Choke - Softcover

Palahniuk, Chuck

3.71

210,313 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0307388921 ISBN 13: 9780307388926

Publisher: Anchor Books, 2008

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Victor Mancini's a medical school dropout with a problem. He needs to pay for elder care for his mother, who's got Alzheimer's. So he comes up with the perfect scam: pretending to choke in upscale restaurants and getting “saved” by fellow diners who, feeling responsible for Victor's life, offer him financial support.Meanwhile, he cruises sexual addiction recovery workshops and spends his days working at Colonial Dunsboro, where his stoner colleagues are sentenced to the stocks for any deviation from the colonial lifestyle. Oh, yeah, and he's desperate to find the truth of his paternity, which his addled mother suggests may be divine.

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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
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"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"

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