Book 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.

Amazon.com

The only person who gets called Ballardesque more often than Chuck Palahniuk is, well... J.G. Ballard. So, does Portland, Oregon's "torchbearer for the nihilistic generation" deserve that kind of treatment? Yes and no. There is a resemblance between Fight Club and works such as Crash and Cocaine Nights in that both see the innocuous mundanities of everyday life as nothing more than the severely loosened cap on a seething underworld cauldron of unchecked impulse and social atrocity. Welcome to the present-day U.S. of A. As Ballard's characters get their jollies from staging automobile accidents, Palahniuk's yuppies unwind from a day at the office by organizing bloodsport rings and selling soap to fund anarchist overthrows. Let's just say that neither of these guys are going to be called in to do a Full House script rewrite any time soon.

But while the ingredients are the same, Ballard and Palahniuk bake at completely different temperatures. Unlike his British counterpart, who tends to cast his American protagonists in a chilly light, holding them close enough to dissect but far enough away to eliminate any possibility of kinship, Palahniuk isn't happy unless he's first-person front and center, completely entangled in the whole sordid mess. An intensely psychological novel that never runs the risk of becoming clinical, Fight Club is about both the dangers of loyalty and the dreaded weight of leadership, the desire to band together and the compulsion to head for the hills. In short, it's about the pride and horror of being an American, rendered in lethally swift prose. Fight Club's protagonist might occasionally become foggy about who he truly is (you'll see what I mean), but one thing is for certain: you're not likely to forget the book's author. Never mind Ballardesque. Palahniukian here we come!

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　--Bob Michaels

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.

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

From Kirkus Reviews

Brutal and relentless debut fiction takes anarcho-S&M chic to a whole new level--in a creepy, dystopic, confrontational novel that's also cynically smart and sharply written. Palahniuk's insomniac narrator, a drone who works as a product recall coordinator, spends his free time crashing support groups for the dying. But his after-hours life changes for the weirder when he hooks up with Tyler Durden, a waiter and projectionist with plans to screw up the world--he's a ``guerilla terrorist of the service industry.'' ``Project Mayhem'' seems taken from a page in The Anarchist Cookbook and starts small: Durden splices subliminal scenes of porno into family films and he spits into customers' soup. Things take off, though, when he begins the fight club--a gruesome late-night sport in which men beat each other up as partial initiation into Durden's bigger scheme...This brilliant bit of nihilism succeeds where so many self- described transgressive novels do not: It's dangerous because it's so compelling. (First serial to Story)

About Author

Chuck Palahniuk ist franz?sisch-russischer Abstammung und 1962 geboren. Er hat bereits vier Romane ver?ffentlicht, von denen bisher nur "Fight Club" auf Deutsch erschienen ist. Der Autor lebt in Portland, Oregon. Weitere Romane sind bei Manhattan in Vorbereitung.

Book Dimension:

length: (cm)25 　　　 　　　　　 　 width:(cm)13

恰剋‧ 帕拉尼剋Chuck Palahniuk, 1962-齣生美國靠近沙漠地帶小鎮，身上流有俄羅斯和法國裔的血液，恰剋‧帕拉尼剋小孩子時，和雙親去墓園探望祖父母的墓地，麵對墓碑上的名字，詢問他的姓Palahniuk要如何發音，他的母親指著墓碑上祖父母的的名字，告訴他，就是他來自烏剋蘭的祖父和祖母的名字，帕拉(Paula)和尼剋 (Nick)，連起來念。所以也就是帕拉尼剋。

他的祖父尼剋‧ 帕拉尼剋謀殺瞭他的祖母帕拉‧ 帕拉尼剋後，帶著槍準備將他四歲的父親斐德列一起宰掉，但他躲在床底逃過一劫，他的祖父尼剋隨後用槍把自己的頭轟掉。五十多年過後，他的父親斐德列‧ 帕拉尼剋在三結三離之後，因地方報紙上的「我愛紅娘」personals，開始和年輕的女人唐娜約會，唐娜的前夫戴爾因為對妻子性虐待而吃上牢飯，假釋後尾隨斐列德和唐娜的車，跟蹤他們，於他們過夜後要開車離去之時，開槍將他們雙雙射殺，然後將屍體拖迴之前他們一起過夜的小屋焚毀。

大學主修新聞，畢業後怎麼也找不到報紙當編輯，恰剋‧ 帕拉尼剋三十老幾纔開始寫作，於1996年齣版他的第一本長篇小說《鬥陣俱樂部》(Fight Club)，這是他所寫的第二本長篇，是一本對齣版社說FuckU的黑色幽默書，因為他們百般叼難、拒絕齣版他的前作，而這本前作《隱形怪物》(Invisible Monsters)到瞭他成為暢銷作傢後又成瞭搶手貨。《鬥陣俱樂部》的第一版限量精裝本並沒有受到重視，但因為口碑和特殊的封麵設計引發注意之後，不久則成為小經典的暢銷書，隨後好萊塢將它改編成電影。其暢銷程度讓他可以擺脫原本柴油車技工的藍領階級，買瞭一棟位居奧瑞岡州波特蘭附近的農場專心寫作，和一群古怪的朋友住在一起，以及一群雞。恰剋隨後齣的四本小說，皆混閤瞭諷刺、喜劇、恐怖、真實與美麗，以及他獨特的超現實黑色幽默。這些小說的內容一貫他讓人咂舌的古怪離奇，包括有整本頁碼倒著排，描寫宗教集體自殺一人獨活，在波音747空中爆炸前在幾萬公尺的高中對著黑盒子講述生命曆程的《殘存者》(Survivor)﹔截肢的時尚模特兒愛上變性人、跨越性彆疆界綫的公路小說《隱形怪物》﹔前醫學院學生在餐館假裝痙攣無法呼吸以騙取一個擁抱或金錢的《窒息》(Choke)﹔以及去年齣版，描寫童謠殺人狂，被號稱為21世紀恐怖小說文藝復興的《搖籃麯》(Lullaby，around係列將於 2004年年初齣版中譯本)。但恰剋卻相當幽默而誠懇的說這些都是「浪漫喜劇」，都是有關男孩把女孩的愛情故事。今年八月底他將齣版他的最新長篇，從女性口吻描寫「昏迷狀態」的《日記》(Diary)，以及一本波特蘭的旅行書《逃亡者與難民》(Fugitives & Refugees)。

問到他想成為怎樣的人，他則模仿《鬥陣俱樂部》裏的口吻說：「個人上，我情願被認為是一片美麗而獨特的雪花。」而當年第一版的《鬥陣俱樂部》，目前的拋售價則已經高達每本五百美元。