Choke - Softcover

Palahniuk, Chuck

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0224061909 ISBN 13: 9780224061902

Publisher: Jonathan Cape Ltd, 2001

Synopsis

Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk's controversial and blazingly original debut novel, introduced a fresh and even renegade talent to American fiction, one who has retooled the classic black humour of Terry Southern and Kurt Vonnegut for the lunacy of the millennial age. In his new novel, Choke, he gives readers a vision of life and love and sex and mortality that is both chillingly brilliant and teeth-rattlingly funny. Victor Mancini, a dropout from medical school, has devised a complicated scam to pay for his mother's hospital care: pretend to be choking on a piece of food in a restaurant and the person who 'saves you' will feel responsible for the rest of their lives. Multiply that a couple of hundred times and you generate a healthy flow of cheques, week in, week out. Between fake choking gigs, Victor works at Colonial Dunsboro with a motley group of losers and stoners trapped in 1734, cruises sex addiction groups for action ('You put twenty sexaholics around a table night after night and don't be surprised.') , and visits his mother, whose anarchic streak made his childhood a mad whirl and whose Alzheimer's disease now hides what may be the startling truth about his, possibly divine, parentage. An antihero for our deranging times, Victor's whole existence is a struggle to wrest an identity from overwhelming forces. His creator, Chuck Palahniuk, is the visionary we need and the satirist we deserve.

About this title

Review:

Imagine watching live images of a runaway stolen bus on TV, and imagine that that same bus comes crashing through your own street, maybe even your own wall, into your existence, and you will have imagined what it is like to read Chuk Palahniuk's third novel, Choke. This is satirical literature for the DVD surround-sound generation. As with his debut novel, Fight Club, which has since been adapted into a critically acclaimed film, Palahniuk's central character, Victor Mancini, is a cruiser of support groups, this time sexual addiction groups. Victor is reminiscent of Patrick Bateman, Bret Easton Ellis's central character in American Psycho, and of David Bell, Don Dellillo's character in Americana. He is a social outsider, psychologically fragmented, unable to function in modern society, uncertain of his true identity, a con-man diner struggling to connect to other diners in a godless and consumerist society.

This is a novel full of big ideas, sharp social commentaries; through Victor's actions and his memories of his dysfunctional crackpot mother, a world is revealed in which addictive behaviour is a way of escaping the banalities that pass for realities, a world which could end with a "discreet, tasteful announcement". However, Victor is also a redeemer, his selfish actions, blackly comic, bring meaning into the lives of the strangers he cons, turning him into a creator of heroes, each one claiming to have saved Victor Mancini from choking to death, each one Victor's benefactor, saving them from the emptiness of their existence.

In portraying Victor's attempt to condense his identity from the chaotic waters of his life, Palahniuk reminds us of the struggles that we all face as individuals in our fast and puzzling new millennium. His prose is quick and inventive, his plot never predictable, and he has the unerring ability to make the reader question himself in the context of his fiction, a mark of truly good writing. --Iain Robinson

Review:

Praise for Chuck Palahniuk:
"Palahniuk is one of the freshest, most intriguing voices to appear in a long time. He rearranges Vonnegut's sly humor, DeLillo's mordant social analysis, and Pynchon's antic surrealism (or is it R. Crumb's?) into a gleaming puzzle palace all his own."
--"Newsday
"
"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 Examiner
""Even I can't write this well."
--Thom Jones
"Palahniuk's language is urgent and tense, touched with psychopathic brilliance, his images dead-on accurate....[He] is an author who makes full use of the alchemical powers of fiction to synthesize a universe that mirrors our own fiction as a way of illuminating the world without obliterating its complexity."
--"L.A. Weekly
""Maybe our generation has found its Don DeLillo."
--Bret Easton Ellis

"From the Hardcover edition."

"Sheer, anarchic fierceness of imagination. . . . Raw and vital."--"The New York Times""Puts a bleakly humorous spin on self-help, addiction recovery, and childhood trauma. . . . Funny mantra-like prose plows toward the mayhem it portends from the get-go."--"The Village Voice""Palahniuk has a vision that's distinctive. Like it or loathe it, Choke cannot be dismissed. Nor can its creator."--"Houston Chronicle""Few contemporary writers mix the outrageous and the hilarious with greater zest. . . . Chuck Palahniuk's splenetic, anarchic glee makes him a worthy heir to Ken Kesey."--"Newsday"

About this edition

• Publisher: Jonathan Cape Ltd
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0224061909
• ISBN 13: 9780224061902
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304