Rating: 
Summary: THIS IS THE BOOK
Review: This is a page for reviewing the BOOK. If you wanna review the movie, go to a movie review page. This is for the BOOK Fight Club. There is a difference. Books are those things with words on them, and movies are the ones that play on your TV.
Rating:
Summary: Fight Club, finally, a grown-up modern "Catcher In The Rye"
Review: A MUST READ. What a riveting book, As an avid reader,not many authors can touch me this way. After viewing the movie, I was so affected that I hopped right online to Amazon.com and ordered the book. Chuck Palahniuk has reached into the very depth of all dissaffected,disillusioned inneffectual males who are spinning their wheels trying to stay afloat in this trash laden chemical waste pit we call corporate america.He says its alright to not want IKEA furniture and SUVs and that it's not alright to accept things the way they are. "Holden Caufield Grows Up" is what Chuck is saying. Fight Club is definitely a grown up version of "Catcher In The Rye" by J.D. Salinger. If you liked "Catcher In The Rye" when you were a teenager you will LOVE Fight Club as an adult. If we were to see Holden mature into adulthood we would have witnessed him joining Fight Club. Imagine Holden bloodied and battered standing over another poor bloody pulp he's just beaten down at Fight Club. You cannot change the system but you can always fight...How do we rebel,we have been raised to believe we would all be millionaire rock stars and we truly have no outlet when we discover the hard cold truth. The intensity of modern life today is enough to drive any man to extremes. I thought that Chuck Palahniuk has captured the pent up feelings present in a lot of us these days, the complete rejection of all things politically correct and disgust with the "normal" corrupt modes of business that we tolerate in his world. Fight Club is Nihilism at its very core. Being an avid reader of all genres, I devoured each and every word of "Fight club" Its alway great to find an author that really relates to your view of the world... I wish Chuck Palahniuk a long and successful career.
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Summary: A raw exercise in original thinking
Review: Books that take no prisoners are the kind that are likely to upset people in search of a happy ending. Shakespeare specialized in the tragedy and killed hundreds with the stroke of a pen. Rarely in Shakespeare to you find a happy ending, or even any type of real catharsis. Welcome to the mindset of Chuck Palahniuk, and his first novel, a book that was made for the manic imagination of director David Fincher, "Fight Club". First and foremost, this is thought-provoking stuff that doesn't even come out of left field--we aren't even in the same sport. Palahniuk's emphasis on raw violence and healing qualities contained within the wounds inflicted on our persons, as well as brilliance in dialogue, character study, and wonderfully sneaky foreshadowing ("How much can you really know about yourself if you've never been in a fight?" Took me a long time to understand the real slyness in these words.) make "Fight Club" one of the most original books I've ever read.The entire novel, written in first person, focuses around an insomniac, unhappy in his life, his job; material comfort means absolutely nothing, despite how much time he's meticulously devoted to furnishing his apartment. The narrator finds comfort in the most unlikely of places: Support groups for various diseases he doesn't even have. This lasts for years until someone else develops the same kind of addiction: The chain-smoking Marla Singer. His support group comfort ruined, he finds solace in the presence of a stranger named Tyler Durden, and together, using the healing properties of violence, form Fight Club. They establish the rules, organize the place and time, and let the blood flow. The problem comes, of course, when Fight Club comes out of the basement and becomes an underground pseudo-political movement called Project Mayhem. Run solely under the direction of Tyler, who is now banging Marla on a regular basis, Project Mayhem's plans continue to spiral out of control, inflicting damage on a near global scale. There's not much more to say about "Fight Club" without giving away a great deal, other than to say it's extraordinarily original thinking put down on paper in almost poetically-crafted sentences. Palahniuk's vision not only translates well in print, it was converted even more wildly on the big screen, in David Fincher's outstanding adaptation of a terrific first novel from one of the more interesting authors I've ever read. This is one for your own collection.
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Summary: This Novel Deserves Acclaim
Review: Chuck Palahniuk's debut novel, Fight Club, has acquired a following, and rightfully so, become a cult classic. It's filled to the brim with brilliant wordplay, insightful narration, and satirical anti-mainstream consumerism concepts. The style of the novel is splendidly unconventional. Everything from haikus and homemade explosive recipes to anatomy perspectives are present in this no holds barred literary work of art. I'm a very happy camper if Chuck really is the future of in your face Gen-X fiction.
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.
So begins our tale set atop the Parker-Morris Building with ten minutes before it's blown to hell. Palahniuk's trademark is opening all of his stories (Fight Club, Survivor, Invisible Monsters) near the end, where the carnage has already really gotten out of hand, where people are about to die. Our Narrator is screwed, and with three minutes remaining before he might die, he tells us how he got in this mess in the first place, he tells us "I remember everything."
Welcome to the world of our hero. He's an insomniac working for a corrupt car company, traveling to wherever his boss doesn't want to go for meetings.
Our paladin is a corporate lap dog, jaded, disillusioned with his life. He's depressed, suicidal, an IKEA addict. On flights, he contemplates his own death by plane crash. Everything has become a routine to him.
I set my watch two hours earlier or three hours later, Pacific, Mountain, Central, or Eastern time; lose an hour gain an hour.
This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time.
Our Narrator is in dire need of a way to change his life, something to make him feel alive again, and sadly, Angela Hayes is already taken.
So to cure his insomnia, our main man goes to different types of cancer, disease, and terminal illness support groups. And although he's in perfect health, he's been going to these meetings for two years and hasn't been caught doing so because "Anyone who might've noticed me in two years has either died or recovered and never came back." He tells us "...why I love support groups so much, if people thought you were dying, they gave you their full attention." It is at these meetings that our Narrator meets Marla Singer, another Faker, the Narrator's antagonist/love interest. The support group meetings though, they're nothing more than a quick fix.
Enter Tyler Durden. A night job worker who our protagonist meets on a nude beach: part-time movie projectionist, part-time banquet waiter. After our Narrator's home and all his possessions within are destroyed by a bomb, a phone call is made. A changing of the guard occurs.
The phone rang in Tyler's rented house on Paper Street.
Oh, Tyler, please deliver me.
And the phone rang...
Oh, Tyler, please rescue me.
And the phone rang...
Deliver me from Swedish furniture.
Deliver me from clever art.
And the phone rang and Tyler answered...
May I never be complete.
May I never be content.
May I never be perfect.
Deliver me, Tyler, from being perfect and complete.
Tyler and I agree to meet at a bar.
That night, Fight Club is created. It's an escape for those with boring, everyday jobs, a place where yuppies can take their aggressions out on each other by beating the living hell out of each other. It's a boys-only club with eight sacrosanct rules. Soon however, Tyler takes Fight Club up a notch with Project Mayhem, a fascist group rebels against society by way of antics that get more and more extreme, right up until the novel's anti-climactic conclusion. The novel's brooding Catcher in the Rye-type ending is much more thought provoking than the film's impressively cinematic pyrotechnics blowout.
Trust me when I tell you to read this enthralling masterwork. Chuck Palahniuk makes the apocalypse of Western Civilization sound so damn cool even I'm anticipating it. Make sure to pick up a copy of this great book. Another underground, lesser-known classic I want to recommend is The Losers Club by Richard Perez.
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Summary: Great satire on society! Chuck Rules.
Review: Chuck was asked how to impress an editor or publisher or agent and he replied something to the effect of: make your novel grand and different, something totally off from anything else they'll see---surprise them---or that's the way I remember it. Chuck is a taste, like preferring a merlot to a cheap beer, or the seat next to the window on a plane over the safe one on the aisle. Chuck's for the few, the proud and the crazy brave---that want to read a fine tale from someone unafraid to drop a strawberry on the open blade of a knife and watch it slide in two pieces onto a white-silk table cloth.
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Summary: kodus to the great
Review: Fantasic book, composed of genious metaphors and a great read. A bit all over the place but for a reason. A fantastic read. The new version contains an extremely intersting intro by chuck. Kudos, Kudos. But shame to me. The First rule of the fight club is...
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Summary: Soap suds and more
Review: Fight Club was the first Chuck Palahniuk novel I read, and I have since become a die-hard fan of his works. I first saw the movie with my friend and fell in love with the story. She was the one who first recommended reading the novel, because according to her, the movie leaves out too many things, and you need to read the book to get the full impact of the story. She couldn't have been more right. I purchased the book and read non-stop for two days, then watched the movie again. It's truly captivating. The best thing, however, is not the story itself but the way in which Palahniuk presents the story. His writing style is one that is brilliant and unique. The characters he creates are intense, and you manage to find parts of yourself that relate the each of them, parts of yourself and your mind that you didn't even know existed. This book is amazing, as are all of Chuck Palahniuk's novels. Would also recommend the following books: Children's Corner by McCrae, Survivor, Plot Against America, and Bark of the Dogwood.
Rating: 
Summary: Brilliant!! But Chuck left some meat on the bone
Review: Have you ever felt like nothing you have ever done makes any real sense? In analyzing the motivation and accomplishments as a young adult, sometimes it seems like my purpose was lost right after I was playing kickball in the cul-de-sac with the other neighborhood kids. Chuck nails this feeling brilliantly, addressing 18-30 year olds, who "don't have a Great War in our generation, or a Great Depression," at least in the traditional sense. Tyler Durden, the great leader of the novel, has you screaming for release from the complicated and empty paradigm in which we live. He seduces you into being on of his followers, one of his "space monkeys."
This novel is important. Generation X was the group who needed to read it most. They did, and they fell in love with it, but Generation X was the group who understood it the least. After the movie came out (because lets be realistic, Gen X doesn't read!) there were little fight clubs breaking out all over the states. City ordinances tried to ban them, but how can the fuzz break up a fight when both parties want to be fighting? Difficult, huh? I once met an 18-year old who had a scar on his hand. The scar was in the shape of lips, and the scar was made from lye. Tyler Durden told his masochist followers that it would free them from their meaningless society-the searing pain from a chemical lye burn. Do you think he was freed?
Palahniuk wrote to show all of us how to avoid being "space monkeys," how to think for ourselves. Tyler Durden's passion is unequaled. It doesn't matter what he is passionate about, just that he is passionate. We are always in search of a leader, and we will rally behind a passionate mane like Tyler Durden. Think of the Fuehrer, this is about him. Hitler was irrationally passionate-and his arguments made just little bit of sense. But it was not his Socratic logos that made him powerful, it was his pathos.
Fight Club brilliantly bewitches the reader to be a lover of Tyler Durden and his ideals. Even though Tyler explains his plan, "We have to show these men and women freedom by enslaving them, and show them courage by frightening them. Napoleon bragged that he could train men to sacrifice their lives for a scrap of ribbon." If you don't believe me that you will be convinced by this "free-thinker," just read the book and see.
Palahniuk leaves a little meat still on the bone. That is why I rated this book with 4-stars. His main characters could be more intimately developed. This character development, along with filling in some of the holes in the plots, would make Fight Club one of the greatest novels ever written.
Rating:
Summary: A truly inventive novel and a good read
Review: How many times do you read a novel and just know what it coming next? Too many stories seem to be re-worked versions of things we've read before; after all, how many truly new things are there under the sun? Palahniuk, however, has created something new and it is both interesting and fun to read.
"Fight Club" follows a disengaged young professional whose life is sliding meaninglessly by until he meets a man about his age who is his polar opposite, capturing each moment of life. The two strike up a friendship and a club that pits other disengaged young men in fights against one another. They strike a chord and events spiral. To an unpredictable conclusion.
Read this one.
Rating:
Summary: Darker than dark, but very humourous.
Review: I bought the book thru Amazon last week after having seen the movie the previous week. I must say, rarely has a story connected with me on such a level. Not to say I'm a raving lunatic with a split personality, nor am I into making soap with human fat, but the very raw emotion of the characters in "Fight Club" appeal to me on some sort of primal level. It's the place in your soul where you know that the world is slowly choking itself, and that there are many bad things in the world, and that you should probably do something about it, but don't. I loved the way it was written, from start to finish, and unlike the movie, which was great too, the book gives you so much more insight into the lives of the Unnamed main character and his counterpart Tyler Durden. And also into Marla's... It is similar to Palahniuk's newer book "Survivor", in that the main caharcter is slowly destroying themselves without knowing it, and at the same time, needing to do so in order to continue at all. Anyway, looking forward to much more brilliance penned by the hand of Palahniuk.
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