Product Description

The first rule about fight club is you don't talk about fight club.

Chuck Palahniuk's outrageous and startling debut novel that exploded American literature and spawned a movement. Every weekend, in the basements and parking lots of bars across the country, young men with white-collar jobs and failed lives take off their shoes and shirts and fight each other barehanded just as long as they have to. Then they go back to those jobs with blackened eyes and loosened teeth and the sense that they can handle anything. Fight club is the invention of Tyler Durden, projectionist, waiter, and dark, anarchic genius, and it's only the beginning of his plans for violent revenge on an empty consumer-culture world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #638 in Books
• Published on: 2005-10-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Featuring soap made from human fat, waiters at high-class restaurants who do unmentionable things to soup and an underground organization dedicated to inflicting a violent anarchy upon the land, Palahniuk's apocalyptic first novel is clearly not for the faint of heart. The unnamed (and extremely unreliable) narrator, who makes his living investigating accidents for a car company in order to assess their liability, is combating insomnia and a general sense of anomie by attending a steady series of support-group meetings for the grievously ill, at one of which (testicular cancer) he meets a young woman named Marla. She and the narrator get into a love triangle of sorts with Tyler Durden, a mysterious and gleefully destructive young man with whom the narrator starts a fight club, a secret society that offers young professionals the chance to beat one another to a bloody pulp. Mayhem ensues, beginning with the narrator's condo exploding and culminating with a terrorist attack on the world's tallest building. Writing in an ironic deadpan and including something to offend everyone, Palahniuk is a risky writer who takes chances galore, especially with a particularly bizarre plot twist he throws in late in the book. Caustic, outrageous, bleakly funny, violent and always unsettling, Palahniuk's utterly original creation will make even the most jaded reader sit up and take notice. Movie rights to Fox 2000.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From The Washington Post
"Fight Club offers diabolically sharp and funny writing."

From Booklist
In the world of Fight Club, healthy young people go to meetings of cancer support groups because only there can they find human warmth and compassion. It's a world where young men gather in the basements of bars to fight strangers "just as long as they have to." And it's a world where "nobody cared if he lived or died, and the feeling was fucking mutual." Messianic nihilist Tyler Durden is the inventor of Fight Club. Soon thousands of young men across the country are reporting to their work cubes with flattened noses, blackened eyes, and shattered teeth, looking forward to their next bare-knuckle maiming. The oracular, increasingly mysterious Durden then begins to harness the despair, alienation, and violence he sees so clearly into complete anarchy. Every generation frightens and unnerves its parents, and Palahniuk's first novel is gen X's most articulate assault yet on baby-boomer sensibilities. This is a dark and disturbing book that dials directly into youthful angst and will likely horrify the parents of teens and twentysomethings. It's also a powerful, and possibly brilliant, first novel. Thomas Gaughan

Customer Reviews

Big one
What can I say more the typical "this is your life and it is ending one minute at a time"? I love this kind of narrative style, but what makes the book so special (apart from the mentioned style) is the philosophical message it carries. I was too young when I saw the movie, but when you get a mainstream job, you clearly feel in in your flesh: you are not special. So accept it and let things happen. Obviously, there is no need to follow Tyler's path and set up a fight club. People just need to focus and follow their own nature. Discard whatever that makes you pain, retain whatever that makes you happy, and that's the whole message.

A sacred, unique snowflake of special unique specialness.
Here's a word to describe the pervasive resonance this story has enjoyed.

Confrontational.

Fight Club is a pugnacious challenge to examine your life, in the form of a blunt instrument. If you want to get peoples attention these days, best be prepared to bludgeon them upside the head. We the ADD generations have no time for study and meditation. You have 5 seconds to deliver the message in an original and exciting way. Check and check.

Take a massively concentrated answer to the existential dilemma, throw in a couple themes of timely relevence, a sense of urgency, twisted humor and wrap up the whole enchilada in a transgressional tortilla and voila! A quintessential 90's literary masterpiece. Fight Club is the successor to Clockwork Orange.

"This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time"

Consider yourself challenged.

Every teenager needs to read this novel!
Fight Club: Self-Improvement, Self-Realization, and Self-Destruction

Growing up, no matter if I succeeded or failed, I received a big hug from my mom and a little-league trophy from my dad. I grew up in a school district that continued to bash the bell curve and inflate grades until we were all winners. We learned through reward and we liked it; we were raised to win and we strove for perfection.

Unfortunately, we were raised wrong. I realized this when I read Fight Club for the first time at age sixteen. I am writing this review because of this experience; I am writing this review because I believe every teenager in the country should read this book.

Keep reading and I'll tell you why.

I reviewed Fight Club by asking two distinct questions: How did the novel change me? And, why did it change me? While I am reviewing this novel for teenagers and their parents, many of my claims are built off other Amazon.com reviews not always written for the same audience. This might sound corny, but just as Fight Club`s protagonist is attempting to crack society's shell; I am attempting to crack to the novel's core.

You see, Fight Club is not just the bloody mess its title indicates, but the story of a man finding his place in a society that does not suit him. The author, Chuck Palahniuk, uses this character to critique the hypocrisy of a culture in which ordinary people are tormented by the drudgery of their modern, daily routines. Tortured by monotony, men are driven to violence in order to escape.

Palahniuk uses this violence to get his readers to question their own lives--to question how they were raised. As the narrator struggles to find a balance between himself, a "rag doll of society", and Tyler Durden, his schizophrenic alter ego, he concludes that if "self-improvement isn't the answer... Maybe self-destruction is" (Palahniuk 49). This kind of teen self-reflection is "extremely important" to development explains Dr. Bernard Golden in his book Healthy Anger. At the same time the narrator becomes involved with an underground fight club, leaving the reader to question the legitimacy their own role in society.

As the fight club quickly becomes a method of therapy for the protagonist, it also becomes an addiction for the reader. As reviewer Kevin Joseph points out, Palahniuk's characters fight for that second of self-realization, a psychological balance that day-to-day life cannot supply. Do we not do the same thing when we are teenagers? Are we not the "all-singing, all-dancing crap of this world" searching for our own place to fit in (169)? You see Palahniuk's characters go to these fight clubs not to impose pain upon others, but to have it imposed upon them. They need to find out what is really real, to temporarily get away from reality--something we all do as we grow up.

This is exactly why every teenager in our country should read Fight Club. It changes a young reader by getting him or her to explore what we as often take for granted. It gets teenagers to question ideals that their parents, their society and sometimes even their common sense enforce. It turns a sixteen year old learner into a sixteen year old thinking.

While there are critics like reviewer Justine1212, who claim that Palahniuk's themes of nihilism and his harsh criticism of consumerism damage the minds of young readers, they ignore the value of self-exploration. In fact, Palahniuk's bitterness towards materialism provides the reader with the dark humor that reviewer CapLeoGem and reviewer Czombie find to be the "bitterly sarcastic" essence of the book:

I think this excerpt from Fight Club kind of sums up my feelings about the book: "[Before,] it used to be enough that when I came home angry and knowing that my life wasn't toeing my five-year plan, I could clean my condominium or detail my car" (49). What does one do when having a nice condominium and car is not enough? Personally, I would not think to start a fight club, but it is these absurdities and incongruities that flood the book, allowing Palahniuk to reveal the dark side of American culture that reviewer Theodore Burke finds "essential."

After all, "`It's only after you've lost everything,'" Tyler says, "`that you're free to do anything.'" While I cannot say I've read Fight Club five times in two months like reviewer Dan Seitz "cinnatusc," I can say that reading Fight Club has, indeed, changed me.

Everyday for one hundred and eighty days of the past fifteen years of my life I have woken up, gone to school and come home only to do it again the next day. Before I read Fight Club, I never really questioned this schedule--my life.

Overall, Fight Club is a book definitely worth reading and has a very accurate customer-rating of four and half stars (even though I gave it five stars). So be a good parent, buy your children a copy this holiday season and break their materialistic obsession or be a good teenager, beg your parents for a copy this holiday season and question authority.