Customer Reviews

Diary

5 star:		(61)
4 star:		(52)
3 star:		(43)
2 star:		(43)
1 star:		(29)

 

 

This review is mostly a counter argument for some of the other reviews I've read for this work. I think the people who read Palahniuk for the gut wrenchingly horrifying and morbidly twisted, yet incredibly imaginative plot lines will be somewhat disappointed with this novel. It's not the most visceral of his works. Then again, a lot of people criticize him for focusing too much on just grossing people out, but claim that his books have no substance. So, this book will definitely prove those people wrong.

I see how people could feel that this story falls considerably short of what they expect from Palahniuk. And short isn't the right word, because that has negative connotations. Maybe it falls to the right, or to the left, or maybe even higher than people's expectations (if you look in the right places). Usually his stories leave your head spinning with their absolute insanity, whereas this one kind of just leaves you humming to yourself and thinking it's all a little absurd, but not even that interesting. On the surface that is.

If you look at the story more metaphorically, and look at what the events that are taking place say about society, love, life it actually is quite interesting. If you have a familiarity with the works of Plato I think you will have fun with this book. He is referenced by name several times, but people who know his work will recognize tons of his ideas worked in. I found it intriguing the way ideas that have been around for thousands of years were worked into modern times and proved to be relevant and socially significant for the present day.

I think this book merely doesn't cater as well to thrill-seekers as much as, say, Choke or Haunted, which is definitely a huge part of Palhniuk's audience. I still think this is a pretty good book, though. It has a lot to say about humanity's conception of immortality, and the things we are willing to sacrifice to obtain it, as well as modern value systems.

I feel unable to put in words everything that is going on in this novel, especially without using examples and giving major spoilers but I think a lot of the negative reviews cater to a specific kind of Palahniuk fan, but there are still plenty of others that would love this book and find it really brilliant.

July 9

Today, the reader from Harrisburg finished Chuck's novel "Diary." The novel that never really convinced him was a diary, as it never stooped to that convention of writing in the first person. He read the awkward switching from third person to second person in Chuck's novel.

Your novel, Chuck.

Apparently, you are in some sort of ironic writer's coma. He is. You are. See how disconcerting this can be, carried out over 250 plus pages of his novel?

Your novel, Chuck?

If you removed all the third-to-second person clarification prose, this job drops an easy 50 pages. Take out all the adipose ramblings of subcutaneous fat and musculataure, which begin cute and end tedious, maybe we're down to a tight novella, Chuck. You are. He is.

In the middle, his novel picks up something resembling dramatic steam. He stayed the impulse to throw the book aside, half-read, Chuck. Your reader, the guy from Harrisburg. But nothing too awfully surprising happens on Waytansea Island. He, your reader, just waits and sees that you have some clever almost Nietzschean idea of eternal return and artistic hell. Did he, I mean you, Chuck, the writer of this poorly executed novel, intend some statement about artistic sacrifice? Or did he, you, I mean, intend just a good read? Because on the latter you failed, and on the former, you failed, and about the best I can summon is that you meant well, and you aren't Danielle Steele or that basic ilk.

My impression was that in picking up a Palahniuk novel, my first Palahniuk novel, his first Palahniuk novel -- your novel, Chuck -- I'd find crisp writing, challenging plot developments, and a refreshing, even bracing worldview.

Instead, he found a tendency to repeat phrases about "What you don't understand you can make mean anything" and suchlike drivel. Why didn't he simply say "What I couldn't write, maybe you can just go think up and attribute to me?"

Why didn't you, Chuck?

Because his characters never come alive. They seem like exercises best left in notebooks.

Your characters, Chuck. Misty, Peter, Tabbi, Grace. Harrow. Angel. Oh, I can name them, but ask me again in a week. Ask him again, and he'll have forgotten them. He will. I will. Me. The reader. Remember the reader, Chuck? Chuck, that rhymes with "buck," that comes from movie rights to half-hearted attempts to replicate the vigor of "Fight Club?"

Caveat emptor. No more will I read his novels. Your novels, Chuck. Even if you awake from your coma to read my diary of your "Diary." His "Diary." Your sloppily written, flimsy dreck that should only garner one Amazon star but for the fact that worse writing does exist, sadly.

When he finished your book, Chuck, the reader from Harrisburg threw it aside and took a nap. The nap was good, at least. Later, he wrote a review on Amazon. About your book. I did. About your book. Blecch.

For those browsing through all of these reviews here and looking at the surprising number of poor reviews for it, I just wanted to post a quick review to add my agreement that this is easily Chuck's worst book and also probably one of the worst books I've ever read.

Please understand that I am a huge fan of Chuck Palahniuk. I live in the Portland area and never miss him when I have a chance to go and see him talk and sign, and I have read all of his books. My favorites are Fight Club, Survivor, Fugitives And Refugees and Lullaby...I'm not a huge fan of Invisible Monsters or Choke but they both have their unique charms and are entirely readable. He's a talented writer and an all-around great guy, but if this book had been his first then nobody would know who he was. In fact, I would go so far as to say he never would have been published.

This book, from start to finish, is BARELY readable. Just to make it as straightforward as possible, I'll organize my major problems with the book point by point...(It's worth noting that the remainder of this review contains very minor spoilers...I'll keep them as light as possible)

-The book is really poorly organized. While I do appreciate an author's need to try different things and push the boundaries of their craft, Diary turns out to be a case study in why your Fiction Writing 101 teacher told you to never, ever change perspective mid-story. Once you have a perspective established, you stick to it. From sentence to sentence (for the first 3/4 of the book, anyway, a point at which Chuck seems to forget about what he was trying to do or just stops caring, and switches almost entirely to 3rd person), perspective changes back and forth...often, statements are repeated to the point of redundancy from different perspectives. It makes for a fairly jarring (and boring) reading experience.

-I got the impression several times that Chuck was trying to tell two stories at the same time, and the result is a confusing mess. On the one hand, we have the very genuine mourning and depression of Misty Marie, who is trying to recover from some very serious traumatic events that happened off-stage before the start of the book. On the other, we have the absolutely ridiculous "fairy tale" aspect of Waytansea island. The theme of both of these stories clashes horribly, never really meshing and never really working.

-Speaking of the fairy tale bits...these tend to dominate the latter half of the book. Chuck stretches way, way beyond reasonable expectations for the reader to suspend disbelief. When you finally get to the point of the book when the revelations begin to trickle down, and the protagonist tries desperately to fight against what's happening to her, you'll be saying "Give me a break!" more often than you'd probably like. Virtually everything that happens once we get into the climax doesn't make any sense at all. I am sorely tempted to point out specific examples, so ridiculous, unbelievable and poorly constructed/thought-out are the climactic events of the book, but I hate heavy spoilers in reviews so I'll restrain myself.

-The ending. THE ENDING. The last five or ten pages of this book, ESPECIALLY the last page, has got to be the dumbest, most derivative ending I've ever sat through. What a COP-OUT!!! I'll just say this: if you DO pick up this book, you're going to go through it hoping that, on some level, Palahniuk is going to deliver at some point...turn things around. All you will feel after reading that incredibly stupid final page will be disappointment, frustration and anger at yourself for sticking with it for no reason. There ain't no pay-off, folks!

What isn't a confusing mess or a bizarre and stupid "curse" story is paint-by-numbers Palahniuk that any one of his fans could throw together without any help from the author. You've got your heavily repeated statements to drive his point home. His over-eagerness to share useless trivia he acquired while researching the book. His fragmented sentences and overly short chapter breaks. All things that are charming and amusing in his other books, but here they feel forced and pointless. It's almost as though Palahniuk is satirizing himself.

In short, what we have here is easily the worst of Palahniuk books, and also one of the lamest ducks in modern American literature. If you're a Palahniuk fan, you've probably already read it and drawn your conclusions. If you've never read him before, or you aren't a fan of the man's entire catalog, avoid at all costs! ANY of Palahniuk's other work stands head and shoulders above this drudgery!

Perhaps it was my fault for reading two novels consecutively by the same author. After enjoying Lullaby, I just could not see what made this book unique. Palahniuk's style shocked at first, but a book driven solely on the visceral fails to hold attention after the initial reaction has expired. Palahniuk pounds the narrator's emotion into print, chapter after chapter, but the story itself had little to say. The wealthy capitalists are manipulative and hollow... we get it, Chuck. Art derives from pain... we get it, Chuck. I found myself frustrated that I'd been taken on a very indirect rout to nowhere.

Chuck can usually make even the most derivative plot cliches seem fresh (a poem that kills people when you read it out loud, anyone?), and his sharp, acerbic writing style more than masks his thin plotting, but Diary is uninspired and pointless. Gone is his astute social commentary, gone is the wit and humor, gone are the twisty plot developments. All we have left here are a few undeveloped ideas and a story that goes nowhere interesting. It reads like Stephen King during his alcoholic phase and doesn't even bother to build to a climax. If you want a recommendation, read Lullaby instead, which at least went for broke in its bleak nihilism and had more than a few moments of inspired brilliance.

It's disheartening to say it but Diary is disappointing. It starts in a very intriguing way, like all Chuck Palahniuk novels, and soon becomes your average thriller novel involving philosophical issues. Name dropping here shows that the author made his research, but it often feels misplaced and repetitive.
In the end, i got the weird impression of having read a cross between Dolores Claiborne and Salem's lot meets Fight Club.
I fear, because i admire his talent, that M.Palahniuk may not be ill from the stendhal syndrome but from best seller syndrome : being now (justly) successful he needs to deliver a manuscript each year.
Diary is fun to read but leaves no trace maybe because it was wirtten with too much haste.

Look at the photo of Chuck Palahniuk on the back flap of "Diary," his new novel. The prospective reader can see a man who's confident in his talent, but unpretentious and affable--the face of a popular contemporary writer who is not full of himself. But what can also be seen is a facial expression that signifies a disappointed, even apologetic look, almost as if he's telepathically communicating to us: "I'm really sorry about this. I promise my next book will be better."

I should've realized this earlier and heeded the man's psychic advice.

As a fan of Palahniuk's prose (though I don't care much for his third-act narrative twists), I was, of course, happy to discover his new novel...and was considerably less happy once I battled through the printed anasthesia of this book. If this marks Palahniuk's initiation into the much-coveted "2-tome-a-year" club, it's not an encouraging sign for his future output. "Diary" is a novel stripped of the author's wit and satire, which is traded for a mostly sober tone, and the effect this has on the narrative is stultifying ("Just for the record, today's weather calls for a $25 paperweight with scattered passages of inspiration"). It's a novel filled with unexciting characters who do kooky things that fail to arouse much interest. The plot rips off a good (but forgotten) horror film from the 1980s called "Dead & Buried", but is rendered with a flatness that makes it a chore to read. After an extremely boring first half, Palahniuk manages a few glimmers of his humor and 'matter-of-fact' commentary, before diving into banality that persists until the very last page. Is there a narrative twist in the third act this time around? Dulled by the experience of reading this, I could hardly tell--that's how bad "Diary" is.

Diary is one of Palahniuk's best books. It's a surprising book about life, art, and hope. I LOVED it.
Kelly Jameson

I anxiouslly awaited the realese of Palahniuk's sixth novel, after being enchanted by the first five I expected the same for Diary, well it didn't happen. I never thought I would say this about Chuck Palahniuk's work, but this was awful. It went nowhere for about three quarters of the novel, it seemed like I was rereading the same chapter for 200+ pages. There were no characters in the book that were remotely interesting, nor did I care what happened to them. There isn't much to sumarise because there isn't enough context to eleborate on whats written in the dust-jacket. I'm hoping that his next novel makes up for Diary. To fans of Palahniuk, I'd wait for the paper-back.

I'm going to keep this brief and just put down the most important things that I feel made this book a total clunker.

1.) The little repetition thing was kind of cute and quirky the first time you read a Palahniuk book. By now, it's just become ridiculous. It takes an almost superhuman effort not to roll your eyes each time you see "Just for the record" and "The weather today is..." The weather today is hackneyed with a strong chance of pretentions drivel.

2.) The book's protagonist is either a total moron, or Pahlaniuk forgot he was writing this book from her point of view. Misty seems to hear all of these important details that would, in any real human being, arouse suspicion. We know that she hears these details because she records them in her diary, that is, the novel itself. But she rarely, if ever, seems to ponder what she's heard or how strange the townspeople seem to be acting.

She's also quite whiney, with sentence after sentence of "Poor me." I wasn't expecting overblown heroic qualities in a Palahniuk protagonist, but honestly, I was hoping she would hurry up and die or stop writing in her diary. Either one would do.

4.) This is the last one and it's kind of a spoiler in some ways, but not too much of one. You might think that the last page of the book offers an interesting twist to the story, right? Nah. You know what it really does? It gives Palahniuk a tongue-in-cheek way of suggesting that anyone who criticizes this book is evil. Because of course, we WANT this book to be read by as many people as possible, right? It's only the right thing to do. So to reveal it for what it is must mean that you're one of the bad people trying to... Well, you know if you've read the book.

Skip this one. Read Survivor or Fight Club.