Customer Reviews

Choke

5 star:		(239)
4 star:		(132)
3 star:		(79)
2 star:		(64)
1 star:		(32)

 

 

...but it's the first word that comes to mind.

Before we get this review started, a word of warning: THIS IS NOT FOR LITTLE KIDS. THIS IS NOT FOR PEOPLE WITH WEAK STOMACHS OR ARE EXTREMELY SENSITIVE.

Okay, with that said, I found Chuck Palahniuk's "Choke" to be a very strange, perverted, dark, and bizarre novel....but it's supposed to be. And, it's a very creative novel, despite if you love the novel or hate it.

I had read "Fight Club" after seeing the movie, and I found the novel to be just as entertaining and creative, if not more. So, I wanted to read another novel by him, so I picked this up. Wow....nothing could've EVER prepared me for this.

"Choke's" main character is Victor; a compulsive sex addict who creates heroes by purposely choking at restaurants and allowing himself to be saved. He does this to feel better about himself, and to help pay for his very sick and dying mother's medical care. And as the story and novel goes on and on, the more twisted and darker it becomes, adding up to one hell of a shocking climax.

The novel is told by the narrator, just like in"Fight Club." He still uses the same sense of thinking, the same amount of sarcasam, and the same dark humor found in "Fight Club." And yet, it's still just as refreshing. I never thought of novels told by the narrator to be all that great, until I read his work.

Again, this is not for kids, and this is not for those who get offended easily. It is a VERY sexually explict novel; I don't think I have ever read anything so sexually graphic! It's going to be one of those books where you're going to be embarrassed to read in public, fearing that somebody just might snatch it out of your hand and start reading it aloud. As intense as the sexual content is, it fits the story.

I found "Choke" to be a really entertaining and thought-provoking novel. Palahniuk has a way of words, and knows how to create a very dark world that none of us have ever seen. Again, this novel is not for the weak and sensitive. If you liked "Fight Club," or any of the other novels by Palahniuk, chances are you will enjoy this one as well. While it may not be one I'm going to read over and over again, it is one I am glad that I took the time to read.

Sorry that this review is so short, and believe me, I'd LOVE to tell you more. However, this is a book in which you must be careful how you describe it. If you give too much away, then you just might ruin it for the reader. I feel I have given the right amount of information that you need to know. The great thing about this novel is even after reading the back of the cover, you still don't know where this story is going to go, until it sucks you right in, whether you're ready or not.

"End" isn't the right word, but it's the first word that comes to mind.

...but it's the first that comes to mind.

The problem with Chuck Palahniuk novels is that they do not lend themselves well to reviews. Reveal too much information, and the fragile twists and turns of the plot are destroyed, robbing the reader of the thrill one receives upon discovering these intricacies for themselves the first time. Reveal too little, and a coherent review is almost impossible, leaving the reader with a false impression of complexities and tangles which are insurmountable.

Choke is the fourth novel written by Palahniuk, a master at angry, adult male angst. Our narrator is one Mr. Victor Mancini, a med-school drop out with a mother suffering from Alzheimer's disease, and an addiction to sex. Like other novels such as Fight Club and Survivor, we are exposed to the dirty underbelly of a society we don't want to acknowledge exists - from prisoners who go to sexaholic meetings for sex and kinky masturbation tips to the problems bending over in the stocks of a colonial theme park creates.

However, unlike the dry sarcasm of Fight Club or the biting satire of Survivor, Choke returns to the humorous yet heart-felt writing of Invisible Monsters, and exposes us to a more humorous side of Palahniuk's nature. From Tanya and her string of plastic balls to Gwen, who insists Victor wouldn't know how to rape a woman if he tried, Palahniuk presents us with incredibly memorable characters and scenes that will have you laughing long after you've closed the book.

" `Why do I do this? Why do I always pick the guy who wants to be nice and conventional? The next thing you'll want to do is marry me.' She says, `Just one time, I'd like to have an abusive relationship. Just once!' " (Page 175)

Humor is not the only factor in the story of a man who is led to believe his origin is divine. Victor is most likely one of Palahniuk's most complex characters today, a man who is trying to be anything he is not, who is rebelling against a psychotic mother's abuse while he drops out of law school and takes a job at a Colonial Williamsburg-like village in order to pay for the necessary care and treatment of his ailing mother. A man who believes strangers saving him from choking in a restaurant is not only a financial resource but an expression of love and sainthood, Victor is wonderfully human and am incredibly sympathetic character. While we may not be able to validated all of his choices, his is a character we can understand and perhaps even respect.

Palahniuk manages to dazzle and amaze with his ability to turn pithy little quotes into personal mantras and catch phrases, which once read, cannot be burned, pushed, hammered, or flooded out of one's short term memory banks. The same way you will always remember that the first rule of fight club is you do not talk about fight club, you will remember that "this" or "that" isn't the right word, but it's the first word that comes to mind.

The martyrdom of Saint Me.

What would Jesus not do?

However, Palahniuk's novels are about more than catch phrases and plot twists that would impress Rod Serling and Alfred Hitchcock. Choke is a very funny, very sad tale of a man who professes to love the wrong choices, while exposing to the reader the very humane side that even he cannot see.

Imagine your friend is beating his sexual addiction by collecting rocks, with which he builds a castle. Imagine being a sex addict and unable to have sex with the one woman who desperately wants to have sex with you. Imagine discovering the complexity of the Mile High Club, and what it means to "ride the circuit." Imagine telling school children about the black plague while giving tours of colonial buildings in clothing so authentic, you can smell the dirt on them.

Imagine yourself in the life of Victor Mancini, and you'll never see life the same way.

I've basically come to the conclusion that the first Palahniuk book you read will be your favorite. So if you haven't touched this guy yet then just pick one (well, my biased opinion would recommend Fight Club, since that was my first read), it will be fresh, a great read, and something that gets you to think. It will probably even challenge you towards more books and authors that put their books out with something to say, rather than the abundance of authors simply trying to catch your attention span long enough to get on the best seller list.

But none of Palahniuk's books ever quite matches the pure elation of my first Palahniuk (though Invisible Monsters did come quite close). Palahniuk utilizes gimmicks as his style, and while it seems fresh at first, the more of him you read the more it becomes derivative. Each book is your usual assortment of twists, shocks, catchy-phrases, classic losers, and then the surprise ending. And each time, no matter how challenging Palahniuk's theme may be, I get a little less interested. Don't let this mislead you, I'm still a fan of Palahniuk, I've read all four of Palahniuk's books, and they're always good reads. I'll be one of the first to pick up his next book, but I'm going to be hoping that it's not more of the same. Being fresh all the time eventually gets stale too.

To be fair, and to maybe give some insight as to where I'm coming from, I had the same problem with Vonnegut. Loved the first book I read by him, had practically just as much fun with my second book. The third one was enjoyable and just as quick a read as the others, but by the fourth one I was getting the hang of it and didn't really feel the need to read anymore. This basically mirrors my Palahniuk experience, though Chuck has still got me coming back for more.

So in summary, Choke is as good a place to start as any. For the veterans of Palahniuk, you'll like it too, especially if you haven't tired of his gimmicks yet. But, as much as you'll likely enjoy it, you probably won't get the same visceral thrills from it as you did with your first Palahniuk novel.

"We spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or Insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heros or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are. Letting our past decide our future. Or we can decide for ourselves. And maybe its our job to invent something better." Palahniuk never ceases to inspire. Behind all the satire. Behind his often hillirous look at life and the little things that make us human, or at least the views that he portrays in his unforgetable characters, Palahniuk, never stops to apologize, and there no reason to because he writes the truth in it most crulest of ways. "People sit home and watch Friends, because they have no Friends." I dare you to read any Palahniuk book, be it, Fight Club, Survivior, IM, or Choke, and not be inspired to do something better with yourself. Improve yourself. Create something. Destroy something. Do Something with yourself other than sit in front of a mind-numbing television set, and dream about the life you could have, get off your "" and do something! At least that's what I get out of Palahniuk work. Since the first time I picked up Fight Club, I was hooked, his words are like heroin to me. I've lost track how many times I've read that book, and Survivor. IM about four times. There are many messages in Chuck's work, some hidden, some in your face, some crammed down your throat, and forced into the pit of your stomach. The most important message, in seemingly all his works, is do something with yourself other than waste away precious brain cells in this repetitive world as we know it, we all have a talent for something, find yours, and make it happen, for yourself, and nobody else. I predict that Chuck will be a household name after his next book Lullabye comes out, and after the movie adaptation of Survivor comes out, and possibly an Invisible Monsters movie. Everybody will know who Chuck is, good or bad, that I don't know. Loved or hated, probably both, but do yourself a favor and read his works now while he's got his little cult following, this way a few years down the road, when everybodies on the literary band wagon, you can laugh and tell everyone, "I TOLD YOU SO." Buy this book, read it more than once. Save yourself, and find your place. "Because nothing is as perfect as you imagine it," I'll shut up now.

I wish I could say I was cool enough to have known about Chuck Palahniuk before others had discovered him, but I had actually never heard of his first published novel, Fight Club, until I had seen director David Fincher's brilliant film version of it. A few days later, I bought the novel, read it and then quickly bought his second and third books, Survivor and Invisible Monsters, devouring them one after the other. I was enraptured by Palahniuk's world of anarchists making explosives from human fat, transsexuals feeding estrogen to unsuspecting chauvinists, suicide cultists, and fashion models without faces wreaking vengeance on old boyfriends. I became an instant fan.

In his new novel, Choke, Palahniuk introduces us to Vincent Mancini, a twentysomething whiling his life away in a shitty, low-wage job at a colonial amusement park. His mother is wasting away from Alzheimer's in an expensive elder-care facility, and to make enough money to help her, he goes into restaurants, stuffs food into his mouth and pretends to be choking. When someone comes to the rescue, a plea for financial aid soon follows. Feeling an obligation to look after the person he's saved, the "hero" eagerly complies.

Faced with his mom's painful end, Vincent goes into meltdown. He becomes obsessed with death and sex, diagnosing people's minor ailments as symptoms of potentially excruciating death, cruising addiction sections of bookstores and going to Sexual Compulsives Anonymous (SCA) 12-step meetings to pick up women. Not that he doesn't realize just how much of a lost soul he is. Written in the form of a brutal self-inventory-Step Four of the 12 Steps to Recovery pioneered by Alcoholics Anonymous-Vincent warns us off at the beginning:

"If you're going to read this, don't bother. After a couple of pages, you won't want to be here. So forget it. Go away. Get out while you're still in one piece. Save yourself."

A chapter later, he's humping a girl on the floor of a 12-step meeting bathroom while giving us a philosophical introduction to the world of sexual compulsivity. The bit is both funny and hot enough that we're inclined to agree when he says, "I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a hot-gushing, butt-cramping, gut-hosing orgasm."

But there's despair here amid the debauchery. Vincent's mindless fucking around is a symptom of a deep ennui laced with a soured spirituality. In Fight Club, the relationship with God is always seen in the context of the absent father: If I never know the warmth and trust a good father delivers, then how can I love and trust a faceless, seemingly absent Father in heaven? Daddy's missing in Choke, too-Vincent has never known his father. When he's tossing off a line like "Parenthood is the opiate of the masses," he's not just flipping the bird at people who've found some measure of happiness in breeding; he's also mourn.ing his own loss of family.

Sadly, the origins of the fiction in Choke are rooted in Palahniuk's real-life tragedy. His father-a chronic womanizer-was murdered by a girlfriend's ex-husband who stalked and shot the couple to death. Trying to reach some parity with that loss, Palahniuk attended 12-step programs for sexual compulsives, hoping to get a line on how his father's mind worked.

He's gotten the details right, based on my attendance of SCA meetings with a onetime girlfriend. (Yes, you get laid a lot with a compulsive girlfriend, but there's little joy in it. Sooner or later, infidelity and sexually transmitted diseases rear their ugly heads.) He's nailed the 12-step minutiae dead-on: the circle of blandly normal faces; the small green church meeting rooms; the coffee and cigarette smoke; the horrific, matter-of-fact recitation of stories that sound like urban legends; the trembling raised hand; the eyes that look only at the floor; the weeping and self-loathing; the fact that you'll never ever look at people without wondering what secrets they're harboring.

I don't mean this to sound like the book is a downer because it isn't. The particular strength of each of Palahniuk's books is that no matter how colorfully degraded the characters, his tight, economical writing never bores. It's also never preachy, delivering the bitter pills of his sharp observations with wry humor and a steely-eyed but generous humanity.

For Palahniuk and his readers, the unexamined life isn't worth reading about. His characters have to reach the lowest depths before they can reclaim their lives, and, like a 21st-century Virgil, he's there to take our hand and give us a guided tour of hell. Palahniuk's interest is in redemption, not nihilism, despite the objections of uncomprehending critics.

But social criticism isn't enough unless you're prepared to follow through and actually change things. That's a tough truth to take to heart, and I suspect many will simply gloss over that aspect of the book, preferring to focus on the sexual activity and snarky asides simply because it's easier. Palahniuk warns us that we can only tear down the world-and one another-so much before we run out of things to level.

It's a sober lesson, but once you've learned it, you're fucked. You can't go back; you can only move forward and try to improve things or stay where you are, frozen in panic.

Strolling through the bookstore, broke, unemployed, I cracked open this book and after reading the first few paragraphs I knew I had to buy it. Max out that credit card. Who cares? Here's the author begging us NOT to love his hero. Here's a guy who isn't a master spy or a noble lawyer, doctor, soldier... Palahniuk creates a character who lives such an absurd life, but from the way he tells it could be the guy sitting next to you on the bus. These obsurdities are told in such hillarious detail that I couldn't help but laugh out loud and draw stares from the Starbucks crowd. (I'd look up daring them to ask me what was so funny.) Chuck Palahniuk draws the lines between the underground/urban folklore life and that of the "normal" people and how it's hard to tell if one is any better off than the other. All of this in a novel overflowing with useful/dangerous information/misinformation and suprising story revelations that speaks, in a demented way, to young adults who are not satisfied with the goals we are taught to accept. See Also: Fight Club See Also: Invisible Monsters See Also: Survivor

In this novel, Chuck Palahniuk covers a great deal of the territory which will be familiar to readers of his earlier writing. But, this book -- while not as stunning as "Fight Club" -- is still remarkable.

Here we are confronted with the story of Victor Mancini -- sex-addict, con artist, drop out, would-be messiah, etc. Definitely an interesting character. And Palahniuk provides a voice for him that is totally believable.

The novel starts with Victor telling us that we shouldn't read it...which only makes us want to go ahead and read.

And it won't be the last time a reader is unwittingly manipulated by Victor's seemingly innocent narration.

From there it moves on to his description of telling scenes from his childhood and details of his relationship with his crazy mother. Convinced that her relatively petty (mostly) crimes are situationist acts which will awaken the masses from their mental slavery, Ida Mancini definitely manages to impress Victor with an unique world view -- when she isn't doing time, that is.

Victor is a smart guy...even if he is twisted. And, throughout the novel, his viewpoint and the opinions he expresses are interesting.

But the plot wears thin -- in spite of the fact that it deals mostly with Victor's concerns about his mother's failing health and what he could or should do to save her. Pretty heavy stuff. But this seems like something we've seen before.

We get a lot of information along the way about Victor's strange sexual predilections. And have no trouble by novel's end imagining how this character could have gotten to be so far from normal.

Palahniuk's writing is first rate throughout. Unfortunately, the ingredients of this novel seem to be assembled following a successful recipe.

What's different here is not all that different from what we've seen before in Palahniuk's work.

At one point, Victor comments about "jamais vu" -- the opposite of "deja vu" -- seeing something again but feeling as if it is for the first time rather than seeing something for the first time and feeling as if it is oddly familiar.

Palahniuk can't expect us to forget his earlier work. He'll need to work harder to make his future work every bit as good and ever more original.

Blame "Fight Club". The movie and the book. Blame "Survivor" (the book, not the TV show). You see. Chuck Palahniuk has set himself up. He only has himself to blame. You go write two blazing, incendiary novels, people have expectations. Every novel has to be blazing and incendiary. More than that: each successive novel has to be more blazing and more incendiary than the one that preceded it. The conclusion I reached - ooh, about midway through "Choke" - was that, whilst making for a better read than (the unholy mess that was) "Invisible Monsters", "Choke" is not quite as good as "Survivor". Or rather, "Choke" is only as good as "Survivor" and - now that he has a back catalogue, as it were - it is time to raise the bar somewhat.

Which isn't really very fair, I know. Because "Choke" is a great book. A messy (but in a good way), diffuse look at what is rapidly coming to be a Palahniuk type (itself another problem: the narrators of his novels, be they men or women, are all the same voice): the post-outsider. Because Palahniuk's narrators are not just your average outsiders. They are former Cult members like "Survivor"'s Tender Branson, or models without a jaw like whatever the name of the character in "Invisible Monsters" was. Victor Mancini (the star of this particular fable) has a mother who used to be a sort of outlaw and is now dying from Alzheimers. To raise the money to keep her in a care home, he chokes on food each night in restaurants, safe in the knowledge that whoever saves him will inevitably feel beholden to him, for making them a hero. They send money. He pays bills. Victor is also a sex addict. He attends regular meetings (are you thinking "Fight Club"? me too) of sex addicts (except where they go to follow a twelve step programme, Victor goes to take notes). What else, what else? Well, he works in a theme park that seeks to recreate the educational aspects of 1734. Everybody who works there is on some kind of unprescripted medication. He has a sort of a romance going with his mother's doctor. His friend Denny collects rocks. Just your average collection of fruit loops and start-of-the-century madmen then.

And of course it is all hugely enjoyable. A kind of romp. A Palahniuk romp. It's just that we've had Palahniuk romps now. It's time for a new trick. Because if, as every Tom, Jick and Harry contend, he is the new Don DeLillo, the new Bret Easton Ellis, the new whatever, it is time he set himself a challenge, it is time he sent himself a bomb wrapped in brown paper through the post, it is time he gave us Palahniuk's "Underworld" or "Glamarama" or whatever.

Chuck Palahniuk's Choke is about the spiritual self-immolation and reclamation of one Victor Mancini, con artist and sexual addict. Once again Palahniuk makes short work of invoking compassion for his lost boy viewpoint character by daring you to like him in spite of all the reasons not to. And, if you're like me, you do. You pull for Victor even when he's told you not to. You pull for him through the most scatalogical, pornagraphic, manipulated and just plain sick moments of your reading life, and you feel either thrilled or sordid yourself as you are led through all the messed-up elements of his messed-up life.

Me, I felt sordid. I wanted to put the book down after the third page, but the writing was too strong and the character too compelling. I gave it four stars because of the writing power, but kind of wish I had never read it at all. I think that, like Fight Club, it's going to be with me for a long time.

Reading a Chuck Palahniuk novel is a guarantee for a unique and often frightening reading experience, and CHOKE is no exception. I devoured this book in one setting and would rate it as one of my favorite Palahniuk books. CHOKE is full of social satire and rude and gutsy humor that makes one examine the world around them in an entirely different light. There are virtually no sentences that are not affected by Palahniuk's social commentary.

CHOKE is centered around Victor Mancini, a sex addict and con artist who works at a Colonial living museum with co-workers who tend to dabble in pot smoking and other insidious drugs while on the job. When not at work he likes to eat out at restaurants and pretend to choke in order to make unsuspecting heroes when the other patrons save his life. It is safe to say that Victor has not had a so-called normal childhood; his mother continually performed stunts at the expense of others and society when she was not in jail and was known to kidnap him and teach him important life lessons.

Palahniuk creates brilliant and original scenes that highly entertained and made me chuckle out loud numerous times, including Victor's relationship with the elderly patients at the nursing home and his best friend's obsession with rock collecting. Highly recommended.