Spoiler alert! If you've seen the movie then you already know.I really like the movie Fight Club. I'm not one of those guys who talks about it all the time, or incessantly quotes from it...but I like it. For that reason, I wanted to read the book.
I had never read anything by Palahniuk, and had heard that his writing style was unusual. It is. He writes in this odd form of first-person present tense, which gave Fight Club a feeling of immediacy. Palahniuk also involves the reader in the action of the book. He switches between, "I wake up in Seattle" to "You wake up in Portland." His unusual writing style does take a little getting used to.
The split personality was the big reveal at the end of the movie, but this was not the case with the book. It felt as though Palahniuk wanted readers to slowly realize that the two main characters are actually the same person. Granted, I may think this only because I was already aware of this plot point when I started the book.
Fight Club was an extremely quick read. While I enjoyed the book, I don't know that I would like to read other works by Palahniuk, simply because of his style. But I still have to read 40 more books, so who knows.
3 comments:
How did Carlton slip into second place?
The tortoise and the hare, man. The tortoise and the hare.
I have some similar feelings about Palahniuk. There's something appealing about the po-mo noir bleakness of his work, but it's just too pulpy at times. The writing often seems awfully loose and the characters never get past the conceptual stage. Then again, the only Palahniuk work I've read is supposed to be his worst.
Post a Comment