Choke

Zusatztext “Sheer! anarchic fierceness of imagination . . . [A] raw and vital book.” --The New York Times “Few contemporary writers mix the outrageous and the hilarious with greater zest. . . . Chuck Palahniuk’s splenetic! anarchic glee makes him a worthy heir to Ken Kesey.” — Newsday "Palahniuk displays a Swiftian gift for satire! as well as a knack for crafting mesmerizing sentences." --San Francisco Examiner “Puts a bleakly humorous spin on self-help! addiction recovery! and childhood trauma . . . [F]unny mantra-like prose plows toward the mayhem it portends from the get-go.” -- The Village Voice Informationen zum Autor Chuck Palahniuk Klappentext Victor Mancini, a medical-school dropout, is an antihero for our deranged times. Needing to pay elder care for his mother, Victor has devised an ingenious scam: he pretends to choke on pieces of food while dining in upscale restaurants. He then allows himself to be "saved” by fellow patrons who, feeling responsible for Victor's life, go on to send checks to support him. When he's not pulling this stunt, Victor cruises sexual addiction recovery workshops for action, visits his addled mom, and spends his days working at a colonial theme park. His creator, Chuck Palahniuk, is the visionary we need and the satirist we deserve.In the summer of 1642 in Plymouth, Massachusetts, a teenage boy was accused of buggering a mare, a cow, two goats, five sheep, two calves, and a turkey. This is real history on the books. In accordance with the Biblical laws of Leviticus, after the boy confessed he was forced to watch each animal being slaughtered. Then he was killed and his body heaped with the dead animals and buried in an unmarked pit. This was before there were sexaholic talk therapy meetings. This teenager, writing his fourth step must've been a whole barnyard tell-all. I ask, "Any questions?" The fourth-graders just look at me. A girl in the second row says, "What's buggering?" I say, ask your teacher. Every half hour, I'm supposed to teach another herd of fourth-graders some shit nobody wants to learn, like how to start a fire. How to carve an apple-head doll. How to make ink out of black walnuts. As if this is going to get any of them into a good college. Besides deforming the poor chickens, these fourth-graders, they all walk in here carrying some germ. It's no mystery why Denny's always wiping his nose and coughing. Head lice, pinworms, chlamydia, ringworm?for serious, these field trip kids are the pint-sized horsemen of the apocalypse. Instead of useful Pilgrim crap, I tell them how their playground game ring-around-a-rosy is based on the bubonic plague of 1665. The Black Death gave people hard, swollen, black spots they called "plague roses," or buboes, surrounded by a pale ring. Hence "bubonic." Infected people were locked inside their houses to die. In six months, a hundred thousand people were buried in the huge mass graves. The "pocket full of posies" was what people of London carried so they wouldn't smell the corpses. To build a fire, all you do is pile up some sticks and dry grass. You strike a spark with a flint. You work the bellows. Don't think for a second this fire-starting routine makes their little eyes sparkle. Nobody's impressed by a spark. Kids crouch in the front row, huddling over their little video games. Kids yawn right in your face. All of them giggle and pinch, rolling their eyes at me in my breeches and dirty shirt. Instead, I tell them how in 1672, the Black Plague hit Naples, Italy, killing some four hundred thousand people. In 1711, in the Holy Roman Empire, the Black Plague killed five hundred thousand people. In 1781, millions died worldwide from the flu. In 1792, another plague killed eight hundred thousand people in Egypt. In 1793, mosquitoes spread yellow fever to Philadelphi...

Product details

• Authors: Chuck Palahniuk
• Publisher: Random House Inc.
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 01.01.2002
• EAN: 9780385720922
• ISBN: 978-0-385-72092-2
• No. of pages: 304
• Dimensions: 131 mm x 204 mm x 20 mm
• Weight: 239 g
• Series: Anchor Books; ANCHOR
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature