Fight Club

The first rule of fight club is you don't talk about fight club.
The second rule of fight club is you don't talk about fight club.

Probably the most (in)famous - and most copied - rules in the history of literature.

American author Chuck Palahniuk has a total of eight published non-fiction novels, Fight Club being the first. As most of us already know, it was made into a film by David Fincher that starred Edward Norton, Brad Pitt and Helena Bonham Carter.

The book begins with a sentence that read thusly: 'Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that, Tyler's pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die.' If that doesn't grab your attention right away, I don't know what will. It's the sort of thing that Palahniuk would write, the sort of thing only he could come up with.

Fight Club revolves around a man, an insomniac who starts attending support groups when he finds that they help him sleep. After two years, everything is brought to an abrupt halt by a certain Marla Singer who watches him so that he can't cry, can't sleep at night.

One day, he returns from a business trip to find that his condo unit (along with everything in it) had been reduced to bits by a bomb of some sort. Remembering a man named Tyler Durden whom he met at a nude beach, he calls him up and they arrange to meet at a bar.

After a few drinks, Tyler says he'll allow the narrator to stay with him if he would do him a favour.

"I want you to hit me as hard as you can."

From there, everything goes downhill -- in a good way, of course.

The plot has quite a few twists and turns and the storyline jumps from the past to the present and back to the past. That said, Fight Club is riveting; it's the kind of book you won't want to put down for fear of missing (or forgetting) a crucial part of the story.

And then, of course, there is the climax of the plot -- the twist of all twists -- that forces you to look differently at all that you read thus far.

In the copy of the book I have (published by Vintage Books), there is an afterword by Palahniuk himself, talking about the success of Fight Club, the influence of (read as: ripoffs from) Fight Club and the story behind the story.

Fight Club is a completely original novel that keeps you squirming in your seat, reading on to see what happens next. It is a definite must-read, maybe even a classic.

I am Joe's relaxed shoulders.