Survivor - Softcover

Chuck Palahniuk

Softcover

ISBN 10: 009928264X ISBN 13: 9780099282648

Publisher: Vintage, 2000

Synopsis

Tender Branson, the last surviving member of the Creedish death cult, has commandeered a Boeing 747, emptied of passengers, in order to tell his story to the plane's black box before it crashes. Brought up by the repressive cult and, like all Creedish younger sons, hired out as a domestic servant, Tender finds himself suddenly famous when his fellow cult members all commit suicide. As media messiah he ascends to the very top of the freak-show heap before finally and apocalyptically spiralling out of control.

About this title

Review:

Survivor, the second novel by Chuck Palahniuk--whose debut novel The Fight Club was widely received to critical acclaim--is a deranged comedy of nightmares, a groin-kick at Western society's worst excesses. This is satire at its best, and Palahniuk handles it all with a distinct, engaging prose style and with plot devices that keep the pages turning long after your tea break should have finished.

From the very opening of the book Palahniuk lets us know that his narrator, Tender Branson, the last surviving member of a religious death cult, is on a path to self-destruction. The tension in this book lies not in the outcome, because like Tender's soothsaying friend Fertility, we can see it coming 289 pages away, instead it lies in the intricate plot that takes Tender from farm boy to media celebrity and ruin.

This is a novel that examines what happens when religion meets the overindulgences of our consumerist society. In the world that the author envisages, which is all too real in the light of tragedies such as Waco and the Heaven's Gate suicides, the only acceptable religions are those that can be successfully marketed and controlled at a corporate level; the small separatist models of religion are superfluous, and self-destruct. This is also a look at religion itself, at how it can enslave as many people as it appears to liberate. A comic novel that deals with the most serious issues of society, Survivor places Palahniuk among the most daring and technically able writers of his generation.

Adam said the first step most cultures take to making you a slave is to castrate you ... the cultures that don't castrate you to make you a slave, they castrate your mind.

--Iain Robinson

Review:

"A comedy of horrors, a pantomimic romp through America's obsession with secrets and confessions" (Arena)

"Maybe our generation has found its Don DeLillo" (Bret Easton Ellis)

"Immensely entertaining...an extremly funny account of an outsider stuck inside America" (Independent on Sunday)

"Survivor comes bowling forth out of the same dark corner of the mind as Fight Club... Like its predecessor, it is a terminal novel, a novel that applies the firing-squad principle to extort tortured eloquence from its doomed narrator" (Esquire)

"Brilliant satire and savagely funny, Survivor offers much to admire. Palahniuk displays a swiftian gift for satire, as well as a knack for crafting mesmerizing sentences that loom with stark, prickly prose and repetitive rhythms" (San Francisco Chronicle)

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 009928264X
• ISBN 13: 9780099282648
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304