Author: Chuck Palahniuk
Translator: Pil-won Choi
Publisher: Random House Korea
352 pages | 210*140mm
| Important! Please read before you order! |
| >>>This book is written in Korean. |
About This Book
Victor Mancini is a ruthless con artist. Victor Mancini is a med-school
dropout who's taken a job playing an Irish indentured servant in a
colonial-era theme park in order to help care for his
Alzheimer's-afflicted mother. Victor Mancini is a sex addict. Victor
Mancini is a direct descendant of Jesus Christ. All of these statements
about the protagonist of Choke are more or less true. Welcome, once
again, to the world of Chuck Palahniuk.
"Art never comes from happiness." So says Mancini's mother only a few
pages into the novel. Given her own dicey and melodramatic style of
parenting, you would think that her son's life would be chock-full of
nothing but art. Alas, that's not the case. In the fine tradition of
Oedipus, Stephen Dedalus, and Anthony Soprano, Victor hasn't quite
reconciled his issues with his mother. Instead, he's trawling
sexual-addiction recovery meetings for dates and purposely choking in
restaurants for a few moments of attention. Longing for a hug, in other
words, he's settling for the Heimlich.
Thematically, this is pretty familiar Palahniuk territory. It would be a
pity to disclose the surprises of the plot, but suffice it to say that
what we have here is a little bit of Tom Robbins's Another Roadside
Attraction, a little bit of Don DeLillo's The Day Room, and, well, a
little bit of Fight Club. Just as with Fight Club and the other two
novels under Palahniuk's belt, we get a smattering of gloriously
unflinching sound bites, including this skeptical bit on prayer chains:
"A spiritual pyramid scheme. As if you can gang up on God. Bully him
around."
Whether this is the novel that will break Palahniuk into the mainstream
is hard to say. For a fourth book, in fact, the ratio of iffy,
"dude"-intensive dialogue to interesting and insightful passages is a
little higher than we might wish. In the end, though, the author's nerve
and daring pull the whole thing off--just barely. And what's next for
Victor Mancini's creator? Leave the last word to him, declaring as he
does in the final pages: "Maybe it's our job to invent something
better.... What it's going to be, I don't know." --Bob Michaels
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