Eh... | Snuff | Chuck Palahniuk

An Acquired Taste | Snuff | Chuck Palahniuk

books:


	• Snuff Chuck Palahniuk Doubleday, 2008 - 208 pages average customer review:based on 76 reviews view larger image
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Terrible plot but...

I read the plot and thought, wow, I should just not read it. It was a horrible idea for a book. But the more I got into it, the more Chuck amazed me, like he has in all his other books. What I liked was not the story, but the way he delivered it. He gives you facts that you would never have known without him. His wording is incredible and he shocked me more than once with his immagry.

Eh...

Perhaps because I am such a huge fan of Palahniuk, I was more disappointed with this book than I would have been from any other author. I grew enthusiastically used to the sharp cultural satire present in the rest of his works that I expected the same in this one. While it is a nice jab at the porn industry, it has the same shortcomings - substance. The plot and characters have interesting, potentially humorous twists, but never quite fully pan out. While reading it, I was fully entertained, but after finishing I realized that it was entirely forgettable - definitely not up to Chuck's earlier performances. I distinctly remember reactions and emotions I felt from his books from 3 years ago, but not from "Snuff" 2 weeks ago.

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An Acquired Taste

I had told myself I wouldn't read another Chuck Palahniuk book after I half-finished Invisible Monsters, which I thought was annoying, not because of the writing style, but because of the transitions from scenes. However, I couldn't resist the plot idea of his latest, Snuff: a novel surrounding the life of Cassie Wright, a porn star, as she tries to beat the world record for the biggest gang bang caught on tape. Through the 197 pages, we come across other characters as well, including Mr. 72, Mr. 137, Mr. 600, and a stage assistant known as Sheila, and it is through these characters that we learn about not only Cassie Wright, a wonderfully depicted and drawn character, but also the other narrating protagonists as well as they speak and observe not only their histories and shortcomings, but their surroundings as well. And it is through this method that Mr. Palahniuk thoroughly succeeds in making sympathetic, three dimensional characters who are not archetypes and stereotypes, but human. Plot-wise, Palahniuk engages the reader with cliff hanger ending chapters, as they stumble through his minimalist prose. I say stumble because it is something you'd have to work through; a stylistic feature before its time the likes of Hemingway or Burroughs; an acquired taste, yet something whole-heartedly revolutionary. However, the story falls short as it climaxes to what turns out to be a twist turned awry that can leave any reader asking the author: "You led me all this way for this?" The characters we meet, though, is worth the price of admission and perhaps giving this author a second chance as his fans wait for his next venture and formerly disgusted readers take another look at his previous works.

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From the master of literary mayhem and provocation, a full-frontal Triple X novel that goes where no American work of fiction has gone before

Cassie Wright, porn priestess, intends to cap her legendary career by breaking the world record for serial fornication. On camera. With six hundred men. Snuff unfolds from the perspectives of Mr. 72, Mr. 137, and Mr. 600, who await their turn on camera in a very crowded green room. This wild, lethally funny, and thoroughly researched novel brings the huge yet underacknowledged presence of pornography in contemporary life into the realm of literary fiction at last. Who else but Chuck Palahniuk would dare do such a thing? Who else could do it so well, so unflinchingly, and with such an incendiary (you might say) climax?

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