Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

I believe in love at first sight, and I’m talking about books.

A few pages into The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin and I knew that this was the book I had been looking for my whole life. The same for Robert A. Heinlein’s brilliant The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. These books are speaking to me, the author and I are sharing a conversation and I am hearing what I want to hear but the writer, through the osmosis of shared visions, is saying for me what I want to say. I had nebulous thoughts and that writer succinctly stated, set down in black and white, what for me was pre-language thought only.

Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club is another, and Palahniuk speaks for a generation; he boils down and dilutes what we all want to say but felt only. The primal fears and drives that we know deep down but before this book could give no voice; Palahniuk has found a pigment to paint on our collective cave wall. What Palahniuk illustrates in words is Edvard Munch’s The Scream amplified and multiplied by ten million.

“I am Joe’s fear of death�.

He is talking about repressed anger spread out over an actuarial table of life expectancy. Stripped down to fighting weight and stepping into the ring with borrowed gloves, this book is a gritty explanation of the dark side of Generation X men.

“What you see at Fight Club is a generation of men raised by women�. This quote is the hard nucleus around which the novel forms, growing fruitlike around a solid core.

The next great, definitive quote is “The first rule about Fight Club is that you don’t talk about fight Club.� This is a charismatic catch phrase, to be sure, but it is more than this. Palahniuk goes to great length, albeit subtle, to reveal that much of what is felt and experienced in Fight Club is either beyond or beneath language, inexpressible. Palahniuk is grasping at deep roots. One of the foundations of feminist thought is communication, the need for women to relate to one another and to talk about feelings. Men are encouraged to express themselves as well and Palahniuk takes time, the same as Hemingway in The Sun Also Rises, to draw a misdirected connection to the narrator’s affinity for self help groups and his need to cry. I can hear the echoes of Jake Barnes crying by himself and of Romero’s desperate but heroic fist fighting accomplishments. Palahniuk resurrects the strong, quiet type and raises him, dead from the grave, in a post-modern zombie-like caricature; Fight Club’s protagonists are still �30 year old boys� trying to be what they were never raised to be.

I cannot help but compare this book with Bernard Malamud’s The Natural. I saw both film before reading the book, and both film adaptations have significant variances from the original literature.

Fight Club was brilliant and disturbing all at the same time.