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I loved the movie. I only liked the book. As Charlie Kaufman (Nicholas Cage) says in Adaptation: the book is "sprawling New Yorker shit". That's about as cleanly and concisely as the book can be described. It is, fundamentally, an interesting book filled with interesting people and interesting happenings. The problem is that, in my opinion, she is a clusterfuck writer. The book started out life as an article for the New Yorker about John Laroche, an Orchid poacher. The article was so popular that she was approached to expand it into a book. The problem, in my opinion, is that she focused too much on the history of orchids. By the time she started writing her book, Laroche had sworn off orchids and was in the business of internet porn. (I'm not kidding). Had she decided to follow Laroche on his adventures in internet porn from his beginnings as an Orchid poacher, I think this would have been a much more interesting book. However, she was dead set on writing a book about orchids, and unfortunately her principal character for this quasi biography was no longer interested in the subject. This makes it difficult to write a 280 page book, in my opinion. What she does to compensate is digress incessantly into every minute detail of orchid history at every opportunity. So the book consists of 2 to 3 pages of first person narration, followed by 10-20 pages of relatively dry orchid history. Admittedly, some of this history is interesting, but in my opinion the real meat of the book is in her first hand observations of the orchid fiends and her recollections of their dialogue. That is fascinating stuff. I think that she missed the boat with her book. I think that the book should have been more dialogue with Laroche and others like him. To me, it was supposed to be a book about obsession. But for some reason she felt it necessary to digress about the history of orchids every five seconds. Fuck orchids. Orchids aren't the story. The story is people. I want to know the details of Laroche and his internet porn. I want to hear him talk to his former orchid cronies about porn. I want to see him at a swanky orchid meeting shouting about fat naked chicks. I know the guy does it. I know he does. Why couldn't I read about it? Permalink to this post. |
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Lullaby is a bit of a departure from the rest of his books. The familiar elements are all there: self destruction, the crumbling of society, self mutilation, small time scams, and a Marla Singer-esque character. But the plot itself separates it from the rest of his books. In my opinion, nihilism does not work if there is a God. By definition, nihilism is the belief that all values are baseless. Well, stick God into the equation and all of a sudden there is a basis for everything. God is God, after all. And if you stick magic into a story, I cannot conceive of any explanation other than some form of god, and therefore nihilism does not make sense. Remember, magic isn't magic unless it is violating natural law, therefore implying the supernatural The plot of Lullaby revolves around magic. The main character runs across a book of poems containing a "culling poem", which is a poem used in antiquity to control population. i.e. kill off people when the population got to be too much to be supported by the environment. (Hey, it's kinder than starvation and pestilence). This by itself may be compatible with nihilism. I didn't really have such a problem with the clairvoyance in Survivor because he made a stab at a mechanistic explanation. I was able to suspend disbelief and the nihilism was intact. Initially I did the same thing with the culling poem. He never really tried to explain it, but I was able to do so because he never really said it was magic. If fact, Helen (the Marla Singer) went on a tirade about how belief in the afterlife was wishful thinking. She said that she made money off of people deluding themselves into this belief. The book actually starts with her selling and re-selling "haunted" houses, and this speech initially "fixed" that inconsistency for me. After reading the rest of the book, however, this speech feels very tacked on, as if Chuck was trying to let you know that he really doesn't believe any of this shit. It turns out that this poem originated in the "grimoire", or witch's spell book. They go on a quest to a) destroy all of the books in which the culling poem is found and b) find the grimoire. Up until they find the grimoire, you can suspend disbelief and imagine a mechanistic world where this stuff exists. Once they find it, however, all bets are off. This is a world full of magic. There are flying spells and possession spells, fertility spells and more. How you can be depressed about the pointlessness of the world when you can cast magic spells, I'll never know. These things bug me because I am a very mechanistic person. They bug me because I feel that they completely undermine the entire nihilistic concept, which is Chuck Palahniuk's stated message in all of these books. (Well, I assume so after reading the nihilism quotes in the binder.) A less critical person will probably not notice any of these things. A person who doesn't spend their time logically dissecting different philosophical assertions will probably not see any inconsistency. Hell, many people may even disagree with my earlier assertion: "If magic then God." Ignore this stuff and you've got a great book. It's well written, compelling, and disturbing. The characters are interesting, you sympathize with them. You hate who you're supposed to hate. You care about what happens. There are surprising twists, as there are in all of his books. It's a good read. Bottom line: buy it and read it. It is good. But if you are like me and really like internal consistency in philosophy, you're going to have to hang that part of your brain on the shelf while you read this book. Permalink to this post. |
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What. The. Fuck. Now, I dig weird books. I dig crazy stuff. And there were a few stories in this book that I liked. "In the Penal Colony" was definitely my favorite of the bunch. It was a good solid short story. "The Metamorphosis" was also good, but I had some problems with it. More on that in a second. Several of the "stories" in this book were just insane. And I don't mean insane in a "weird stuff happening" sort of way. He would write 3 pages about some guy who owns a store. Just a guy. Then he'd start a new chapter about a different, equally mundane guy in another city. Totally unrelated. And you'd sit through six or ten chapters of this, waiting for some sort of theme or plot or connection to emerge, but none does. You have just read fifty pages of random uninteresting shit. And that's it. The "story", if you can call it that, is over. It is well written, and several of the chapters really grabbed my attention, but only to really piss me off by not going anywhere and not tying into anything else. I would on occasion zone out and think about football or boobies while reading, and realize that I missed 5 pages, but not really worry about it because there was absolutely no consequence to me missing those pages. I missed 5 pages of random meaningless shit. My second beef with Kafka's writing is very evident in the Metamorphosis: in the real world, people simply don't act or talk the way they do in his stories. I know this is fantasy, I know it is fiction. But when people do things that *no one* would ever ever in a billion years do in a given situation, it jars me out of the story. I can't believe it. Hey, I can buy a guy suddenly turning into a bug. I can *NOT* buy that his main concern is how to get to work and not upsetting his boss. (And yes, I do understand that it is supposed to be ironic. That doesn't change anything.) So here is my story by story breakdown of the book: Conversation with the Supplicant What in the hell is this supposed to be? Meditation (note: a million sub stories) 1) Children on a country road WTF? 2) Unmasking a confidence trickster WTF? 3) The sudden walk WTF? 4) OK, this is getting long...EVERY sub story: WTF?...Except Bachelor's Ill Luck, which I thought was a pretty poignant paragraph. The Judgement Oddly compelling, but once again, people just don't act like this. Maybe they did back in the Pre-Cambrian era of 1900 The Metamorphosis Pretty good. Depressing. Good statement on abandonment of those you love. However, people don't act like this. A Country Doctor(another million sub stories) They're all poop except "A Country Doctor" (he does that a lot...name a sub story after the story...), and "Jackals and Arabs". Also "A Report to an Academy" is actually really really really good...It's about a monkey who learns how to be human In the Penal Colony Rocks. Creepy as hell. Basically a thirty page description of a torture device and what it does to your body. A Hunger Artist (another million sub stories...) "A Hunger Artist" was a good sub story. "Josephine the Singer" was just freaking retarded. The First Long Train Journey Nothing much happens with this one, but it's long enough to become compelling, and it's a nice little "slice of life". A lot of his stories are like this, but they're just too short. It feels to disjointed and frustrating. I enjoyed this one simply because I had time to actually care about what was going on. Permalink to this post. |
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The hijacker is the sole surviving member of a religious cult. Every other member killed themselves as per church orders. The book is essentially the story of how he got to this point. A nice touch is that the pages are numbered backwards, ending at 1. I didn't really get into this book until the last 70 pages or so. I felt that nothing was really happening...that the story was just floating along. But then I realized that the writer was building this character up to destroy him. I can relate directly to the destruction. The character started out fat, but became a workout fiend. Then he was pulled away from his routine he had to watch his body return to being fat and sick. For obvious reasons this bit got me. Now that I have read a few of Chuck Palahniuk's books, I recognize a few recurring themes. 1) Female characters like Marla Singer 2) A well built body falling apart 3) Small time "grifts". (There are literally hundreds in these books) 4) Highly specific factiods about different occupations (this one was filled with home cleaning tips) 5) Detailed listings of different mind altering and performance enhancing drugs and their effects on the body 6) Addiction 7) Sex and Death as the only real thrills left. This is Good Stuff, kids! Pick up a copy today! Permalink to this post. |
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This book rivals Geek Love in the pure madness of the characters. Let's see if I can capture it in a synopsis... Protagonist is a model whose jaw is shot off by a gun. The lower half of her face is gone, and her tongue just hangs there. She is unable to speak. Her fiance is a vice cop who arrests gay men that come on to him in the park. To get more busts he dresses in tight speedos and packs them with rolled up bread. Her best friend is sleeping with her fiance. One of them may or may not have shot off her face. Her new best friend is a six foot tall drag queen. The "Queen Supreme" Brandy Alexander. Brandy lives on estrogen and demoral. Together they (minus the cheating friend) go on a cross country crime spree, running a scam involving touring the houses of the rich and famous in search of prescription drugs to sell on the street. Once again Chuck throws the pointlessness of life at us. Once again he holds a magnifying makeup mirror to our faces. We get to see all of the blackheads and hairs. We get to see how we are killing ourselves slowly with booze, stress, and just plain breathing. Even running on a treadmill is just a slower way of killing yourself. As the book progresses and the characters develop (or rather, decay) more and more of the madness that brought everything to this point is revealed. My only complaint about the book is that some of the twists are something of a stretch, and you have to suspend disbelief a bit to accept that these things happened by coincidence. But this isn't exactly a true crime novel, so it is forgivable. The day I finished it I bought Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk. Permalink to this post. |
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