Fight Club is one of the incredibly few book-to-movie adaptations where both are awesome, yet still significantly different in plot. Their endings are different (in a big way). Events are different. However, you can watch the movie and read the book and easily like both. There is none of that … oh but they changed it!
For those who seen the movie, the book contains the same unknown narrator speaking the sentences which were lifted verbatim and transposed into Ed Norton’s voice. I am Joe’s Prostate. I am Joe’s Complete Lack of Surprise. Short statements are peppered throughout Fight Club and as you read, they pile up in your mind, slowly pushing on the barriers society and yourself have built up.
Crazy thoughts slip in. Why am I going to work at this dead-end job? Did our hunter-gather ancestors think we’d end up like this? Why not break society down?
In short, Fight Club will mess with your mind.
Fight Club is a perfect miracle of author and topic.
Fight Club is violent and mocking and honest.
Fight Club is dark and twisted and … right.
I am Joe’s Envy.
It is precisely because it is so right and so accurate in hitting its targets (mindless consumerism, the sublimation of violent urges, the transformation of men into pale imitations of their fathers, etc) that it is truly a great book. The fundamental assumptions of society are held up and found to be hollow and see-through and once we begin to accept Tyler Durden’s ideas we can’t help but be pulled even further into the story.
What Fight Club is about
The unknown narrator of Fight Club hates his life, hates his job as a product recall specialist for a car company, hates the consumerist nesting instinct that has saturated through his life and expresses the sentiments many in our modern world do:
You buy furniture. You tell yourself this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple of years you’re satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you’ve got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug.
Then you’re trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.
His life changes when he meets Tyler Durden, a charismatic madman who lives an anti-consumerist lifestyle, opposes capitalism, the social structure and pop culture. Together they form an underground fight club as a method of extreme therapy and other men begin to join them. Fight Club spreads and Tyler begins to use it to encourage acts of rebellion and destruction across the country. Eventually this grows into Project Mayhem – focussing on nothing less than the destruction of society itself.
Why guys love Fight Club
I admit I (and other men around the world if you look up Fight Club) find the idea of fighting and destruction attractive. Who hasn’t smashed something and been happy about it? When a fire is burning we throw wood in to keep it going but a lot of it is the desire to see something burn. Fight Club really captures the very male desire for destruction and chaos and shows a storyworld where, yes you can escape from your asshole of a boss, yes you can destroy a credit card company, and yes you can free yourself from all your possessions and be strong and independent again.
If you love Fight Club buy … none other of Chuck Palahniuk’s books
After I read it, I was desperate to read his other books (Lullaby, Invisible Monsters, Survivor, Haunted, Choke, Diary, Stranger than Fiction, Rant, Snuff) and went out and bought Choke, Diary, Invisible Monsters and Stranger than Fiction all in the one go.
What a mistake that was.
Fight Club is an incredible once-off one hit-wonder. Those other books which I struggled to get through (I don’t think I finished any of them because they bored me) play in the same area as Fight Club but are pale and washed out in comparison. I actually gave most them of away (except for Stranger than Fiction, so that will come up in the future review).
How I got Fight Club: Melbourne central Myer bookshop, before the movie came out.
Chuck Palahniuk’s website
Buy Fight Club from Amazon, or buy the Fight Club DVD if you don’t feel like reading. Of course, if you don’t feel like reading, what the hell are you doing here?
Happy reading,
Mat
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your pause before answering was your answer
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