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Chuck's "Choke" Connects
“Chuck Palahniuk is the now generation's Kurt Vonnegut: a slyly brilliant writer more concerned with telling a great story than necessitating the dictionary. We find an array of characters who are not us--people whom we will never be and probably never wish to be, but somehow to whom we are directly connected.
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-11-04.
I found the plot moving actions to be hilarious, but like a great magician, these were largely sleights of hand so he could drop the boom that--good, bad or ugly, we are only the composition of our actions and inactions--both having equal consequences.
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Just what I wanted.
“Let's cut to the chase: this book is amazing.
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-10-27.
Unapologetic, raw, and funny as hell. It's exactly what the world of literature needs.” -
Dark and disgusting and wonderful
“This book isn't for someone sensitive or with a weak stomach, but it is really a fantastic book. This is one of those novels that throws you into a world that you wouldn't otherwise know if you hadn't read it. I loved it very much, and it was my first of Chuck Palahnuik's books, and is still one of my favorites.”
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-10-19. -
AWESOME MAY NOT BE THE RIGHT WORD........
“but it's the first the comes to mind.
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-10-13.
Really enjoyed this book. Anyone under 30 will also love it too.
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1 of 1 members found this review helpful.
A spider-web of addiction and reliance
“Choke is about contradictions and irony. About the yin and the yang, the back and the forth, the dichotomous relationship that produces the amazing and bizarre in life, but when related to addiction results so often in pleasure and pain.
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-09-08.
Understandable yet ridiculous, the give and take of addiction manifests itself in many ways throughout Choke. Medical professionals probably feel the elation saving a life or fixing ailments, but are conversely disgusted knowing how that plunger handle got lodged up there - despite the patient's protests. With the subtopics of sexual addiction, religion, and hospital visits in this book, the previous metaphor is disturbingly appropriate.
A med-school dropout, Victor diagnoses strippers' melanoma as incurable cancer and picks up women at sex addicts' meetings for fun. He wears a scratchy wool costume at a colonial reenactment village to pay the bills, most notably his mother's medical bills for Alzheimer's. Outwardly his fellow employees look and act as if transported into centuries past; realistically, however, most discretely yearn for the comforts and addictions of their current lifestyles. Told through a thick haze of self-loathing, Victor is no different from others; his sex addiction is known but he can't beat it off.
When salvation is within grasp, the addicted still don't really want help, which is Victor's issue. Reliant upon others for salvation or help, he pretends to choke at restaurants to get free meals, but primarily to create heroes and earn some extra cash while making himself feel better. With his ruse, however, he tempts fate: if the choking is fake, everyone else thinks it's real; when it's real be careful, lest one end up as the boy who cried wolf.
Told interspersed with oddball childhood recollections of leapfrogging between foster parents and his mother's abductions, Victor is almost predisposed for the codependency on which every aspect of this novel tramples. When the walls come crumbling down around his life, however, pleasure and pain is felt throughout the "colony."
Perverse and heart-warming, chock full of lists of bizarre trivia, this is classic Chuck Palahniuk. If you're familiar with his work, you'll understand and love it. If not, I highly recommend this book for the slightly twisted looking for an original concept with a twist of dark comedy.”
