Chuck Palahniuk — «Fight Club»

Вряд ли кому-то надо описывать эту книгу или переводить название. Фильм, думаю, смотрели все. Кто не смотрел — слышал.

Сюжет фильма почти соответствует книге. Отличия в мелочах, хотя ради них стоит почитать. Хотя бы даже на русском. На английском читается легко, часто лазить в словарь приходилось в двух случаях — когда затрагивалась тема медицины и отельно-ресторанной деятельности, то есть всплывали специфичные термины.

Дополнительным «бонусом» для меня стало то, что это вторая книга в моей жизни, которая удачно попала в нужное время и в нужное состояние души. Читаешь, и через абзац — вспышки в голове. Первой, в своё время, была «Повелитель теней» П. Верещагина (или Кайла Иторра) и она способствовала выводу из затяжной, в несколько лет, депрессии. «Бойцовский клуб», в этом плане, может в неё скорее погрузить, но так как я с тех пор немного окреп, то использую её в качестве эдакого путеводителя по забытым тёмным закоулкам своей души. Кино, к слову, такого глубокого эффекта не возымеет.

Цитаты:

***
We have sort of a triangle thing going here. I want Tyler. Tyler wants Marla. Marla wants me.
I don’t want Marla, and Tyler doesn’t want me around, not anymore. This isn’t about love as in caring. This is about property as in ownership.

***
This is when I’d cry because right now, your life comes down to nothing, and not even nothing, oblivion.
It’s easy to cry when you realize that everyone you love will reject you or die. On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone will drop to zero.

***
This is how it is with insomnia. Everything is so far away, a copy of a copy of a copy. The insomnia distance of everything, you can’t touch anything and nothing can touch you.

***
This was freedom. Losing all hope was freedom. If I didn’t say anything, people in a group assumed the worst. They cried harder. I cried harder. Look up into the stars and you’re gone.

***
I melt and swell at the moment of landing when one wheel thuds on the runway but the plane leans to one side and hangs in the decision to right itself or roll. For this moment, nothing matters. Look up into the stars and you’re gone. Not your luggage. Nothing matters. Not your bad breath. The windows are dark outside and the turbine engines roar backward. The cabin hangs at the wrong angle under the roar of the turbines, and you will never have to file another expense account claim. Receipt required for items over twenty-five dollars. You will never have to get another haircut.
A thud, and the second wheel hits the tarmac. The staccato of a hundred seatbelt buckles snapping open, and the single-use friend you almost died sitting next to says:
I hope you make your connection.
Yeah, me too.
And this is how long your moment lasted. And life goes on.

***
If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person?
I asked if Tyler was an artist.
Tyler shrugged and showed me how the five standing logs were wider at the base. Tyler showed me the line he’d drawn in the sand, and how he’d use the line to gauge the shadow cast by each log.
Sometimes, you wake up and have to ask where you are.
What Tyler had created was the shadow of a giant hand. Only now the fingers were Nosferatu-long and the thumb was too short, but he said how at exactly four-thirty the hand was perfect. The giant shadow hand was perfect for one minute, and for one perfect minute Tyler had sat in the palm of a perfection he’d created himself.
You wake up, and you’re nowhere.
One minute was enough, Tyler said, a person had to work hard for it, but a minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.
You wake up, and that’s enough.
His name was Tyler Durden, and he was a movie projectionist with the union, and he was a banquet waiter at a hotel, downtown, and he gave me his phone number.
And this is how we met.

***
Imagine, the task force guy says, telling a passenger on arrival that a dildo kept her baggage on the East Coast. Sometimes it’s even a man. It’s airline policy not to imply ownership in the event of a dildo. Use the indefinite article.
A dildo.
Never your dildo.
Never, ever say the dildo accidentally turned itself on.
A dildo activated itself and created an emergency situation that required evacuating your baggage.

***
And I wasn’t the only slave to my nesting instinct. The people I know who used to sit in the bathroom with pornography, now they sit in the bathroom with their IKEA furniture catalogue.
We all have the same Johanneshov armchair in the Strinne green stripe pattern. Mine fell fifteen stories, burning, into a fountain.
We all have the same Rislampa/Har paper lamps made from wire and environmentally friendly unbleached paper. Mine are confetti.
All that sitting in the bathroom.
The Alle cutlery service. Stainless steel. Dishwasher safe.
The Vild hall clock made of galvanized steel, oh, I had to have that.
The Klipsk shelving unit, oh, yeah.
Hemlig hat boxes. Yes.

***
You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you’re satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you’ve got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug.
Then you’re trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.

***
Tyler and I, we met and drank a lot of beer, and Tyler said, yes, I could move in with him, but I would have to do him a favor.
The next day, my suitcase would arrive with the bare minimum, six shirts, six pair of underwear.
There, drunk in a bar where no one was watching and no one would care, I asked Tyler what he wanted me to do.
Tyler said, «I want you to hit me as hard as you can.»

***
On the dresser, there’s a dildo made of the same soft pink plastic as a million Barbie dolls, and for a moment, Tyler can picture millions of baby dolls and Barbie dolls and dildos injectionmolded and coming off the same assembly line in Taiwan.

***
Without just one nest
A bird can call the world home
Life is your career

***
Only after disaster can we be resurrected.
«It’s only after you’ve lost everything,» Tyler says, «that you’re free to do anything.»

***
Watching white moon face
The stars never feel anger
Blah, blah, blah, the end

***
There are a lot of things we don’t want to know about the people we love.

***
To warm her up, to make her laugh, I tell Marla about the woman in Dear Abby who married a handsome successful mortician and on their wedding night, he made her soak in a tub of ice water until her skin was freezing to the touch, and then he made her lie in bed completely still while he had intercourse with her cold inert body.

***
THIS IS WHY I loved the support groups so much, if people thought you were dying, they gave you their full attention.
If this might be the last time they saw you, they really saw you. Everything else about their checkbook balance and radio songs and messy hair went out the window.
You had their full attention.
People listened instead of just waiting for their turn to speak.
And when they spoke, they weren’t telling you a story. When the two of you talked, you were building something, and afterward you were both different than before.

***
Nothing is static.
Everything is falling apart.

***
The first thing the hotel manager said was I had three minutes. In the first thirty seconds, I told how I’d been peeing into soup, farting on creme brulees, sneezing on braised endive, and now I wanted the hotel to send me a check every week equivalent to my average week’s pay plus tips. In return, I wouldn’t come to work anymore, and I wouldn’t go to the newspapers or the public health people with a confused, tearful confession.

***
Everyone wanted to ask if it [gun] was loaded, but the second rule of Project Mayhem is you don’t ask questions.
Maybe it was loaded, maybe not. Maybe we should always assume the worst.

***
How Tyler saw it was that getting God’s attention for being bad was better than getting no attention at all. Maybe because God’s hate better than His indifference.

Which is worse, hell or nothing?

***
The lower you fall, the higher you’ll fly.

***
«You’re not how much money you’ve got in the bank. You’re not your job. You’re not your family, and you’re not who you tell yourself. You’re not your name. You’re not your problems. You’re not your age. You’re not your hopes.»

***
Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don’t really need.
«We don’t have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression.»