There is always a special harmony with more or less contemporary writers. Chuck Palahniuk It is like a colleague with whom I could go to have some beer to talk about the good years of youth, even if I take a good decade, it all has to be said. When one has grown up in the shelter of the contradictory generation X, the affinity ends up creating a very special connection space.
In Palahniuk, fundamental aspects of this transitional generation from analog to digital are detected, while it was the last whose forms of leisure focused on direct interaction between people.
Through this dichotomy between technology and the tangible as a form of personal development, those peaks of youthful rebellion are also detected in the 80s and 90s in which the apparent bonanza seemed to invite little to the revolution, and yet the youth needed rebellion in the face of something, eventually leading to nihilism if the goal to be conquered seems immovable or dissipates like a cause lost in the fog.
Around there I sense that the literary motivation of the American Chuck Palahniuk. And hence some of his most brutal works such as Fight Club, which almost all of us remember more for the film but, as always, the novel brings more depth to the matter. Because starting from a deranged bipolarity, it always has that point of greater empathy from the precision of a black on white narration. Basically because the text is not subjected to the most corseted specifications of the cinematographic.
But beyond this great work, in Palahniuk we find the narrator determined to show us the papier-mâché of the world, the tinsel and the trompe l'oeil of happiness in a society driven by a nullifying inertia. With his acid and hyperbolic critical tone, Palahniuk gives a good shake to a multitude of aspects about social conventions, the instrumentalization of the individual, hypocrisy and the forced fit of the individual in the mass of mediocrity, of normality.
It never hurts to take a tour of the novels of this author, to recover that critical look that can end up sifting the accessory, the imposed and the formal, to end up retaking a generation X rebellion that in the end does have a cause and that part of the vindication of the personal.
Chuck Palahniuk's Top 3 Recommended Novels
Fight club
An unusual therapy for stockbrokers, financiers and any other human beasts who wasted their lives between desks, files, job layoffs, emotional separations or insurmountable losses.
Fight club meetings are not dedicated to brainstorming…, as the name suggests, they go there to smash their faces with other guys like you, frustrated souls who gather hatred for their gray lives and They face the struggle for survival with a clenched fist and dog face.
But the fight club really was born in a more random way, in a simple fight between the protagonist and the flamboyant Tyler Durden, just at the moment in which the desperation of the protagonist has driven him through therapies, sleepless nights, stormy relationships and a whole sum of circumstances that have him on the verge of insanity.
And so a therapy is spreading to face self-destruction from self-destruction itself. Each therapy talks about facing the problem that cancels you and they do the maximum in the club, establishing their mythical eight rules that give them reasons to continue living around hatred, fear or whatever it is that has become the engine of the ominous life of each one ...
Fight club 2
For lovers of Palahniuk's great novel, this sequel brings that countercultural and fresh point of graphic work, illustrated with an underground touch that enriches and places us in the heyday of the illustrated narrative of the 80s or 90s.
Undertaking the assault on the second part of a round work should not always be an easy task for an author. Halfway between commercial temptation and creative incentive, the decision must be weighed on the basis of finally true arguments about the need to tell something more ...
But of course, if the registry is changed, everything can be easier. From the original novel, from that surprising first part, we move on to a graphic novel. From the unnamed protagonist who houses his violent alter ego Tyler Durden, we go to a certain Sebastian who narrates the new installment.
A decade has passed and Sebastian seems to have tamed the beast within. He leads a new normal life and is accompanied by his wife and a son, some kind of valium keeps at bay the beast that has dominated him. But nothing of the internal forum can be covered forever.
In fact, everything bad, fears or destructive tendencies tend to feed in silence, until they find their way to regain control. But sometimes Sebastian does not pass for being a strange type in his violence.
We live in violent times in an unreal bubble of happiness that harbors dehumanization and annihilation. An ideal setting for Tyler Durden, once emerged from his ascetic-drug retreat, to find those moments of pleasant violence with which to make up for his frustrated ego, his mediocre life and a world conjured up under the old good ways.
Make something up
Previously reviewed in this space. In this book Make Up Something, transgression is once again narrative sustenance and nourishment. A volume with more than twenty stories and a short novel that offer that glimpse between macabre until bordering on the eschatological, truffled with acid humor but always linked to that dark side of vice, perversion, the liberation of the inner monster, of criticism as a symphony of rebellion without a cause as the sum of all causes concentrated in perdition.
The consideration of Palahniuk's characters as representatives of that dark side that increases when the pathological becomes chronic in the mind leads to a distorting perspective of the world.
At the end of the day, the plethora or rather the crowd, (depending on how you look at it) of personalities that roam through so many stories, can be those friendly neighbors or those fully reliable co-workers, or those friends to whom you entrust your secret ... As Lou Reed would say, walking through all these stories means taking a walk on the wild side ...
Other recommended books by Chuck Palahniuk…
The invention of sound
Sometimes it's about offering the strangest threads to pull on to move the plot forward. Because the most overwhelming surprises are found in the eccentric. And the environment of the eccentric par excellence in the global world may be Hollywood with its stars back from everything, some returning to the simple and others still launched into the discovery of universes and black holes, whatever...
It's been seventeen years since Gates Foster lost his daughter Lucy and he hasn't stopped looking for her since. Now, a shocking and unexpected event provides him with his first significant clue in a decade, and everything indicates that he is about to discover a terrible truth.
Meanwhile, Mitzi Ives has managed to carve out a niche for herself as a sound engineer for the Hollywood industry using the same secret techniques her father used. The horrifying screams that she creates for horror films are especially famous, so credible and shocking that they could very well be real. When the lives of Gates and Mitzi intersect, the atrocious and violent secrets hidden behind the glamorous facade of Hollywood will come to light.
consider this
The reasons for writing are unfathomable. That is why it is certainly daring to delve into how and why to write. But of course, from a genius like Stephen King in his ·»While I write» even any writer of second or third rank is encouraged by the vademecum of writers. Taking the matter with tweezers, without a doubt Chuck Palahaniuk can be an interesting reference for the final channel of the writing process. Because…, since you begin to try to learn from others, push yourself with those most committed to literature without filters so as not to succumb to the worst, self-censorship.
After more than two decades dedicated to writing, the acclaimed author of Fight club has decided to share his wisdom and his years of experience in the art of storytelling. Palahniuk reveals the knowledge that he himself has accumulated over the years, thanks to his great capacity for observation, the literary workshops in which he was trained, and the writers and teachers who, like Tom Spanbauer, influenced the work of the.
Palahniuk gives us a solid practical guide to build and develop a novel (with unique proposals that do not appear in writing manuals), and tells us about the types of characters that make up a plot, writing as therapy or how to involve the reader to empathize with the narrative. The ideas he brings up range from practical advice and examples from classic works and his own books, to endless anecdotes and reminiscences from his life as a writer and from his years of literary tours of the world.
This work, destined to become a benchmark for books on writing, is a lucid, sensitive and expert love letter to the writer's craft.
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