I wanted to read a book which is very unavailable in India. So I ordered for that book in "Land mark". Book is “fight club” by Chuck palauhnik. I knew it was a black comedy. But I never knew that it was an acid bomb printed in the form of letters. If you are there to categorize, you can categorize this book as "transgressive fiction" . Transgressive fiction is a genre of literature that focuses on characters who feel confined by the norms and expectations of society and who break free of those confines in unusual aor illicit ways. Because they are obsessively reacting against the basic structure of society, protagonists of transgressional fiction may seem mentally ill, anti-social or nihilisticThis is a’comedy of horrors’.Anyway "Land Mark" guys shipped the book for the customer.
Set in American corporate world, novel unfolds a story of existentialism through a new kind of cacophony group which named as “FIGHT CLUB”. There are certain rules in fight club. First rule is that ‘you don’t talk about fight club” and the second rule is “YOU DON’T TALK ABOUT FIGHT CLUB”. I think you got the nature of the madness which is going to come. The narrator of the story is nameless nobody who happen to be an insurance agent .He once meets a very smart man with a twisted philosophy. His name is Tyler durden. Mr. Durdan is a soap sales man. He makes soap. "Soap’s name: Paper streets Soap Company". Narrator is an insomniac who wakes up at different places. He is somebody who prays for a crash every time when the flight takes off from the airport. That cures his insomnia. A doctor advises him to go to support groups where he can see many badly affected people and that might cure his insomnia. It was fine for a few days until he met Marla who is another faker just like him. He looses sleep again.Accidently the man meet Tyler durden and meet an new way of life which preaches destruction is the way to salvation. Tyler advised him “self improvement is masturbation. self destruction is way to divine”.
Tyler set a fight club in the basements and parking lot across the country, young men with good white collar jobs and absent fathers take off their shoes and shirts [rules] and fight each other barehanded for as long as they have to. If this is your first fight in fight club, you have to fight”. YES, “Fight club” is the invention of tyler durden, the projectionist, the waiter, the soap maker and the dark anarchic genius. He makes plans to destroy the civilization which evolved through centuries. Fight club becomes “Project Mayhem” and there happens an epic. Later, David Fincher made a cult movie based on this novel in the same name and the film became a box officel failure on its original release and soon achieved cult status after its DVD release.
Novel is the burning anger of the author against corporate life style which is getting propagated each moment in America and Our own India. Corporate cultures which never see a man as a human being but just a machine to integrate its economic sources make most men in this age ‘existentialists”. These frustrated men have their own rule of life which led to cacophony groups. Chuck palaunhink himself said that he got motivated to write this novel from cacophony groups.
Novel goes in a non-linear order which you might not find as a story. But if you read, it would be terrific [and terrible at the same time] experience in your life because
“The barrel of the gun pressed against the back of my throat, Tyler says “We really won’t die”, This is not really death, we will be legends, we won’t grow old”….
You I advise not to work, but to fight. You I advise not to peace, but to victory. Let your work be a fight, let your peace be a victory! – Thus spake Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche