by Elton Gahr

Created on: October 20, 2010

Fight Club is a novel written by Chuck Palahniuk and published in 1996. It was shortly thereafter made into a movie of the same name. It tells the story of two men who meet and discover that by fighting they can feel more alive than ever before and slowly they form the fight club in which men get together and fight.

It is hard to read a book when you have already seen the movie. The quality of the book and the movie mix and blend together. You can not help but seeing the actors when their characters appear. This is even more true with the twist at the end of this story, and while I loved the end of this story when I saw the movie I in many ways wish that I had not seen it before reading the book because the subtle clues to what is going on in the book are spotlights if you already know.

Fight Club is a disturbing and dark book in large part because there is something appealing about it. Even though few of us would willingly join a fight club there is something in the heart of man that is drawn to that desire to destroy the world. Men sometimes simply want to tear things down and break them. This is something that our society does not feed, and in many ways that is a good thing. On the other hand the denying of what we are, the attempts to be something that we are is not a good thing and eventually if you force things down long enough it will come out in undesirable ways. Instead we need to focus on better ways to use the instincts that are explored in fight club.

The way this book is written could be very confusing. The story can be rambling and it can cut from point to point in the story. You will have the narrator tell you something and then not mention it again for some time, and then return to that same point far later in the book. It is only the quality, and shocking nature of this story that keeps it fresh enough in your mind that you are easily able to keep this up.

This is a great book, for men. It looks at a part of ourselves that we often do not look at and while it is an angry book and one that is disturbing it is also worth reading.

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