Survivor: A Novel
by Chuck Palahniuk
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Book Summary Information
Author: Chuck PalahniukEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2000-01-04
ISBN: 0385498721
Number of pages: 304
Publisher: Anchor
Book Reviews of Survivor: A Novel
Book Review: Not worth Saving
Summary: 2 Stars
People have called Chuck Palahniuk's writing many things: Neo Goth, Modern Goth., New Goth....just dont get the idea that its all about whiny teenagers wearing black and griping about their latent vampire powers through bad poetry. No, Palahniuk writes a different kind of book without all of the grim color and stale mythology, but he maintains the same themes: deterioration of the human condition, lack of moral fiber in today's society, and the danker recesses of the human psyche. Survivor tackles these topics with dazzling success and even enters a few new contenders to the mix such as commercialism, consumerism, and materialism.
And this is all very old news to absolutely everybody but me, because Chuck Palahniuk has been around for a while now. It was only until recently I decided to pick up one of his paperbacks at the suggestion of my thugish Top 8 Myspace friend with too much facial hair and the clown tattoo.
Now, the way I like my stories told is with a good opening page, a large use of style, and a frugal use on the words. Typically, I don't read too many novels over 300 pages long. I have read plenty of longer books in the past, and all too often the only thing that separates a long story from a short one is that the author of a short book knows how to consolidate his word use and when to shut up. I'm happy to say Chuck Palahniuk is such a writer by all counts. Like any good stylist, his words flow like water straight from the page into your brain as the protagonist's situation is fleshed out. Survivor opens in the first person with a single man on a plane preparing to crash into the Australian Outback. He's the last surviving member of a death cult who has made some strange decisions...some better than others. At this time he is known the world over as a great spiritual leader, Anti Christ figure, and media mogul. There are many misconceptions about who he is and why he's on said death plane, and he'd like to set the record straight with the help of the jets black box.
And from there we meet the narrator, Tender Branson, now in the past tense and living in humble times as a religious servant. Members from his cult are killing themselves left and right, so the government gives Branson his own psychotherapist and puts him on suicide watch. But Branson is way past believing anything the church filled his mind with, and is more interested in telling other people to kill themselves after they find one of his phony suicide hotline numbers stuck to the side of a bus stop. He works for a couple that is very well off, and through his years of service has accumulated a library's worth of useful housekeeping tips. The reader is educated, in detail, how to properly remove tear stains from pillow cases, urine from drapes, bullet holes in walls, and blood from fur coats.
Everyday situations are presented from the most warped of perspectives, and depending on the readers attitude, this may either be disturbing or refreshing. Example: Is learning that everyone you love will someday die from owning and loving upwards of six hundred pet Goldfishes that have all died strike you as ironic, or sad? Are you intrigued by romances sparked in a cemetery, or turned off? How about an over analytic shrink who convinces a hypochondriac that he has multiple problems in an attempt identify and cure just one? Clever, or whatever? If you're leaning towards the former with any of these, I might have an author to recommend.
The characters are wonderful, and I took to them like a kid to a black van with candy. They have no need for convention. They have their own means of courtship, their own philosophies forged in solitude and cynicism, their own reasons for being attracted to someone else, and their own reasons for living and dying. But none of this is to say that everything is Mentos and Diet Coke. While I've never read another Palahniuk book, I have seen Fight Club, a filmed adaptation if his book, and the voice of the protagonist in that story is very similar to the voice in this one. I couldn't even read a sentence here without hearing Edward Norton's voice, so similar were the personalities. Both had a very sardonic tone towards everything modern and cynical one liners about the status quo. Sloppy, but Ill let it pass.
Did I mention that everything I just said only applies to the first half of the book? The second half falls to pieces and leaves what could have been over arching themes or meanings in smouldering shambles. It's a shame really. The first one hundred and fifty pages of Survivor read very much like something I might very well write ten years from now, whereas the second half was more like the rough draft of something I could write now. Character actions break the bank of plausibility and some scenes read like the author is trying to beat you over the head with some point that you just can't make out. For a book that started out so strong, I was left with a story that ultimately delivered nothing but the comical and poignant one liners it offered along the way. But hey, that's life, isn't it? Well sure, its life, and its shaggy dog story telling too, but read both halves and tell me that something wasnt wasted from the first one. Threads were coming together.
If the book had stayed on course all the way through, I'd be using this review to announce Chuck Palahniuk as my new favorite author, and maybe Survivor as a favorite book. Unfortunately, the second half was so lacking, I can barely recommend it as a whole. But there's no reason that good writing should go to waste. Use the first two chapters here to qualify yourself for all of Palahniuk's writings. You can do it in one sitting and be introduced to a wonderful mind and voice. From there you can hopscotch the Palahniuk library with some assurance that everything will be A-OK in your tragedy of choice.
Summary of Survivor: A Novel
From the author of the cult sensation Fight Club (now a major motion picture starring Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, and Helena Bonham Carter) comes Survivor."A turbo-charged, deliciously manic satire of contemporary American life." --Newsday
"The only difference between suicide and martyrdom is press coverage," according to the "been there, done that" wisdom of Tender Branson, last surviving member of the Creedish Death Cult. At the opening of Chuck Palahniuk's hilariously unnerving second novel, Tender is cruising on autopilot, 39,000 feet up, dictating the whole of his life story into Flight 2039's "black box" in the final moments before crashing into the vast Australian outback.
Not since Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night has there been as dark and telling a satire on the wages of fame and the bedrock lunacy of the modern world. Wickedly incisive and mesmerizing, Survivor is Chuck Palahniuk at his deadpan peak.
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
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