Writes some very, very good books. I Have thus far read Fight Club (obviously), diary, damned, snuff, choke (the film adaptation of which was so shitty I actually plan to write my own), rant and now : Pygmy.
What agitates me about Palahniuk books is that on the cover, or the blurb of a book that isn’t Fight Club, some critic will draw a comparison to Fight Club.
It’s not even his best one. Damned is.
And it’s definitely not Pygmy either I’m afraid.
Pygmy is written in the first person, as are all the others, but it is in broken english. It’s really charming for a while because you don’t know exactly where he’s from, so you can inflict upon him the accent of your choosing and read away. Pretty soon however, you’ll revert back to the voice inside your head, which of course, is yours, and it’s hard work. I read at a conversational, relaxed pace I guess, a friend of mine who reads at the speed of light agrees with me when I say that absorbing the words off of the page, translating them into english proper and then moving on is akin to throwing a dish cloth into a swimming pool and hoping for the best.
I appreciate that in every book he’s written, Mr Palahniuk has utilised a different structure or style to keep it all fresh and interesting.
But it’s all just a little bit like ice skating uphill at times, many a double take was necessary.
I read in bite size chunks on lunch breaks and what have you, and this does contribute greatly to the problem I have faced. Take this book on a long trip and it does start to flow and Pygmy is a loveable little shit. His verbose, bottomlessly varying and extremely hilarious manner of naming the people he interacts with and the persistent quoting of most glorious ruthless dictators such as the venerable Idi Amin really make you feel at home in a Palahniuk Novel.
A surprisingly low level of “what the fuck?” moments though.
And by that I mean only one yellow haired bully was sodomised. Pretty tame by old chucks standards if you ask me. It’s tameness in violence and sexual depravity are more than made up for in the brutally honest commentaries made upon the capitalist system by our ethnically ambiguous thirteen year old quasi genius, trained in the martial arts with the intent to fulfil his mission entitled “operation havoc”.
The thing is, it’s all spot on, and all you can do is laugh at it until he hits a nerve and you really start to question the choices you’ve made in life.
I didn’t become seriously depressed about it. Honest.
For all the ‘Murica bashing that goes on, some comments are made on the (i can assume) eastern practices of government and such forth. Cos’ y’know, objectivity an’ that?
I would urge to you to read this book, as I hope it’s just my caffeine dependency, poor quality of sleep and general illiteracy that are to be attributed to my struggles.
You’re probably slightly less broken than I am.
Huggateerex 