"perfect" isnt the right word, but its the first word that comes to mind... (Choke - Chuck Palahniuk)

Member Name: inima

Product:	Choke - Chuck Palahniuk
Date:	03/06/02 (1126 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Challenging, Thought Provoking

Disadvantages: Too self analytical to be believable, Price

As a dyslexice, reading takes me forever. So when I do read a book, I live with it, literally for months, reading a page or two a day, living with the characters moment by moment. And I was strangely happy that Victor Mancini, the main narrator, was my virtual roomate for these last few weeks.

The story - there isn't much to tell. It's about a guy who is anything but ordinary, and yet, you can empathise with him in your own way. You learn to realise that there is no such thing as ordinary, and everyone has their own strange habbits - maybe you could say that this what is ordinary. I don't want to go into the precise plot here - although interesting, it's only a function / canvass in which Chuck Palahniuk can investigate the issues that he does:

Themes - there are two main ones here. The first is about identity. It is a struggle for a man to make sense of himself - he goes from trying to strip any form of identity from himself (unsucessfully as all of this is commented upon), to attempting to superimpose the most supreme of all identities. I had better be careful here....

The other theme is addiction - escape from reality (/identity) with the help of sex / madness / denial. The book gives reasons for everything that Victor does and believes in, and one can't help but feel that his attempts at escapism are unsuccessful, simply because he is aware of what he is doing.

Style - It is written in a very easy format, (mostly consistent), which really helped me to firstly read it, and secondly get into Victor's character.

Definately reccomended, - in a world of "The Matrix", "Vanilla Sky", ("Fight Club"), and even "A Beautiful Mind" (the list goes on), a book that makes you question your own identity/reality (we are, after all, defined by our context), and what addictions we give ourselves to esape from it.

Summary: