Survivor – A Novel - Softcover

Palahniuk, Chuck

Softcover

ISBN 10: 039333807X ISBN 13: 9780393338072

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010

Synopsis

Tender Branson last surviving member of the Creedish Death Cult is dictating his life story into Flight 2039 s recorder. He is all alone in the airplane, which will crash shortly into the vast Australian outback. But before it does, he will unfold the tale of his journey from an obedient Creedish child to an ultra-buffed, steroid- and collagen-packed media messiah. Unpredictable and unforgettable, Survivor is Chuck Palahniuk at his deadpan peak: a mesmerizing, unnerving, and hilarious satire on the wages of fame and the bedrock lunacy of the modern world."

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:

Maniacally comic.

Maybe our generation has found its Don DeLillo.--Bret Easton Ellis

A turbo-charged, deliciously manic satire of contemporary American life.

A dead-on sendup of the media, celebrity and pop culture.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 039333807X
• ISBN 13: 9780393338072
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304