Niklas reviewed Make something up by Chuck Palahniuk
Review of 'Make something up' on 'Storygraph'
2 stars
And despite the miraculous, well-documented healing powers of the Comedic Arts my old man dies taking a big bloody shit in his bed.
This is a pretty standard Palahniuk line from one of the short stories in this tome, of which a lot are OK, one's great and a few are...not up to par with his usual writing, albeit in novel form.
Then, at times, you're jolted by his genius:
And you know the feeling: You want your best friends and your fiancée to mesh, but my friends grit their teeth and look at me with their eyebrows worried tight together in the middle, and they say, “Dude, did it ever cross your mind that maybe—just maybe—Britney is mentally retarded?” And I tell them to relax. She’s just an alcoholic. I’m pretty certain she’s a heroin junkie, too. That, and she’s a sexual compulsive, but it’s nothing so bad some …
And despite the miraculous, well-documented healing powers of the Comedic Arts my old man dies taking a big bloody shit in his bed.
This is a pretty standard Palahniuk line from one of the short stories in this tome, of which a lot are OK, one's great and a few are...not up to par with his usual writing, albeit in novel form.
Then, at times, you're jolted by his genius:
And you know the feeling: You want your best friends and your fiancée to mesh, but my friends grit their teeth and look at me with their eyebrows worried tight together in the middle, and they say, “Dude, did it ever cross your mind that maybe—just maybe—Britney is mentally retarded?” And I tell them to relax. She’s just an alcoholic. I’m pretty certain she’s a heroin junkie, too. That, and she’s a sexual compulsive, but it’s nothing so bad some talk therapy wouldn’t fix her. Look at me: I’m fat; nobody’s perfect. And maybe instead of a wedding reception we could get our two families together in a hotel conference room to surprise her with an intervention, and instead of a honeymoon we could get Britney committed to a ninety-day inpatient recovery program. We’ll work through this. But no way is she retarded. She just needs some rehab.
Then again, at the worst, he feels like a pastiche of himself:
He owned a cat he’d named Belinda Carlisle and let drink from the black bidets. It was a long-haired sable Burmese, like a bubble of black hair. Ted loved Belinda Carlisle, but he knew enough not to let her get too close.
All in all, this is entertaining, yet not too fulfulling. I'll recommend "Choke" or "Rant" much rather than this.