Fight Club By Chuck Palahniuk
Chuck Palahniuk · 3 review
Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk
Fight Club is a 1996 novel by Chuck Palahniuk.
It follows the experiences of an unnamed protagonist struggling with insomnia. Inspired by his doctor's exasperated remark that insomnia is not suffering, the protagonist finds relief by impersonating a seriously ill person in several support groups. Then he meets a mysterious man named Tyler Durden and establishes an underground fighting club as radical psychotherapy.
تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز بیست و ششم ماه می سال 2011 میلادی
عنوان: باشگاه مشت زنی (باشگاه مبارزه)؛ نویسنده: چاک پالانیک؛ مترجم: پیمان خاکسار؛ تهران، نشر چشمه، 1390، در 230ص، شابک9789643627379؛ موضوع داستانهای نویسندگان ایالات متحده آمریکا - سده 20م
داستان با این واژه ها آغاز می‌شود: («تایلر» یک شغل پیشخدمتی برایم پیدا می‌کند، و بعد تفنگی در دهانم می‌چپاند، و می‌گوید که اولین قدم برای رسیدن به جاودانگی مردن است؛ با اینکه من و «تایلر» از مدت‌ها پیش بهترین دوست هم بودیم، باز هم مردمان، همیشه از من می‌پرسیدند که اسم «تایلر دردن» به گوشم خورده یا نه؛ لوله ی تفنگ به ته گلویم فشار می‌آورد؛ «تایلر» می‌گوید: ما واقعا نمی‌میریم؛ با زبانم شیارهای صدا خفه کن لوله ی تفنگ را، که خودمان مته شان کرده ایم، حس می‌کنم؛ بیشتر صداییکه شلیک گلوله ایجاد می‌کند، در اثر انبساط گازهاست؛ گلوله صدای زیر قابل شنیدنی هم تولید می‌کند، که به خاطر حرکت بسیار سریعش است؛ برای خفه کردن صدا، تنها باید تعداد زیادی سوراخ، داخل لوله ی تفنگ ایجاد کرد؛ اینکار به گازها اجازه ی خروج می‌دهد؛ و این‌طوری سرعت گلوله، به کمتر از سرعت صوت می‌رسد؛ اگر سوراخ‌ها را، درست مته نکنی تفنگ در دستت منفجر می‌شود) پایان نقل از متن
باشگاه مبارزه؛ روایت تجربیات شخصیت اصلی بی‌نام رمان است، که از بی‌خوابی و اختلال هویت، رنج می‌برد؛ او پس از اینکه در گروه‌های گوناگون روان درمانی گروهی، نقش فردی بسیار بیمار را، بازی می‌کند، آرامش می‌یابد، و از بی‌خوابی نجات پیدا می‌کند؛ اما پس از آشنایی با دختری به نام «مارلا سینگر»، مجدداً به بی‌خوابی دچار می‌شود؛ تا زمانیکه با شخصی به نام «تایلر دردن» آشنا می‌شود؛ آن‌ها با یاری همدیگر باشگاه زیرزمینی مبارزه ای برپا میکنند، که اعضای آن در مبارزه با یکدیگر، عقده های خود را خالی، و به نوعی، روان خویش را درمان میکنند
تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 24/05/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 06/05/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی 0393327345 Mary Ann Evans, in the 1850s, spoke out against the notion that lady novelists were capable of producing only silly novels - precious, sentimental, illogical and improbable claptrap - while men produced high literature. She changed her name to George Eliot and wrote as a gender neutral narrator, highly educated and worldly, and mostly transparent (i.e., not silly).
The 1990s finds us again at a crossroads where literature is concerned, with the rise of Oprah's book club and the whole genre of chick lit on the one hand (in many cases just silly novels by lady novelists revivified), and a sort of phallic-anxiety heavy-on-the-masculine literature on the other. This second group, I like to call guy crap. It's not a bad label ; there's some good stuff in guy crap, just like there is on Oprah's book list. Guy crap includes genre fiction (Dennis Lehane, Jonathan Lethem), as well as insistent intellectualism (David Foster Wallace, Martin Amis, Paul Auster) ... and, of course, the violent, psych-you-out, latter-day-Robbe-Grillet disturbances of Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Palahniuk. Some of these are done well, and some of them are just as silly as the lady novelists' claptrap.
Fight Club is one of those novels where the unrelenting GUY-ness of narrator and storyline begins as an intriguing challenge and ends up fatiguing and gimmicky. In case there's anyone out here who hasn't either read the book or seen the movie, I won't spoil anything, I promise. It's a book about a bunch of young men, frustrated in their low-on-the-ladder white-collar day jobs and the emptiness of modern society, who meet routinely to pound each other close to death and plot destruction on a less personal scale. The novel is Palahniuk's testament to the counter-culture of yuppiedom, a world in which squalor and presentability, upward mobility and civil disobedience, live side by side and take each other's measure daily. Palahniuk asks pointed questions about the world we live in, and his prose is the strength of this novel - he keeps you interested, even when you realize how much you hate what he's saying.
And you should hate what Palahniuk is saying. Because at the heart of the novel sits a troubled foundation. It's not the acts of (juvenile, for the most part) sociopathy, or even the ultimate real pathology the characters fall into. What you should hate as (or after) you read is the book's central three-part idea, that (a) the disaffected youth of the video-game generation really do hold the truth about society ; (b) society in turn is nothing but a reflection of the video-game generation's disaffected world-view ; and (c) once a disaffected youth of the video-game generation, always a disaffected youth of the video-game generation - there is no improvement, there is no connection, there is no healing, there is no out, because boys never grow up. Even the support-group conceit that could represent the narrator's redemptive attempt at relation turns out to be just a device, as egotistical for the character as it is ultimately for the storyline. Relation between people doesn't exist, not really : you don't talk about fight club. We're all just wandering bruised through the wasted LCD landscape, staking out our independence like rebel teenagers, promising to blow up whatever we disagree with.
Palahniuk has said he wrote this book as a kind of provocation, to get back at a publisher for turning down his earlier manuscript. I wonder if he peed in the publisher's soup, too : it wouldn't altogether surprise me. 0393327345 You do not talk about Fight Club, but...
Upon winning the Oregon Book Award for best novel and the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award, Chuck Palahniuk’s visionary debut novel, Fight Club, was shot to the veins of mainstream fiction. Following the success of its 1999 film adaptation directed by David Fincher, Fight Club gained cult classic status and has become a disturbingly accurate interpretation of our modern world.
The unnamed male narrator, suffering from a long streak of insomnia, finds cure by attending cancer support groups. But when Marla Singer—a sallow, heavy-smoking nihilist—enters the evening meetings and mirrors his own fraud, his insomnia returns, so he confronts Singer to split schedules with him.
On the night when his condominium mysteriously blows up, he calls Tyler Durden, whom he had previously met—under strange circumstances—on a beach. They agree to meet at a bar, where, after drinking, Durden asks him a favor, “I want you to hit me as hard as you can.”
The narrator swings the punch that cradled Fight Club into the world. Shortly, a multitude of men with white-collar jobs join them. Every weekend, in the parking lots and basements of bars, they hold these late-hour no-holds-barred-and-barefisted fights that “go on as long as they have to.”
These one-on-one melees curiously evoke psychotherapeutic effects—resembling that of enlightenment—within the men: they are reborn from their entombed lives.
Fight Club soon evolves into Project Mayhem, an anarchic army led by Durden, who seeks to fulfill his visions of global enlightenment through organized chaos, public unrest, and demolition.
Fight Club is a social satire on the dehumanizing effects of consumerism: alienation brought by chronic materialism, illusory comforts, overindulgence, and career and lifestyle obsessions fueled by advertising. “The modern world is for business—not for the people,” as what the great psychoanalyst Carl Jung said.
“It’s only after you’ve lost everything that you’re free to do anything.” Skillfully fusing Zen elements with Durden’s extremist ideologies, Palahniuk has written a provocative expression of metaphysical rebellion. The collective revolt against the existential vacuum is Durden’s nucleus and what draws men toward him.
Fight Club’s noir ambience and the solid economy of its prose are reminiscent of Albert Camus’s The Stranger, but with the sharp nonlinear narration executing its plot; inheriting Kurt Vonnegut’s dark humor, Chuck Palahniuk is among today’s distinct and intriguing voices. 0393327345 the first rule of reading fight club is: you do not talk about reading fight club.
which is a good thing because i honestly have no idea what i read.
man, this book is W I L D. 0393327345 “You are not special. You're not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We're all part of the same compost heap. We're all singing, all dancing crap of the world.”
Fight Club is absolutely tragic in its reflection of the real world. I get angry when I read it and annoyed at a world that could cause such a situation. This may be fiction, but it’s full of truth.
The modern world is unfulfilling and depressing. People spend their lives working in call centres or sat behind desks slowly getting more miserable until they become depressed and want to kill themselves. The modern world drives people crazy with its insufferable and suffocating ways. It’s a concrete jungle and not all of us can find happiness amongst the endless grey days of mundanity.
And in a way, Fight Club is a reaction against that. Fighting bare knuckle in the streets is a way of feeling alive in a dead and detached world. It might be painful, but it is something. It’s a feeling, no matter how bad it may be. It’s better than the nothingness that faces these men as they wonder amongst the stones and lights of an insomnia driven emptiness because it is a feeling, a reminder that they are in fact alive. If you’ve ever worked a dead end nine to five job, then you may be able to relate. It can be soul destroying.
“I let go. Lost in oblivion. Dark and silent and complete. I found freedom. Losing all hope was freedom.”
This is not a happy book. It possesses no bright spark and like American Psycho it left me feeling thoroughly defeated after reading, and that’s because there is so much truth in these pages. Hard truths. Gut-wrenchingly agonising truths. Truths that might make you question your own existence because they are just so cynical in their viewpoint. It’s all a bit of a mind fuck. And if we’re to talk about the power of words, about how words can affect you and make you perceive something new, then these words certainly are powerful in their terribleness.
You should go read them.
If you dare. 0393327345
This is satirical, cynical, Darkly intense. A mind f**k.
What person in their right mind goes to support groups for cancer patients in order to get perspective on their own life and cure their insomnia? That's what kind of story this is. This is how it begins. An Obsession with death.
Then the fight club is born. Blue collar to white collar. There are 6 rules in the fight club. First rule: you don't talk about the fight club. Second rule: you don't talk about the fight club. Third rule: two men per fight. Fourth rule: one fight at a time. Fifth rule: no shoes, no shirts in the fight club. The sixth rule: the fight goes on as long as they have to.
This is their way of turning down the volume in the real world. These guys are on a mission to self destruct although they would describe it as enlightenment. A subculture of violence trying to correct all the wrongs in the world with the most primitive emotion and passion that exists: hate.
What a trip Palahniuk takes the reader on. What one may interpret as a mind blowing, head shaking, wtf is going on: let the fights begin! Another may interpret it as a state of mental illness and the effects of it not being treated. A fascinating analysis of the human psyche.
Enough said. 4.5⭐️ 0393327345 Dear Chuck,
I have tried to like you. Really, I honestly have. I tried to read Rant, I tried to read Choke and then I attempted this book. Rare is the moment where I realize I enjoyed the movie much MUCH more then then the novel it is based on. I simply do not like your style of writing, and I have been ridiculed by fanboys who will defend your honor to the grave. Your style comes off as unique, but I can feel the pretentiousness like a piece of meat stuck in between my teeth. You know full well that a vast majority of your audience shops at Hot Topic, and you lead them by the fishnets to your thin plot lines, monotone voice and the gritty and edgy characters that seem to recycle themselves with your stories. (You wake up in Miami. You wake up in Des Moines. You wake up in Botswana...straitlaced man meets crazy man: life changes. Rinse. Repeat.)
I have been told that I do not get you. That I do not understand the basics of a male love story, a male writer who understands the male psyche and who can convey what it really feels like to be, a male. Perhaps this is the core of my issue, being a hapless female who fails at trends. Either way, I have friends that adore you and for that reason only I will not completely denounce you on the internets. Keep appealing to your trendy fan base and keep raking in the dough. Maybe someday I will swallow my pride and appeal to the masses just like you. And James Patterson.
Best wishes
Sarah 0393327345
I wondered whether this book would seem self-absorbed and shallow in our post-9/11 world, but instead I found it prophetic. Throughout the materialism and political correctness of the 1990's and Tyler Durden's response to it, you can sense how all that repressed mama's boy machismo is just hoping and praying for something big and fiery and nasty that would blow our little precious world apart. Well, with 9/11 and the Iraq war, we sure got it. So . . . are all you boys satisfied now?
Sure, this book has its flaws. The rhetorical use of repetition, although effective at first, eventually becomes little more than a stylistic tic. Also, for such a hard-edged book, it gets surprisingly (and disappointingly) sentimental at the end.
Still . . . Fight Club is wickedly funny, memorably aphoristic and prophetic. And it holds up well after fifteen years. 0393327345 I believe in love at first sight, and I’m talking about books.
A few pages into The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin and I knew that this was the book I had been looking for my whole life. The same for Robert A. Heinlein’s brilliant The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. These books are speaking to me, the author and I are sharing a conversation and I am hearing what I want to hear but the writer, through the osmosis of shared visions, is saying for me what I want to say. I had nebulous thoughts and that writer succinctly stated, set down in black and white, what for me was pre-language thought only.
Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club is another, and Palahniuk speaks for a generation; he boils down and dilutes what we all want to say but felt only. The primal fears and drives that we know deep down but before this book could give no voice; Palahniuk has found a pigment to paint on our collective cave wall. What Palahniuk illustrates in words is Edvard Munch’s The Scream amplified and multiplied by ten million.
“I am Joe’s fear of death”.
He is talking about repressed anger spread out over an actuarial table of life expectancy. Stripped down to fighting weight and stepping into the ring with borrowed gloves, this book is a gritty explanation of the dark side of Generation X men.
“What you see at Fight Club is a generation of men raised by women”. This quote is the hard nucleus around which the novel forms, growing fruitlike around a solid core.
The next great, definitive quote is “The first rule about Fight Club is that you don’t talk about fight Club.” This is a charismatic catch phrase, to be sure, but it is more than this. Palahniuk goes to great length, albeit subtle, to reveal that much of what is felt and experienced in Fight Club is either beyond or beneath language, inexpressible. Palahniuk is grasping at deep roots. One of the foundations of feminist thought is communication, the need for women to relate to one another and to talk about feelings. Men are encouraged to express themselves as well and Palahniuk takes time, the same as Hemingway in The Sun Also Rises, to draw a misdirected connection to the narrator’s affinity for self help groups and his need to cry. I can hear the echoes of Jake Barnes crying by himself and of Romero’s desperate but heroic fist fighting accomplishments. Palahniuk resurrects the strong, quiet type and raises him, dead from the grave, in a post-modern zombie-like caricature; Fight Club’s protagonists are still “30 year old boys” trying to be what they were never raised to be.
I cannot help but compare this book with Bernard Malamud’s The Natural. I saw both film before reading the book, and both film adaptations have significant variances from the original literature.
Fight Club was brilliant and disturbing all at the same time.
0393327345 I read this book as a self-absorbed 18-year old and never looked back. Brilliant modern critique of western consumerism and masculinity, told through the story of an underground club of men who beat the hell out of each other as a way of working through their disillusionments.
Each sentence of each chapter is quotable, things like :
'You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile.'
and
'We don't have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression.'
(As a trivial aside, you can hear a selection of them in the Dust Brother's song 'This is Your Life' featuring Brad Pitt, who incidentally does a pretty good job as the aforementioned anti-hero in the movie.)
What is most poignant however, is the lingering effects of the narrator's troubled relationship with his father throughout his adult life. The quote I remembered most explicity, even years after reading Fight Club is this one:
What you have to understand, is your father was your model for God. If you're male and you're Christian and living in America, your father is your model for God. And if you never know your father, if your father bails out and dies or is never at home, what do you believe about God?
I'm waiting for another book to come along that will speak as loudly to me about modern day malaise.
0393327345
It follows the experiences of an unnamed protagonist struggling with insomnia. Inspired by his doctor's exasperated remark that insomnia is not suffering, the protagonist finds relief by impersonating a seriously ill person in several support groups. Then he meets a mysterious man named Tyler Durden and establishes an underground fighting club as radical psychotherapy. Fight Club
