Palahniuk C P Books : Survivor

Survivor

£3.04


Survivor, the second novel by Chuck Palahniuk--whose debut novel The Fight Club was widely received to critical acclaim--is a deranged comedy of nightmares, a groin-kick at Western society s worst excesses. This is satire at its best, and Palahniuk handles it all with a distinct, engaging prose style and with plot devices that keep the pages turning long after your tea break should have finished. From the very opening of the book Palahniuk lets us know that his narrator, Tender Branson, the last surviving member of a religious death cult, is on a path to self-destruction. The tension in this book lies not in the outcome, because like Tender s soothsaying friend Fertility, we can see it coming 289 pages away, instead it lies in the intricate plot that takes Tender from farm boy to media celebrity and ruin. This is a novel that examines what happens when religion meets the overindulgences of our consumerist society. In the world that the author envisages, which is all too real in the light of tragedies such as Waco and the Heaven s Gate suicides, the only acceptable religions are those that can be successfully marketed and controlled at a corporate level, the small separatist models of religion are superfluous, and self-destruct. This is also a look at religion itself, at how it can enslave as many people as it appears to liberate. A comic novel that deals with the most serious issues of society, Survivor places Palahniuk among the most daring and technically able writers of his generation. Adam said the first step most cultures take to making you a slave is to castrate you ... the cultures that don t castrate you to make you a slave, they castrate your mind. --Iain Robinson

Survivor mp3 edition - Other reviews here cover the book itself, so I won t bother to repeat what s already been said, suffice to say that I m a fan of Chuck Palahniuk and along with fight club this is my personal favourite of his books.I just wanted to say a few words on the audiobook edition. As any fan of audiobooks will know a bad reading can ruin the effect of even the greatest prose, so I m glad to say that isn t the case here. The performance is subtle and adroit, perfectly complementing the wry humour. Like a good film adaptation, where you can never re-read the novel with picturing a perfectly cast actor, it would be impossible for me to now re-read survivor without hearing it in Paul Michael Garcia s dead-pan delivery.And given that the narration of the novel is in the form of a man recording his story into an aircraft s black box recorder, it makes an audio version all the more appropriate.It consists of about 50 or so files, split by chapter in mp3 format at bitrate 128 kbps.

A near perfect read - After reading Fight Club I was curious about Survivor, but in the end decided to pass based on negative reviews I d read. What a waste. Survivor is wickedly funny commentary on our societal obsession with fame, fortune and legacy. It was just outrageous enough to be believable, and Palahniuk never shied away from the tougher parts of our protagonist s story. From start to finish a near perfect read... long live Palahniuk!

You WILL survive - Palahniuk s works are so often compared to Sedaris, Christopher Moore, and Jackson McCrae, but I have to disagree even though I like those authors and would recommend their books. Palahniuk s works are very complex and well thought out, and his character of Tender Branson in SURVIVOR is one of my favorites. The plotline of SURVIVOR is not that complicated---at first. Tender is on a plane with nothing more than a black box. He plans to recite his life story into said box, but as with all C.P novels, things don t go as planned. The biggest problem with Palahniuk s works is that you can t tell everyone just how great they are without giving away key elements to the story. Everything in his books will come as a surprise and telling almost any detail will give something away. So you just have to trust people when they say his stuff is great----off the wall, way off, but great. Of the three books I ve recently read (Moore s Practical Demon Keeping and MCCrae s Katzenjammer) SURVIVOR has been my favorite.

Dark, disturbing, humorous, engaging - Chuck Palahniuk s Survivor takes the reader into the world of Tender Branson, the last surviving member of a suicide cult. As the book opens, Branson, the narrator, has hijacked a Boeing 747 with the intention of crashing it, with himself on board, into the Australian outback. Having emptied the plane of passengers, he proceeds to tell his account of his life - ostensibly as it really happened - into the flight recorder, from his childhood under the repressive authority of the Creedish Church to being propelled years later to media stardom as the last survivor. The first thing that the reader will notice is that the book begins with Chapter 47 on page 289 and counts its way down to Chapter 1 and page 1 at the end, a device which serves to constantly remind the reader that Branson s last minutes are ticking away even as he retells his story, lending an air of foreboding to his words. Palahniuk also has Branson constantly backtrack upon himself in a way which mimics such a stream-of-consciousness dictation. The writing style throughout is informal and extremely sketchy as regards description. Even the names of key characters are never revealed - including the government caseworker appointed to prevent Tender from following the rest of his cult members into suicide, and the agent who later drives him to stardom. On the other hand, by having Tender talk at great length about apparently unimportant and superfluous things such as how to correctly eat a lobster, Palahniuk gives us a sense of Tender s quirky and disturbed nature, almost as if he exists slightly out of tune with reality.This is a book which tackles big themes: birth and death, murder and suicide, free will and determinism, belief and unbelief, truth and falsehood. Palahniuk conjures up a vividly dystopian and disturbing world, which only grows darker as Tender is drawn within the media culture - a culture which proves every bit as restrictive, false, twisted and soul-destroying as the Creedish society that he used to belong to. What really engages the reader, however, is the strength of the main characters: firstly Tender, who struggles throughout the story to find meaning in his life and to become truly free, and secondly his friend Fertility Hollis, who claims to be able to see the future and acts as Tender s guide. It is their relationship which forms the backbone of the story right up until its climax in the final chapter.Pacy, inventive, often funny, Survivor is a fine (though dark) book, and one that I can easily recommend.

okish - This book was fairly good until about half way through. The main character and his strange ways are well developed as the book initially progresses and then you hit the middle. At this point the main character is put in touch with an agent looking to make money out of him as the last survivor of a creedish death cult. The book changes direction and the well developed character becomes a puppet for his agent. I found this section pretty tedious and longed for the main character to break away and do something more interesting. The main character does escape eventually but by this point I had lost interest and was reading the book quickly just to get to the end so I could stick it on the shelf and start something more interesting.




Survivor