Fight Club

Writer: Chuck Palahniuk
Genre: Fiction

Probably for the first time picked up a book after watching the movie. So impressive were the conversations in the movie that I knew the book had to be better. Turned out, I wasn’t wrong!

The main protagonist of the book is an insomniac who is trying to get sleep by visiting various support groups for they help him vent his feelings and give him a nice sleep. However this solution to his insomnia goes for a toss when he meets Marla, another fake visitor to the support groups.
On one of his business trips he had met Tyler Durden and when his apartment is destroyed in an explosion he moves in with Tyler. Thus starts his association with Tyler, who, unlike him, is a carefree, no-strings-attached kind of human. Together they start Fight Club, a place where men just gather to fight. Fight Club proves to extremely popular and soon there are branches in every city. Meanwhile, Tyler becomes involved with Marla and this is not liked by our protagonist who feels she is taking Tyler away from him. However he keeps the thoughts to himself.

Tyler starts activities that disrupts society functioning and his Fight Club followers execute dangerous missions under his leadership. The protagonist wants to question him but Tyler disappears and his efforts to trace him lead him to a situation so dangerous that it threatens his existence.

The synopsis may sound vague but trust me it is not possible to explain the book without giving away its major plot. It’s definitely an amazing book with some top notch lines, a few of which I jot down here.


"You're not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not your fucking khakis. You're the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world."


"On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."


"The things you own end up owning you."


"If you wake up at a different time in a different place, could you wake up as a different person?"

"It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything."


"Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off." [This is my personal favourite]