Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk was our February title and we met, as always, in our faithful local to discuss the book. It’s the first time we had our brand new group together (all eight of us; SJ, MB, AG, SA, CB, CR, HB and me!). We’re still an all female group and someone made the very good point last week that we should probably try and include a token male at some point. So we met, we talked, and then we came second in the Sunday night pub quiz…because, of course, book clubs are awesome.
We were, as a group, completely aware that we weren’t exactly the target audience. The novel is for boys, full of gore and disgust, and those things didn’t exactly fill some of the group with happy fuzzy feelings. Although most of us enjoyed the ambiguity and really different nature of the writing style, it isn’t for everyone, and its most certainly a departure from standard dramatic fiction.Fight Club is a book so visual and graphic in its descriptions, it could have been lifted straight from the movie script. The film version of the book did enter into the discussion on more than one occasion and although there are some significant differences (mainly near the end), its one of the few adaptations where we felt the book was done justice.
Palahniuk is an immense writer; filled with passion and fire, his writing is powerful in its venom. Since we had previously read American Psycho (Brett Easton Ellis) the similarities with that were also marked. Palahniuk has said that Ellis was an inspiration and the violence in the book definitely shows that.
Overall though, the novel came out ok. Myself, SJ, AG, and MB did all recognise that had we not read Ellis beforehand, we probably would have enjoyed Fight Club more. It still got a pretty decent score though and we came away with another novel (what I’m going to describe as a bloke’s book) for the next month.
Overall Score: 7/10
Next Month's Choice is from: SJ
Next Book: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
