Choke

By: Chuck Palahniuk

Narrated by: Chuck Palahniuk

Length: 7 hrs and 16 mins

Publisher's Summary

Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk's controversial and blazingly original debut novel, introduced a fresh and even renegade talent to American fiction, one who has retooled the classic black humor of Terry Southern and Kurt Vonnegut for the lunacy of the millennial age. In this novel, Choke, he gives listeners a vision of life and love and sex and mortality that is both chillingly brilliant and teeth-rattlingly funny.

Victor Mancini, a dropout from medical school, has devised a complicated scam to pay for his mother's elder care: Pretend to be choking on a piece of food in a restaurant and the person who "saves you" will feel responsible for the rest of his life. Multiply that a couple of hundred times and you generate a healthy flow of checks, week in, week out. Between fake choking gigs, Victor works at Colonial Dunsboro with a motley group of losers and stoners trapped in 1734, cruises sex addiction groups for action ("You put 20 sexaholics around a table night after night and don't be surprised"), and visits his mother, whose anarchic streak made his childhood a mad whirl and whose Alzheimer's disease now hides what may be the startling truth about his (possibly divine?) parentage. An antihero for our deranging times, Victor finds that his whole existence is a struggle to wrest an identity from overwhelming forces. His creator, Chuck Palahniuk, is the visionary we need and the satirist we deserve.

"Even I can't write this well," says Thom Jones, and Bret Easton Ellis opines, "Maybe our generation has found its Don DeLillo."

Choke is also available in print from Doubleday.

©2001 by Chuck Palahniuk
(P)2002 Random House, Inc.

Critic Reviews

"One of the freshest, most intriguing voices to appear in a long time. He rearranges Vonnegut's sly humor, DeLillo's mordant social analysis, and Pynchon's antic surrealism (or is it R. Crumb's?) into a gleaming puzzle palace all its own." (Newsday)
"At times very funny. Also sick and perverted....Readers will love it. Readers will hate it and be offended by it. Must listen to figure out what you think." (AudioFile)
"Displays a Swiftian gift for satire, as well as a knack for crafting mesmerizing sentences that loom with stark, prickly prose and repetitive rhythms." (San Francisco Examiner)

Oh please, not another abridged!!!

Will you please stop featuring such appealing novels only available in abridged format? I am continually stumped as to why oh why anyone with a brain would even bother to read an abridged novel. Several times I have found on your site what promised to be a good read, but only available in the abridged version, and I have gone to the competition and rented the unabridged cassettes. Please stop the insanity!

170 of 182 people found this review helpful

Oh please, not another abridged!!!

Will you please stop featuring such appealing novels only available in abridged format? I am continually stumped as to why oh why anyone with a brain would even bother to read an abridged novel. Several times I have found on your site what promised to be a good read, but only available in the abridged version, and I have gone to the competition and rented the unabridged cassettes. Please stop the insanity!

94 of 103 people found this review helpful

Stop the Abridged Madness!

“It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.”
― Philip K. Dick, VALIS

I'm not sure how this one slipped by me. I normally don't purchase abridged novels or audiobooks. Perhaps, I just really wanted to hear Palahniuk read his own stuff (his voice is uncannily like a friend of mine who suffers from Triskaidekaphobia, but I digress...), but I can't give it a great review because it is ABRIDGED. Half the Mona Lisa might still be 1/2 a Da Vinci, but it isn't the Mona Lisa anymore. It is a piece. A sleave. Ugh.

I really liked this book. In a lot of ways it may be my favorite Palahniuk novel (so far, and ignoring the abridgement which I had to fix on my own by going back to the original novel). You can tell CP is leaving a lot of his own emotion and blood in the narrative. Do I think it is autobiographical? Certainly not, but I think it may be built out of stones that Palahniuk has lifted. He is able to weave many of the themes he will visit again and again into this novel. The struggle of addiction, the struggle to be human in a dehumanized world, the explosive need to not conform to what is being sold is all here.

There is a period in modern life when you wake up and realize that YOU are the beakless chicken destined to spend the rest of your life in a battery cage so small you cannot even stretch your wings. Society will continue to feed and water you as long as you keep pumping those eggs out. Most of us wake up to this existence and either pray or beg for it to end quickly. We might seek to muffle our existence with drugs, or religion, or sex, or exercise, or some other form of mental escape. We all grab for some opiate of the egg farm. Palahniuk is one of those rare writers, one of those rare birds who won't sit still in the cage. He is a chicken that seems fully prepared to burn the farm DOWN.

26 of 30 people found this review helpful

Original amusing and sexy in a sick kind of way

I sometimes wonder if I have been listening to the same book as other reviewers. This is an ultimately uplifting book about the point at which people break out of destructive behaviors and turn their lives around.
Now that obviously involves delving into the destructive behaviors but since the example given is sex addiction everything has its positive side.
I found it a very funny book. It is completely unreliable on almost everything especially the opening entreaty from the author to stop reading.
If you are easily offended its not for you. If your are annoyed by snowboarder speak...Dude don't do it!
If you enjoy original and irreverent ideas coming at you in twisted but amusing ways get it in your cart!
I bought it because I enjoyed the sample...I think its pretty representative of the whole book so I would recommend you try that, if you enjoy it you will enjoy the whole thing.

13 of 15 people found this review helpful

Completely mis-understood work of genius

This book has been reviewed by several prudes on this site, and that's cool. But this book contains so much more depth and insight into people's actions and the motivations behind them. It is one of the most insightful and thought provoking books I've ever read, and it's a shame that so many people can't see past the "vulgarity and sex talk". Have an open mind with this one and you might walk away a different person. I know I did.

17 of 20 people found this review helpful

A very subtle, very brilliant, author!

Chuck does something not many other people do and he may not do it intentionally, but the wisdom of his writing is buried underneath a sort of "shock test" that you have to be open-minded enough to accept as having some value, before his brilliance really starts to surface for you. 'Lullaby' is better, but 'Choke' is good.

3 of 3 people found this review helpful

Loved this book!

Very dark and dry humor, kept me interested the entire time. The author narrates the book which I really enjoyed. His dead pan delivery of some of the most shocking material literally made me laugh out loud numerous times. If you like sarcastic dark humor you must check this out. If you are very serious about a 12 step program you belong to this book might not be for you.

3 of 3 people found this review helpful

sobering

I got this book because I really enjoyed the movie "Fight Club." I was a little unnerved by the extensive and raw description of what goes on in the mind of a sex addict. Though this was disturbing, I found the book compelling. In the end I felt that the author's narration set the perfect tone. I enjoyed my little journey in someone else's mind--a reminder that the world is composed of all kinds.

10 of 12 people found this review helpful

Do not recommend

Struggled to finish it with such a monotone voice. I was so excited about it due to a recent recommendation, but the only way I could get through it was on a long trainride. I still cannot tell if the story was uninteresting due to the voice, or if it was not unique in general.

1 of 1 people found this review helpful

Dull voice performance

The author read his book with no emotion at a very slow pace. The story had some great disgusting imagery, and a great premise but was poorly executed.

1 of 1 people found this review helpful

Bizarre

Dealing with a world of sex addiction - not one for the faint hearted! Gets more intriguing as the book goes on. Chucks reading style is quite monotonous and droning... but it does kinda fit the theme of an addicts life ‘on repeat’ . It will be a good one for the book club!

Very talent individual. Very inspiring!

chuck is definetely an inspiration to myself and my writing career which I just started. I enjoyed reading and listening to this novel immensely.

0 of 1 people found this review helpful

Very unique

Took me a while to work out what was going on, but I throughly enjoyed the story once I got into it.

0 of 1 people found this review helpful