Cheap Choke (Book) (CHUCK PALAHNIUK) Price

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Customer Reviews of Choke

If you're going to read this, don't bother.
The first sentence of Choke is a warning about what lies ahead.
"If you're going to read this, don't bother. After a couple of pages you won't want to be here. So forget it. Go away. Get out while you're still in one piece. Save yourself."
Palahniuk wasn't kidding. I had a real hard time trying to get through this book which reads more like a lot of snippets of Chuck's wonderful writing, wit, and insight than a well-thought-out, integrated whole.
Many of the individual scenes and dialogues are fun and entertaining, seemingly absurd but at the same time insightful and thought-provoking. That is what I love about Palahniuk's writing and why I struggled to get through this one to the end.
It's not on the same par as Fight Club or Survivor as a story, however, which is unfortunate, given the power of many of the individual scenes.
Juxtaposing Colonial Dunsboro (Colonial Williamsburg?)against contemporary standards and values is a very effective way to ponder what really changes over time and what stays the same.
The sex is more graphic in this book than the other Palahniuk novels that I've read. Victor Mancini is a sex-addict and his dawg gets a real workout.

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My first Palahniuk book.
I actually picked this book up in the "How To" section of my local bookstore. No lie. I could spend hours trying to decipher the accidental or intended implications of such a placement, which stinks of either conspiracy or revolution, I can't tell which.

Anyway, seeing as Fight Club is my all time favorite movie, it only seems logical that I'd gravitate towards ol' Chucks work. Why it took me so long I can't say. Having read none of his other books, I can't really compare them. I can say that I will be purchasing them shortly. Choke is brilliant and extremely funny. It's not often that a novel can make me laugh hysterically in public, but this one did.

The premise of the book and one of it's strengths is the theory that if you make someone else into a hero, they'll love you forever. The protagonist repeatedly fakes choking to death in restaurants to pay his dying mothers hospital bills, but at the same time, he demonstrates that even the most ordinary people have the capacity for the extraordinary. It's sick and beautiful at the same time. Peppered with addiction, sex, insanity, medical references, urban legends, and a ton of Oedipus issues; Choke is about confronting your past, or being consumed by it. Like Fight Club (the movie that is. I know, I blaspheme.) it's about tearing down who you think you are to find out who you really are. It's about rebirth and redemption, perception and illusion.

It's about all that stuff and more, but bottom line, it's just a blast to read. If you like Vonnegut, Irving Welsh or David Foster Wallace, chances are this book is for you. It will probably make you laugh, it might even make you think, but it will definitely entertain you.

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Few can survive on premise alone
Few books can survive on a clever idea alone. Palahniuk is probably the only author I know who can pull this off. This is not to say that the rest of "Choke" is not clever--it is--but the premise alone is good enough. Victor Mancini is a con artists of mega proportions. By day he works in a colonial theme park and when he's not doing that, he goes to restaurants and diners and fakes "choking." This, in order to get cash to help his mother who is a nursing home.

I thought the writing in this novel was simply brilliant and can't wait to tackle all of Palahnuik's works. Bravo