Survivor: A Novel (Paperback)

~ (Author) "And so here is my confession..." (more)
Key Phrases: speakerphone rings, dashboard statuette, daily planner book, Fertility Hollis, Adam Branson, Tender Branson (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Some say that the apocalypse swiftly approacheth, but that simply ain't so according to Chuck Palahniuk. Oh no. It's already here, living in the head of the guy who just crossed the street in front of you, or maybe even closer than that. We saw these possibilities get played out in the author's bloodsporting-anarchist-yuppie shocker of a first novel, Fight Club. Now, in Survivor, his second and newest, the concern is more for the origin of the malaise. Starting at chapter 47 and screaming toward ground zero, Palahniuk hurls the reader back to the beginning in a breathless search for where it all went wrong. This time out, the author's protagonist is self-made, self-ruined mogul-messiah Tender Branson, the sole passenger of a jet moments away from slamming first into the Australian outback and then into oblivion. All that will be left, Branson assures us with a tone bordering on relief, is his life story, from its Amish-on-acid cult beginnings to its televangelist-huckster end. All of this courtesy of the plane's flight recorder.

Speaking of little black boxes, Skinnerians would have a field day with the presenting behavior of the folks who make up Palahniuk's world. They pretend they're suicide hotline operators for fun. They eat lobster before it's quite... done. They dance in morgues. The Cleavers they are not. Scary as they might be, these characters are ultimately more scared of themselves than you are, and that's what makes them so fascinating. In the wee hours and on lonely highways, they exist in a perpetual twilight, caught between the horror of the present and the dread of the unknown. With only two novels under his belt, Chuck Palahniuk is well on his way to becoming an expert at shining a light on these shadowy creatures. --Bob Michaels --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

The rise and fall of a media-made messiah is the subject of Palahniuk's impressive second novel (after the well-received Fight Club), a wryly mannered commentary on the excesses of pop culture that tracks the 15 minutes of fame of the lone living member of a suicide cult. Tender Branson, aged 33, has commandeered a Boeing 747, emptied of passengers, in order to tell his story to the "black box" while flying randomly until the plane runs out of gas and crashes. Branson relates in his long flashback the vicissitudes of his life: a member of the repressive Creedish Death Cult, supposedly founded by a splinter group of Millerites in 1860, he is hired out as a domestic servant who must dedicate his earnings to the cult. Despite his humble beginnings, Branson finds himself on the edge of fame and fortune when the cult members begin their suicide binge, and he keeps himself on the media radar by using the psychic dreams of his potential romantic interest, Fertility Hollis, in which the girl accurately predicts a series of strange disasters. After a brief period at the top of the freak-show heap, Branson succumbs to the excesses of his trade when his agent mysteriously dies at the Super Bowl as Branson predicts the outcome of the game at half-time, simultaneously triggering a riot and turning him into a murder suspect. Branson's spookily matter of fact account of his bizarre experiences does not excite tension until the narrative is well under way, but the novel picks up momentum during the homestretch when Branson goes on the lam with Fertility and his murderous brother Adam, and the story steamrolls toward its nightmarish climax. Palahniuk's DeLilloesque cultural witticisms and his satirical take on the culture of instant celebrity invest the narrative with a dark humor that does not quite overcome its lack of a coherent plot. Agent, Edward Hibbert. (Feb.) FYI: Fight Club is being filmed by David Fincher.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Anchor; 1st Anchor Books ed edition (January 4, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385498721
• ISBN-13: 978-0385498722
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (413 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #7,115 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

110 of 115 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant satire and apocalyptic vision rolled into one!, July 3, 2000

By	"figurat" (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews

Chuck Palaniuk (say it ten times fast) has recently stormed onto the popular literary field, thanks to David Fincher's amazing adaptation of his underground novel, FIGHT CLUB. Hopefully, if he keeps writing books this good, he can give up being a mechanic forever.

SURVIVOR begins on its final page, and shoots backwards towards page 1, always reminding you of its approaching demise. Along with the novel, the narrator is apporaching his own demise, as he pilots a commandeered airplane waiting for it to crash and explode. In order to preserve his life story, he is speaking into the black-box on-flight recorder, hoping to wipe himself out and attain immortality at the same time.

What is his problem? Well, he is the last survivor of a suicide cult, a former indentured servant in the "real world". He also narrates of his tranistion from nobody to media messiah back to nobody. In it, Palahniuk takes on a wild ride through a satire of modern society in all its little nuances. Everything from Lobster eating to TV networks gets raked over the coals in this incediary novel.

ALthough the book, like FIGHT CLUB begins to self-destruct about three quarters of the way through, the story is so compelling in its banal gruesomeness that you can't help but read it. Palahniuk is a magician who will keep you hypnotized, glued to each page until the final end of both his protagonist and the book.

Oh, and did I mention that the book is also riotously funny? It is. So in other words, one of the best books I've read in awhile.

38 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Unique Look at Modern American Life by a Great Author, May 3, 2001

By	F. Lybrand "Black Mesa" (Chapel Hill, NC US) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I read Survivor because I really liked Mr. Palahniuk's first book, "Fight Club", and I read "Fight Club" because I thought the movie was great. "Survivor" is a great book, despite it's thematic similarity to Fight Club. The plot on the other hand is very different, although some of the characters seem very familiar to ones from the author's first book. I wanted to be sure not to spoil the plot, one of the difficulties I had with "Fight Club" was my knowledge of the basic premise through having seen the movie (although I do feel there are enough differences to merit a reading of that book), however the entire plot is spelled out on the back cover of the book. Avoid that if you would like some surprises.

Mr. Palahniuk has again succeeded in creating a very unusual plot, which is as good as that of "Fight Club", but its primarily used as a vehicle to provide the same lambasting of modern society that "Fight Club" provided. The lambasting takes some new turns and has a few new targets (although cornflower blue does make a return), but the method is the same. The characters are written in much the same method and the book-ending cataclysm is very similar. While I do hope that the next book of his that I read, "Monster" is different than his first two books, I was still very pleased with "Survivor". The reason is very simple, while the two books are similar, they are both so drastically different in both style and character development than the rest of the books out there that they are very compelling and thought-provoking reads. There are few authors capable of delivering the same sophisticated, yet still blunt, critique of both the excesses and shallowness of modern American mass society. In this end, the author succeeds in reaching a more convenient tone than have many other authors with similar messages, such as Pynchon, Camut or Thoreau.

It is the delivery of this critique that makes Mr. Palahniuk such a promising author (please note as of this review I still haven't read his third book, "Monster"). Criticism of the many contradictions of modern society is as easy to find in literature as the faults themselves while walking the street, however, the author delivers the blows using a masterful combination of both hyperbole, subtlety and the voice of his characters that the words are received with both laughter and disdain. If Mr. Palahniuk continues to use these methods as he has in his first two books, his works can only become more interesting. I thought this was an excellent book, and would recommend it to anyone with an interest in modern literature.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Suicidally Good!, November 20, 2000

By	Michael Downing (Gorham, ME USA) - See all my reviews

After seeing the movie Fight Club, I became very interested in Chuck Palahniuk's work. So I went to the bookstore looking for some of his other novels. You know the saying "don't judge a book by its cover"? Well I do judge books by their covers. The covers of books now are just so... corny. I could tell Survivor was going to be a good book from its unique cover. It is very plan, almost completely silver, but it has style. The novel is centered on the thought to be only survivor of a Creedish Death Cult, Tender Branson. In the first chapter, chapter 47, it is explained that Tender Branson is alone on a high jacked commercial airplane and he is going to crash it into the Australian Outback. But before that happens he is going to tell his life story to the "indestructible black box of Flight 2039". As the chapters work their way down to 1, there is a very dark apocalyptic story of Tender's rise to stardom from a housemaid for a strange yuppie couple. In his work experience with this yuppie couple, Tender learns helpful facts like how to get bloodstains off of wallpaper. Also how to hide stab holes in tuxedos. No book is complete without a love interest, and Fertility Hollis adds that and much more. Tender falls for the very interesting character Fertility, who happens to be the sister of a man Tender killed (in a round about way). The plot takes many twists and turns that keep you very interested, for instance Tender's twin brother might be trying to kill him so that all of the Cult would be in their rightful place, dead. "'What's the difference between a Creedish and a corpse?' Just a matter of hours." It is a very unpredictable, enticing, hilarious novel that is so real, it might make you consider suicide. I loved this very unique novel and would recommend it to everyone, except people who have considered suicide, because it might just push them over the edge.