Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
As I am sitting here with my little laptop balanced on my legs, an episode of Murder, She Wrote playing in the background, chewing on my finger nails and still slightly woozy from the food poisoning I had on the weekend, I find myself at an emotional impasse. How do I rate and review this book?
I could just leave it at the good old statement “the movie was better than the book, for once” and move on with my life, but something feels wrong.
Let me backtrack a bit and explain why I chose to read this book now, at this interesting (and quite frankly scary) time for all of us.
First, I read this book, because it was on my to-read list for a very long time. I watched the movie ages ago and my brother owns a copy that he refused to lend to me, because he liked the book so much. It is a rare occurrence for my brother to voluntarily read and like a book.
Secondly, for some reason I felt this book would get me a bit closer to my gym, now that everything is boarded up and we wait for this pandemic to be over.
You see, I have been training in a Muay Thai/kickboxing gym for the last nine months and I miss my coach, my training partners and the friends I have made dearly.
So, what better way to find comfort than to read a book about fighting, right?
Unfortunately, I felt the story lacking. It all boils down to the narrative style the author chose to tell this story.
I can tell what he was trying to do and why he was doing what he was doing. I just feel it would have been a more captivating read, if a different style had been chosen.
I really enjoyed the characters and wanted to know more about them. They had depth and showed signs of being raw and unapologetic, having enough substance to make them relatable to the reader.
I guess the story wasn’t so much about a clear plot (don’t curse me, if you have a different opinion), but more so about a moment in time of this one character, who was in need of telling his story, plopping us right in the middle of events as they unravel and develop.
The only problem (and big) problem I have is the narrative style used. It kept too much of the story at arm’s length. Nothing was ever brought close enough to care, to develop an interest and to really sink one’s teeth into a story that concluded the way it did.
Why didn’t we get to hear more from Marla and Tyler themselves? The use of indirect speech plus the first-person narrative has us, the reader, trapped in the bubble together with the narrator, but I think expanding the narrative perspective would have given the story, overall speaking, much more power and would have had a greater impact. A bit more “pow”, if you like.
Overall, I feel like I’m turning my back on so many people, who love this story by being so fastidious about a book, whose movie adaptation I greatly enjoyed.
I would suggest it as a quick and intriguing read, with a side of caution.
