Man, this sucked. Palahniuk's work seems to get worse with every book that I read. I'm not sure whether this is because I'm getting tired of his signature style, or because I've read two brilliant novels and expect more of the same. Either way, I don't see me wasting too much more energy on this author.
Survivor sucked because it was clumsy and stuff happened for no apparent reason. It had a beautiful premise - the story opens with the last survivor of a "suicide cult" alone on a jet airliner, with seven hours to go before he runs out of fuel, whiling away the time by telling his story to the black box. What follows should be great stuff, but isn't. It's boring, random, and has too many different ideas mashed up together. There's no visible social commentary. The protagonist is so stupid he completely fails to excite any sympathy at all. And yet again there's no clear reason for the ending to have been the way it was.
I feel that I ought to go back and read Fight Club again, to find out if it was really that good in the first place.
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Saturday, March 24, 2007
4 comments:
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Have you seen this link?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.chuckpalahniuk.net/books/survivor/survivorending.php
No, and I can't look at it either, because it's hanging off the end of the frame so I can't copy the whole thing. Please repost as HTML.
ReplyDeleteOK, now?
ReplyDeleteGot it. And it took me till now to realise that I could actually see the whole URL if I'd gone to the post page for this post in the first place. Sorry about that.
ReplyDeleteAs for the explanation of the ending, it's terribly clever and it makes it all make so much sense. Now why didn't I think of that? Was I not thinking hard enough, or is it possible that the story is unforgiveably flawed in a fundamental way?
No, of course not. It's natural for readers to see absolutely no point to a story until they read the author's explanation. After all, he wrote the book, so of course he's the only one who can make sense of it, right?