CHUCK PALAHNIUK
Palahniuk reads at Elliott Bay
101 S Main St, 624-6600
7:30 pm, free
(advance tickets available).
Sometimes the experience of reading a book feels like a long slide down a dark,
oily tunnel. CHUCK PALAHNIUK’s new novel, Survivor, gives the reader
a quick shove and never stops for handholds, spurting out visceral language
and a backwards page count. Narrator Tender Branson’s tale about surviving a
death cult that programmed him to clean houses and kill himself is as harrowing
as literature gets. Palahniuk’s 1996 debut, Fight Club, sent him on the
path to Hollywood (it is currently being filmed), and was described as “indescribable,”
drawing comparisons to Kurt Vonnegut and Thomas Pynchon. Survivor is
double-edged from the title on, packed with cleaning tips and morbid platitudes
like, “Since change is constant, you wonder if people crave death because it’s
the only way they can get anything really finished.” In the end, Branson finds
his own way to clean things up and Palahniuk’s prose comes out shiny as a razor-scraped
penny.