Mañana toca el club de la pelea. No pienso perderme el club de la pelea.

Chuck Palahniuk escribió un libro de culto, un referente para generaciones revolucionarias, una manual del caos, una obra maestra.
El director David Fincher aumentó aún más la leyenda de Tyler Durden y convirtió al libro un objeto de devoción para muchos seguidores entusiastas.
Desde que el narrador comienza a contarnos su vida, su pozo emocional y su salida al caos, de cómo conoció a Tyler Durden y a Marla Singer, a través de esos grupos de ayuda para enfermos terminales hasta la creación del Club de la Pelea y su transformación en el Proyecto Caos todo es una espiral de acción, violencia y descontrol que nunca termina de detenerse.
La novela es un canto desesperado de toda una generación vacía de jóvenes perdidos, de hombres descarriados y a punto de explotar.
El club de la pelea les da a empleados, meseros, choferes, abogados o estudiantes la hermosa oportunidad de molerse a palos en el sótano de un bar, obviamente respetando las ocho reglas fundamentales de combate.
Acá no hay rodeos ni metáforas ni vueltas. Estos descarriados llegaron para abofetear al mundo, para darle una verdadera paliza e infectar a la sociedad con sus ataques subversivos.
Una manera de invertir el orden de las cosas, hacerlo saltar todo hacia arriba, infundir miedo, caos y despertar a una sociedad dormida y estupidizada y es a la vez una crítica feroz al consumismo que domina a las sociedades, a la idiotez humana y a todos aquellos hombres políticamente correctos que creen controlar a los distintos estratos de la sociedad.
“El club de la pelea” es también una novela con clara temática del doble y como considero que mucha gente lo leyó (los que no lo leyeron probablemente sea porque no les gustó la película) esto se plantea en un pasaje cuando el narrador comienza a desmoronarse:"Tyler es una proyección. Es un trastorno disociativo de la personalidad. Un estado de fuga psicogénica. Tyler es una alucinación".
De todas maneras nada puede afirmarse como real en esta novela tan genial y adictiva, que el mismo Palahniuk se encarga de afirmar en su prefacio, como “de anticipación” y vaya si lo es…
Como sostengo al principio, “El club de la pelea” es una verdadera obra maestra.
Lo sé porque Tyler lo sabe.

I wondered whether this book would seem self-absorbed and shallow in our post-9/11 world, but instead I found it prophetic. Throughout the materialism and political correctness of the 1990's and Tyler Durden's response to it, you can sense how all that repressed mama's boy machismo is just hoping and praying for something big and fiery and nasty that would blow our little precious world apart. Well, with 9/11 and the Iraq war, we sure got it. So . . . are all you boys satisfied now?

Sure, this book has its flaws. The rhetorical use of repetition, although effective at first, eventually becomes little more than a stylistic tic. Also, for such a hard-edged book, it gets surprisingly (and disappointingly) sentimental at the end.

Still . . . "Fight Club" is wickedly funny, memorably aphoristic and prophetic. And it holds up well after fifteen years.

n  Bulgarian review below/Ревюто на български е по-долуn
Since I began marching in step with the people who (try to) earn their daily bread (and fruits and vegetables too), I take the subject of the forsaken rank-and-file employee in a crappy office to heart and it’s a sticky subject to me. Is there anyone who haven’t made the discovery that nothing makes you go off your wits as surely as a job that suffocates you? We all dwell in the miniature boxes of our lives and offices so we can successfully squeeze in the petty hole which our dear consumerist society has left for us. Yes, that’s right – in order to buy stuff we don’t need with money we don’t have to impress people we don’t like.

Too many human beings live their lives as in a dream. They eat, speak, and do whatever they do with the sluggish mechanical movements which suggest a lack of a more significant thought process. Same shit, different day, some would say. We are all Pavlov’s dogs and we just wait for the respective cues to do the next thing for the day.
‘This is how it is with insomnia. Everything is so far away, a copy of a copy of a copy. The insomnia distance of everything, you can't touch anything and nothing can touch you.’

Chuck Palahniuk constructs surrealistic metaphors. His sarcasm’s whip stings you harshly and it smarts. Is this who I am? Boring life, empty like a shell, meaningless, I get out of bed, I’m not quite awake all day long, I go to bed, I hoard, and hoard, and hoard. Wherefore? And when you push someone up against the wall so tight they can barely hold it together, they just give you the finger and lash against you. This is when Tyler appears. And Tyler is not like you. Tyler pisses over the established order (literally) and knows what he wants – and especially how to get it.

‘Fight Club’ leaves you raw as the knuckles of a hand which has hit something. It is the cold shower of the future. Of that future when even the sleeping cocoons have realized that something has to change.
‘We are the middle children of history, raised by television to believe that someday we'll be millionaires and movie stars and rock stars, but we won't. And we're just learning this fact,’ Tyler said. ‘So don't fuck with us.’

Our great depression is our life. In a world where communication is everything, people have forgotten to talk to each other. We’ve forgotten to be people. We’ve forgotten to treat each other as human beings. We’ve forgotten to do humane things. Sometimes though there are some who venture to lift the lid of their reason and check if Schrödinger’s cat is still alive in there. In some cases it is. And its name is Tyler.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Откакто и аз се влях в редиците на хората, които сами (се опитват да) си припечелват хляба (и плодовете, и зеленчуците), темата за низвергнатия редови служител в смотан офис ми е доста близка и болезнена. Кой ли не е правил в живота си откритието, че почти нищо друго не те чалва така, както работа, от която се задушаваш? А всички обитаваме малките кутийки на живота и офиса си, за да можем успешно да се натъпчем в дребната ниша, която ни е оставило милото ни консуматорско общество. Да, точно така – за да си купим неща, които не ни трябват, с пари, които нямаме, така че да можем да впечатлим хора, които не харесваме.

Твърде много човешки същества живеят живота си като насън. Хранят се, говорят, правят, каквото правят, с онези лениви механични движения, които подсказват липса на протичащ по-съществен мисловен процес. Same shit, different day, биха казали някои. Всички сме кучета на Павлов и просто чакаме съответните сигнали, за да извършим следващото действие за деня.
‘This is how it is with insomnia. Everything is so far away, a copy of a copy of a copy. The insomnia distance of everything, you can't touch anything and nothing can touch you.’

Чък Паланюк гради сюрреалистични метафори. Камшикът на сарказма му рязко те парва и ти засмъдява. И аз ли съм това? Отегчен, черупково празен живот, безсмислен, ставам, не съм особено буден цял ден, лягам си, трупам, трупам, трупам. За къде? И когато натегнете пружината докрай и ви се струва, че няма накъде повече, тя просто ви тегли една и изскача рязко нагоре. И се появява Тайлър. А Тайлър не е като вас. Тайлър пикае (буквално) на установения ред и знае какво иска – и най-вече как да го постигне.

„Боен клуб“ оставя ожулено като по кокалчетата на ръката, когато удариш. Той е студеният душ на бъдещето. На онова бъдеще, в което дори заспалите пашкули са осъзнали, че трябва нещо да се промени.
‘We are the middle children of history, raised by television to believe that someday we'll be millionaires and movie stars and rock stars, but we won't. And we're just learning this fact,’ Tyler said. ‘So don't fuck with us.’

Нашата велика депресия е нашият живот. В свят, в който комуникациите са всичко, хората са забравили да общуват. Забравили са да са хора. Забравили са да се отнасят един към друг като с хора. Забравили са да правят човешки неща. Понякога обаче има такива, които се осмеляват да повдигнат капака на разума си и да проверят дали котката на Шрьодингер, която се намира вътре, е все още жива. В някои случаи е жива. И се казва Тайлър.

To start with, the film is so far superior to this book it becomes a valuable example in the argument of "instances when film adaptations are better than the original books".
There. Ive said it.
Moving on.
No, his writing is not "good" nor is it "brilliant" or "Gritty" (one of my favorites, usually translates to bad). It is indeed bad writing. Bad from the perspective of literature. Bad when viewed through scope of history and the pantheon of wonderful, eloquent geniuses of the written word. Men who have put a piece of thier soul down on paper and made it dance and contort in order to say something profound about humanity and what it means to be human.
Perhaps Palahniuk's ideas are there and that is a separate issue from the writing itself. The writing (and I have to agree with some others who have reviewed this book)reeks of the same gangrenous rot that much modern "literature" reeks of. A debasement of the language down to the point where the 7 percent of American males who read a book in the last year can feel comfortable reading it and not have thier attention spans exhausted within two pages.
Oh I compliment Mr. Palahniuks accomplishment. Quite impressive really. He has created a work so debased and and simple, that a whole generation of disaffected, junior-high and high-school boys now can now channel thier collective aggression and penchant for physical harm upon each other into an organized ethos.
The truth is sad, because I really do feel the Chuck is really saying something profound about society, but like all bad art, we must question whether the message is communicated accurately and effectively. At its pithy middle, Fight Club is about the search for meaning within a society of artifice. A search that peters out for most as our fear of failing to accomplish our ideals flings us into a life of rote, mechanical (excuse the word)pussy-ship. Fight Club attempts to turn these fears on thier head by begging the question: are our ideals really our own? Are they bull-sh*t?
Unfortunately I feel this question is lost amidst the musical screams and thuds of a festival of meat-pounding violence.
John Gardner once said:

~To write with taste in the highest sense, is to write with the assumption that one out of a hundred people who read one's work may be dying, or having some loved one dying. To write so that no one commits suicide, no one despairs; to write as Shakespeare wrote, so that people understand, sympathize, and see the universality of pain and feel strengthened, if not directly encouraged to live on.

Cool.
And short! Which I really appreciated, as I don't think this would be the kind of book you could drag out and have the same effect.



The movie follows the book pretty faithfully (except the ending), but even if you have seen it, I would heartily recommend reading this. It's just so. well. done.
I mean, everything is there, staring you in the face, but I can see how you would just completely miss what was going on if you were unaware of the underlying plot.
Everything! I mean down to the fact that you don't realize you've never been given the narrator's name until the rug has been pulled out from under you. It was such an insanely well-crafted story.



Ok, so if you somehow aren't aware of this story, the skinny gist is that you're following this man's life as he spirals downward into chaos. Lonely, isolated, and lacking any real meaning in his 9-5 life, he eventually loses everything as he grows more under the influence of an anarchist on the fringes of society.



Tyler Durden is also searching for a meaningful life of his own, but his personality is lacking in any regard for the rules of law. As the founder of Fight Club, he taps into a source for other disenfranchised men from all walks of life to connect with a hidden part of themselves.
You know, by beating the shit out of each other.



The ending here is slightly different than the movie, and to be honest, I don't know which one I prefer.
But this was a wild ride and a lot of fun to unpack.



Highly Recommended.

I haven't seen the movie. I read the book.

I don't understand all the hype.

This is two stories: one about a dysfunctional relationship between flat characters and another an intriguing history of a movement that starts out as a drunken fight between acquaintances and ends up as a highly-regimented, carefully controlled cult of anarchy.

I liked the second story. Hated the first.

I've heard that this novel was an expansion of an earlier short story. Frankly, I can tell. Chapter 1 is promising, but chapters 2-5 are tedious, a real slog. Chapter 6 is where the real story begins. There violence, anti-commercialism, philosophy, and psychology all meld into a mind-bending maelstrom. Good stuff, if you can stomach the gore.

Of course, having finished the novel, one realizes that the two stories are intertwined and interdependent. I get this. But do the "relationship" sections have to be so bloody boring? Really? It's analogous to filling half of a pleasure-cruise ship with lead. At best, it's going to slow things down a lot. And it might just sink the ship. I feel like Fight Club barely lurched into the harbor, though it could have been a hydrofoil.

Oh, and repeating the same thing several times doesn't make you a compelling author or avant-garde or anything but dull and repetitive.

Maybe it's time I saw the movie.

1.25/5

Unpopular opinion time:

Seriously, ya’ll. How does this book have such a high average rating? What’s so good about it? I’d really like to know.

The prologue was interesting enough, I’ll give it that—but it sets you up to think that the rest of the book will be as interesting. But, it’s not. Literally, as soon as I started chapter 1 everything started declining. I swear, that six page prologue is the highlight of the entire book.

I’m not saying it wasn’t original or anything, because it is. It’s not predictable either (thank goodness). Finding out who Tyler was actually shocked me, but not enough to like the book.

Another thing. The writing wasn’t good—it was far too choppy! Not only that, but I didn’t connect to anything or anyone in the novel. I hated the main character and Marla (especially her).

I don’t get the hype surrounding this novel! And I’m really happy I’m done reading it, because it was starting to push me into a reading slump, which is never something you want from a novel.

Overall, this was not what I expected. I’m never going to understand the hype with this one.

Cross-eyed and painless, I'm like many who had read this book after loving the film, only to love the author and his outrageous and overblown themes. The brilliant and jarring cross-fertilization of ideas is what really got me going, although the dialog and characterizations were what rooted me to the tale.
Sure, this is a story of hyper-masculinity, but it is also a story of the Everyman's disenfranchisement and redemption in the world. There are too many quotes to do the novel justice, but I'll keep it simple and tell you that I was changed after reading the novel. I hadn't read anything like it, nor had any other work speak to me in the same way. Sure, there are classics that come close, but you still have to put yourself in a different time and place in order to sink into the story and let it overwhelm you. Not so for me at this time for this novel. It was so messed up that it became a screaming neon sign of self-help for many of us who had lost meaning in our lives. I don't want to sound flippant. Even the really oddball aspects of the novel like stealing Marla's mom's fat fit perfectly into the times and how people of my generation silently screamed out for a release from all of this proscribed nonsense we call society; and we didn't care anymore about how we were told to care.

Coming from the absolute bullshit of the PC world; the complete marketing of thoughts and behaviors that were sold to us at premium cost; the deep-seated realization that nothing we do even matters in this time and place all point to an attachment to this book as a life-raft in a moral sea of void.

Ok, sure, I've read the great nihilists of the past, and got thoroughly mind-fucked by them, so perhaps I was a little prepped for this little masterpiece of fiction. Then again, I also got so many belly-laughs and hope for mankind after reading it that I suppose it all harmonized a bit.

Qué manera de construir una historia. El inicio de la lectura es una locura y a medida que se avanza vamos descubriendo que los personajes, también. Son de una complejidad fuera de serie y al mismo tiempo sumamente atractivos, entendería que no fuera un libro para todos los gustos. Los personajes centrales son la construcción perfecta del antihéroe y no por ello menos interesantes.

یه روزی، اگه برسه اون روز، دست می کنی تهِ حلقت و هرچی به خوردت دادن بالا میاری و خلاص! تو یه شورشی هستی! دیگه می فهمی که نباید بازی رو ادامه بدی! بازی احمقانه ی کار و عشق و پیشرفت و خونه و زمین و سکه و دولار! بازی احمقانه ی نجاتِ دنیا و آرمانِ آسمانی! بازی احمقانه ی رفاهِ اجتماعی و آزادی های مدنی و تا 1400 با فلانی و فلانی ها! بازی احمقانه ی هشتگ فلان هشتگ بهمان! بازی احمقانه ی قومِ برتر و نژاد آریایی و ایرانی باهوش ترین آدمِ دنیا! همه مون بازی خوردیم رفقا و به بازی احمقانه ای که خوردیم افتخار می کنیم! ترسِ اینکه بپذیریم همه چی رو مفتِ مفتِ به گرون ترین قیمت تو پاچه مون کرده ن سبب می شه که باز هم به بازی ادامه بدیم و هر روز بیشتر توی کثافت فرو بریم! اصلن غرق بشیم! مدفون بشیم! و نکبت بشه بوی مطبوع روزها و ساعت هامون! سلام قربان! نوکرم قربان! چاکرم قربان! مخلصم قربان! کوچیکم قربان! فدای شما بشم! قوربونِ شما بشم! دروغ! دروغ! دروغ! و هر روز تو چشمای هم نگاه کنیم و خنده های احمقانه تحویل هم بدیم و بعد توی کله ی گند گرفته مون فحش ناموسی حواله ی هم کنیم! اوه! ما به بازی ادامه می دیم! اما بازی خیلی وقته که تموم شده! اون روز که شورش کردی اون روز بازی تمومه! اون روز دیگه آزادی! دیگه هیچی مهم نیست! دیگه هیچی عصبانیت نمی کنه! اون روز تف می ندازی تو صورت همه ی اونایی که بهت دروغ گفتن! دروغ می گن! حتا خودت! آره به باشگاه مشت زنی خوش اومدین
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ترجمه تیکه پاره و بی اندازه دستمالی شده به نظرم میاد! متن اصلی رو ندیدم اما اعتمادی به ترجمه های رفقای نشر چشمه ندارم! از سر ناچاری بود خوندنش چون ترجمه ی دیگه ای از فایت کلاب دسترس نیست. باری اونقدر داستان گزنده هست که حتا سایه ای از اون، روحِ شورشی متن رو نمایان کنه
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سیل کلِ مملکت رو ورداشته! ممالک محروسه و فدویانِ درگاه و ملت همیشه در صحنه که ما باشیم داریم غرق شدن مون رو تماشا می کنیم و عکس یادگاری می گیریم. و من در خوابِ خرگوشی ی خودم در لونه ی خرگوشم دارم در گودریدز دیدگاهم درباره ی نخستین کتابِ 98 رو می نویسم! خنده داره نه؟
1398.01.06

I know the rules, I'm not supposed to talk about Fight Club...

Oh. Oh wow. This was actually really good. It took me a while to get used to the writing style but when I did, my mind was completely blown!