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Palahniuk, Chuck Choke ISBN 13: 9780385501569

Choke - Hardcover

 
9780385501569: Choke
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Medical school dropout Victor Mancini comes up with a complicated but ingenious scam to pay for his mother's elder care--pretend to be choking in a restaurant and con the individuals who "save" him into giving him money--cruises sex addiction groups for action, and visits his zany mother, whose Alzheimer's hides the bizarre truth about his parentage. 40,000 first printing.

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Review:
We can more or less deduce the following of the main protagonist in Choke; Victor Mancini is a ruthless con artist. Victor Mancini is a medical school dropout who's taken a job playing an Irish indentured servant in a colonial-era theme park in order to help care for his Alzehimer's-afflicted mother. Victor Mancini is a sex addict. Victor Mancini is a direct descendant of Jesus Christ. Welcome, once again, to the world of Chuck Palahniuk.

"Art never comes from happiness" says Mancini's mother only a few pages into the novel. Given her own dicey and melodramatic style of parenting, you would think that her son's life would be chock full of nothing but art. Alas, that's not the case--in the fine tradition of Oedipus, Stephen Dedalus and Anthony Soprano, Victor hasn't quite reconciled his issues with his mother. Instead, he's trawling sexual-addiction recovery meetings for dates and purposely choking in restaurants for a few moments of attention. Longing for a hug, in other words, he's settling for the Heimlich.

Thematically, this is pretty familiar Palanhiuk territory. It would be a pity to disclose the surprises of the plot but suffice to say that what we have here is a little bit of Tom Robbins's Another Roadside Attraction, a little bit of Don DeLillo's The Day Room and, well, a little bit of Fight Club. Just as with that book and the other two novels under Palahniuk's belt, we get a smattering of gloriously unflinching sound bites, such as this sceptical slight on prayer chains: "A spiritual pyramid scheme. As if you can gang up on God. Bully him around."

Whether this is the novel that will break Palanhiuk into the mainstream is hard to say. For a fourth book, in fact, the ratio of iffy, "dude"-intensive dialogue to interesting and insightful passages is a little higher than we might wish. In the end though, the author's nerve and daring pull the whole thing off--just. And what's next for Victor Mancini's creator? Leave the last word to him, declaring as he does on the final pages: "Maybe it's our job to invent something better ... What it's going to be, I don't know." --Bob Michaels, Amazon.com

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"

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  • PublisherDoubleday
  • Publication date2001
  • ISBN 10 0385501560
  • ISBN 13 9780385501569
  • BindingHardcover
  • Edition number1
  • Number of pages293
  • Rating

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Other Popular Editions of the Same Title

9780385720922: Choke: A Novel

Featured Edition

ISBN 10:  ISBN 13:  9780385720922
Publisher: Anchor Books, 2002
Softcover

  • 9780099422686: Choke

    Vintage, 2002
    Softcover

  • 9782070305520: Choke: A30552 (Folio Policier)

    Gallimard, 2005
    Pocket Book

  • 9780307388926: Choke

    Anchor..., 2008
    Softcover

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