Yes, this novel is different. Yes, it is a read out of my comfort zone. And yes, it is crude, raw and at times bizarre. After all, it is about an unnamed narrator in search of a meaningful life, whose idea of managing his chronic insomnia is joining support groups for terminal illnesses he does not have. There he meets and falls for Marla, a fellow faker. His best friend is Tyler Durden, inventor of Fight Club (a group of men who beat each other up for fun in the basement of bars) and Project Mayhem (a group of men who commit crimes intentionally to cause havoc). And yet, buried within this chaos is a significant life lesson, the unraveling of which I found to be so original, entertaining, and surprisingly moving. So yes, I like this book very much!
'Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler's pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die. For a long time though, Tyler and I were best friends. People are always asking, did I know about Tyler Durden.'(opening lines)
'"You cry," Bob says and inhales and sob, sob, sobs. " Go on now and cry."
The big wet face settles down on top of my head, and I am lost inside. This is when I'd cry. Crying is right at hand in the smothering dark, closed inside someone else, when you see how everything you can ever accomplish will end up as trash.'(17)
'Walking home after a support group, I felt more alive than I'd ever felt. I wasn't host to cancer or blood parasites; I was the little warm center that the life of the world crowded around.'(22)
'"No" Marla says. No, she wants it all. The cancers, the parasites. Marla's eyes narrow. She never dreamed she could feel so 'smarvelous. She actually felt alive. Her skin was clearing up. All her life, she never saw a dead person. There was no real sense of life because she had nothing to contrast it with. Oh, but now there was dying and death and loss and grief. Weeping and shuddering, terror and remorse. Now that she knows where we're all going, Marla feels every moment of her life.'(38)
'The first rule about fight club is you don't talk about fight club.'(48)
"The second rule about fight club is you don't talk about fight club.'(48)
'You don't say anything because fight club exists only in the hours between when fight club starts and when fight club ends.'(48)
'That's the third rule in fight club, when someone say stop, or goes limp, even if he's just faking it, the fight is over... Only two guys to a fight. One fight at a time. They fight without shirts or shoes. The fights go on as long as they have to. Those are the other rules of fight club.'(49)
'After a night in fight club, everything in the real world gets the volume turned down. Nothing can piss you off. Your word is law, and if other people break that law or question you, even that doesn't piss you off.'(49)
'At the time, my life just seemed too complete, and maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves.'(52)
'This is why I loved the support groups so much, if people thought you were dying, they gave you their full attention.
If this might be the last time they saw you, they really saw you. Everything else about their checkbook balance and radio songs and messy hair went out the window.
You had their full attention.
People listened instead of just waiting for their turn to speak.
And when they spoke, they weren't telling you a story. When the two of you talked, you were building something, and afterward you were both different than before.'(107)
'You don't ask questions is the first rule in Project Mayhem... the second rule of Project Mayhem is you don't ask questions... The third rule is no excuses.... The fourth rule is no lies.'(122)
'It's Project Mayhem that's going to save the world. A cultural ice age. A prematurely induced dark age. Project Mayhem will force humanity to go dormant or into remission long enough for the Earth to recover.... Like fight club does with clerks and box boys, Project Mayhem will break up civilization so we can make something better out of the world.'(125)
'You have a class of young strong men and women, and they want to give their lives to something. Advertising has these people chasing cars and clothes they don't need. Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don't really need.
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.'(149)
1st Owl Book Edition
208 pages
Book owned
Book idea from JRMD, thanks!
Book qualifies for: 100+ Reading Challenge
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