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Choke is weird. It is trying to be a cohesive narrative with insightful commentary on some overground part of our society much akin to Fight Club or Invisible Monsters, yet it is filled with as much porn as Snuff which is literally a book about one long porno. It quite simply does not work. And, if we are honest, Choke is much closer to Snuff, except Palahniuk had enough decency not to pretend that Snuff is something more than a carnival of debauchery, while for some reason, he did try to convince us that Choke is somehow more profound. He did not succeed, for the plot is actually as thin as that of a porno. There, barely, just so we could pretend we are respectable human beings who would never consume outright porn. Sex was also terribly boring, which is sad. Could not even get a good wank out of it.

This book is not for everyone, indeed, quite frankly, I am not sure it is for anyone.

Esoteric. Occult. Arcane. Mystical. History. Theology. A narrative is constructed. Meager turned into essential. Mere contingency into necessity. It all makes sense! Or does it? Well, probably not. I choose to read this book as a cautionary tale of sorts. What happens when one starts narrativizing to excess. After all, our mind is built for it, that is how we make sense of the world around us. If we try hard enough, we can make everything sound plausible and we could fool a significant amount of people, among them ourselves, with a decently constructed all-encompassing narrative. It is absolutely terrifying. Thank goodness such an obvious and easily exploitable flaw could never fuck shit up for real!!!

"There are four kinds of people in this world: cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics.”
“And that covers everybody?”
“Oh, yes, including us. Or at least me. If you take a good look, everybody fits into one of these categories. Each of us is sometimes a cretin, a fool, a moron, or a lunatic. A normal person is just a reasonable mix of these components, these four ideal types.”

A true exhibit of the postmodern. The story free of definite conclusion or clear meaning.
Many have offered their interpretation of the text, ranging from reasoned essays to outright dismissal of the text as posh nonsense. Therefore, I shall offer my interpretation as well. As I see it, my reading of this text sits somewhere in the middle, as it is neither incredibly profound nor crudely skeptical. I sense the presence of two specters, two truisms, and they are having their laugh echoing throughout the entirety of the text. They are simple and everyone either knows them or will eventually learn them, usually through some painful means, for I believe they are inescapable.

The first one is: "It is not what you know, but who you know." Bitter. Very bitter. We are told that if we get smart enough and work hard enough, we will be rewarded with fame and fortune. Sadly, rarely is this true. Most people can achieve a middle-class life if they work hard, but nobody gets to the top without knowing somebody who is already there. And we all know this is a factor we can only dream of controling. Who we get to meet and on what terms is primarily based on our environment, which is anything but fair. We cannot control who our parents are and what their socio-economic status is. It is a stroke of luck, some might call it Chance. And so, Chance by chance is propelled into global notoriety simply because everybody assumed that he must be somebody important for how else would he be so close to somebody important? The association to somebody of influence legitimizes you as somebody of influence. This fetishism of association appears to only get stronger with time. It almost justifies the cynical approach to our culture and society which at this point is sadly a default approach.

Here we come to the second specter, considerably more timeless. His laugh echos: "People will project their wishes onto your words." Or more commonly heard: "People hear what they want to hear!" And, indeed, this has been true, well, since language became a thing. It might be too solipsistic of me, but I believe this will always be a problem, yet I also believe it is possible to get close to the heart of the matter if candidness replaces this bourgeoisie opaqueness which plagues so much of our modern speech.

This whole book reminds me of that one clip in which Žižek explains why he is generally opposed to wisdom. In summary, you can make any conclusion appear wise as long as you wrap it up to sound intuitive. ( Clip for the interested: www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKoGQpEkpO0 )

This book is split into 2 parts. If we are being completely honest, they do not belong with one another at all. One a description, the other a speculation, neither of them calling upon the other in any meaningful way.

The first part of the book is an extremely sterile description of working-class life in England's 30s. It is so straightforward that you almost feel like you are reading for class or out of some newspaper. If you need to truly feel what it is like to live that sort of life, you are far better off reading Down and Out in Paris and London written by the man himself, the very same, George Orwell.

The second part of this work is far more insightful. I was surprised at how relevant it still is, almost a whole century later. The socialists of Orwell's era never went away, that is to say, socialists of today have seemingly learned nothing from history. If you ask an average man if he is a socialist, he will likely take it as an insult and might get into a fight with you. That is quite a problem for an ideology that fundamentally rests upon populist ideals. What is socialism if the working man is not a socialist? Well, it is largely an aesthetic that middle and upper class youth appropriates. Some do it because they find Marxist philosophy to be reasonable. Some do it because they want to fit in and there is an age at which a lot of people find it cool to be a socialist. Some do it because they want to feel righteous, to dedicate life to some cause larger than themselves, and it is always easier to claim you are fighting for someone else, someone oppressed, unable to fight for themselves, rather than to own up to your own selfish aspirations. Finally, we come to those few, which might understand the theory, but do not care for it, for they are in it all to truly help. They are the types to actually go out and do something. They are rare, worse still, they rarely come to mind when one mentions the word socialism. The sad reality is that even the socialists themselves upon hearing the label most likely think of the self-important, self-serving types I have first mentioned. Unfortunately, this does not only diminish any appeal socialism might have, it actively bolsters fascist thinking and pushes people further to the right. For a fascist is an opportunist. Pick your struggle, he will listen to you and tell you that you are right. He can always appeal to the idea that there is a group of people working on making a common man's life harder, and his solutions will be familiar and soothing to the ears of an average individual. Whether one is for progress or against it, to a leftist, it should not matter. No matter how many reasoned opinions you hold, no matter how many truths you have discovered, until you can convince the common man that they are worth pursuing, you have failed as a leftist. What Orwell is talking about in the second part of this book is well worth taking in, if for no other reason, but for a reality check. The leftist movement has wrecked itself from within. The movement tends to be either full of out-of-touch theorists that love the aesthetic or people with no clear demands and objectives. This will have to change, or we are all condemned to suffer under fascism.