Archive - 2013

This week I read  Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk, which I review below.

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

The protagonist, who remains nameless, is an insomniac leading a bland corporate existence, investigating accidents for a car company, whose only concern is profit.  Unable to find meaning in a faceless consumerist society, he instead seeks solace in support groups, for a wide range of potentially terminal diseases, including testicular cancer and brain parasites, ailments which he himself is not afflicted with.  He is not alone in masquerading as the seriously ill: there is also Marla, a dysfunctional nihilist with a deeply troubled past, whose presence at these gatherings he resents.

Everything changes abruptly when our main character meets Tyler Durden, a fervent anarchist, who works as a projectionist and waiter.  Tyler is hellbent on creating mayhem at every opportunity, even during his working hours, when he can be found inserting obscene images onto film reels and urinating in his hotel’s wealthy clients’ soups.

Tyler, whose belligerent attitude towards social norms is matched only by his organisational skills and leadership abilities, forms a fight club.  Every Sunday during the early hours men congregate to fight one-on-one in basements and car lots.  These disenfranchised young men were brought up with absent fathers and fed on a diet of mass media that led them to believe they would be superstars.  It is only now that they have come to the realisation that their destiny is to toil in low paid blue-collar positions and office jobs, devoid of meaning.  These angry individuals, now empowered by Fight Club are ready to bring about Tyler’s dream of returning the world to a hunter-gatherer society.  Our protagonist had until his introduction to Fight Club been a co-operative and meek employee, but now he typifies this response and casts a sinister presence in the office, constantly bruised, bloodied and with the permanent fixture of a hole through his cheek.  The Fight Club phenomena  soon becomes a frenzy, with new clubs forming throughout the country and Tyler finds his dream of bringing about social dissolution gaining momentum, as his plans evolve into self-destruction and terrorism with Project Mayhem.  However we discover that all is not what it initially appears to be when a revelation alters the protagonist’s understanding and reaction to the unfolding events.

Palahniuk takes us on a journey through a dark, menacing and brutal world that mirrors the film it inspired almost exactly.  Fight Club is nothing if not  controversial and the constant violent descriptions, nihilism and references to subjects such as human soap and descriptions of disease will not be to every reader’s liking.  However whatever our personal opinion may be on these matters, it is widely accepted that Fight Club proves to be adept at both exploring the very nature of violent behaviour and commenting on society at large.

This week resident book reviewer Adam Riley reviews The Life of Pi by Yann Martel.

The Life of Pi by Yann Martel

Piscine Molitor Patel, an intelligent, spiritual boy who renames himself Pi after one too many jokes about the similarity between his first name and a certain bodily function, grows up in his parents’ zoo in Pondicherry, a former French colony in Southern India. By birth a Hindu, he finds himself simultaneously attracted to Christianity after a visit to a Catholic church, and Islam through conversations with a local Muslim, leading to the unusual position of practising three mutually exclusive religions.

But when the family try to relocate the zoo to Canada, all three faiths are severly tested. The cargo ship sinks, leaving Pi as the only human survivor, stranded on a lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific with a zebra, a hyena, an orangutan, some cockroaches and a Bengal tiger. Natural food chain hierarchies soon reduce the occupants to just Pi and the tiger, leaving the sixteen year old boy in a desperate struggle for survival against the elements, starvation, dehydration and a vicious predator. But is the tiger really a threat to Pi, or are their lives more entwined than they really know?

A very famous book, and now a very famous film, the above plot is fairly well known. I did not expect, however, the rich metaphorical turns the story would take, and its ambiguous, thought-provoking ending. Written mainly from the point of view of Pi, the style exhibits a dignified wonder at the peculiarities of existence, as well as deadpan humour, for example when Pi begins to have his doubts the crew of the ship have his safety in mind when they throw him overboard, and chapter 97, which consists of the entire story retold in two words. Obvious literary comparisons can be made to Robinson Crusoe, particularly in the detailed methods used by the resourceful narrator to stay alive, and Pincher Martin, William Golding’s stark, intense story of a drowning man clinging to the illusions in his own head.

A highly symbolical novel, exploring the manifold expressions of life’s will to live, The Life of Pi also scrutinises the central problem of human existence: the tension between our perception of ourselves as rational, moral beings, and the reality of our animal precondition. Perhaps, The Life of Pi does not see this as a problem, but merely a fact, one that a higher power might prefer to include in any story it writes.

This week I finished reading The Earth Shifter by Lada Ray.

The Earth Shifter by Lada Ray

The Earth Shifter is the first part of a paranormal YA trilogy written by the prolific Lada Ray.

Humanity is unaware how close the Earth came to ending on June 30th 1908. On that occasion it was saved by the mysterious Earth Keepers. The world is now under threat once again from the Comet of Karma and the The Earth Keepers must decide if the Earth is worth saving or if it is beyond redemption.
Teenager and Moscow resident Sasha Elfimova possesses powers that could change the fate of the Earth, as she is a Time and Mind Shifter, whose developing abilities are yet to be fully realised. Sasha’s mentor is a Siberian shaman named Tengis, who resides on the shores of the largest fresh water resource on the planet, the beautiful Lake Baikal. On the other side of the world in Chinatown, New York City, live Kei and Win, two enterprising twins of Chinese origin, one of whose destinies when combined with Sasha’s could alter the fate of mankind. Will destiny bring these two together to form an alliance that will decide the fate of our planet or is mankind destined to face annihilation?
The Earth Shifter is essentially a complex and diverse tale with a good versus evil theme, in which the author is adept at merging real world events such as the aforementioned meteorite explosion and explaining their continued relevance today. Though the book could best be described as a cosmic adventure thriller, it also combines fantasy and mystery elements and this along with its compelling narration of Russian history, embrace of the natural world and fascinating insights into Geopolitics assures that The Earth Shifter will not only appeal to a younger audience.
The second instalment is due for release next winter and it will undoubtedly be eagerly anticipated.

Follow Lada on Twitter – @LadaTweets

This week resident book reviewer Adam  reviews Flaubert in Egypt by Gustave Flaubert.

Flaubert in  Egypt by Gustave Flaubert

(Translated and edited by Francis Steegmuller)

In 1849, the twenty seven year old Flaubert read out the first draft of his hallucinatory masterpiece The Temptation of St. Anthony (see earlier review) to some friends.  Less than encouraging, they urged him never to publish it.  With only a couple of short stories to his name, but possessing the sort of fierce literary ambition incompatible with his mother’s suggestion that he find ‘a little job’, he set out with one of them, the writer and photographer Maxime du Camp, on a six month tour of Egypt, taking in Cairo, the Nile, the pyramids of Giza, the temples of Karnak, the Grotto of Samoun (a bizarre pit of mummified humans and animals), and numerous bordellos and bathhouses along the way.

The result is a vivid, sensuous account of a travel experience, as Flaubert pays attention to details that lesser writers would cast aside as insignificant: a handshake between a man on a camel and a man on the ground; a monkey pleasuring a donkey in the street; a boy offering his mother for five paras and wishing him a ‘long prick’.  These last two demonstrate the largely lubricious tone of proceedings.  Street rapes by locals are dispassionatley reported, brief homosexual encounters in steam rooms are casually averred, while his brothel experiences are meticulously set down, particularly his fondness for the courtesan Kuchuk Hanem, whom he visits multiple times.

As sleazy as this sounds, akin to the wanderings of a Burroughsian sex tourist (see review of The Soft Machine), it could perhaps be viewed as part of a wider literary sensibility.  Flaubert was apparently bored by du Camp’s painstaking photographic work in the temples and tombs, and his descriptions tend less towards apprehending the ruins of antiquity than the life of the people in the streets.  However, his fascination with the ancient world is in evidence, for example in his rapturous, almost fearful prose upon seeing the Great Sphinx rise out of the desert at Giza, a statue that he would have known only from drawings.

Flaubert’s eye for scatological detail can be seen later in his brilliant classical epic Salaambo.  No doubt this trip was a major inspiration.  A visit to a hospital provides ample material, such as, not wishing to be too graphic, the anal chancres of a group of syphilitic Mamelukes.  Perhaps, that was too graphic.

From copious letters and journals, Francis Steegmuller has edited a coherent and palatable account, providing useful explanatory notes along the way.  Although it is certainly a book of interest for Flaubert fans, there is enough piquant material to make it a lively read.  If you like things like anal chancres, of course…