User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
Quite possibly the most fucked up piece of literature I’ve ever read, this novel is a brilliantly executed train wreck from beginning to end.
Rating: really liked it
It made me want to blow my own jaw off...but in a good way.
Rating: really liked it
Check the shelf I put this on. Now you're ready: This book is insane. There's something on practically every page that makes you say, "What the *%$#!?" You'll keep reading anyway, though, and you'll love it. The book's like a really hard-core Swedish massage. It hurts SOOOOO good.
The story is essentially about beauty: who values it, what it means, how it can be good, and how it can be a horror. Not only do the characters suffer FOR beauty, they suffer BECAUSE of beauty, and that's a powerful comment on current American society. Palahniuk shows off masterful writing all the way through, allowing the reader to both like and dislike, agree and disagree with all of the characters. He lays pathos out before his readers and expects us to have the capacity and intelligence to simultaneously exalt and suffer, and that's powerful stuff. If you don't have a firm grip on your sanity, a good sense of humor, and an expansive sense of the ridiculousness that is humanity, don't bother with this book.
Rating: really liked it
I'm too old for this stuff. Shocking doesn't do it for me alone, and he works SO VERY HARD at being vulgar and violent and crass. Don't get me wrong; those are three things that can make for a great story. But it was so unrelenting and contrived, and not as funny as it was supposed to be. There were some clever turns of phrase, and it wasn't entirely unenjoyable, but I was not really impressed.
Rating: really liked it
I have a theory about Chuck Palahniuk books.
If somebody is starting to read Chuck Palahniuk for the first time...the first book they read of his will always be their favorite. I have found that to be the case with many people.
I really enjoyed Invisible Monsters and it was the first Chuck Palahniuk book I read. It was such a new approach to writing that I had never seen before, and I found myself really engrossed and moved by the now-usual Palahniuk twisty ending. It was such a shocking book to me that I loved every page of it.
Of course, since, I have read Chuck Palahniuk books that I could consider to be better, but the initial shock of this book on me has kept it the one I've liked the most.
A lot of people I have talked to really don't like this book of Palahniuk's, but I think that is probably because they didn't read it first.
Rating: really liked it
Yes! This is what Chuck Palahniuk is all about - a wonderful darkly comical yet engrossing thriller cum mystery cum horror! A supermodel has her lower jaw blown off, from being shot through her car window. Palahniuk brings together a non-linear story, told in a multitude of snippets of the before, duration and after, the shooting!
This book has such a surreal cast, from the vice cop that wears Speedos in the park to entrap men, to the elegant and beautiful Brandy Alexander, prescribed drugs addict and queen of flamboyancy. Among this cast however dwells an invisible monster! One of my fave Palahniuk's. 7 out of 12.
2003 read
Rating: really liked it
Chuck Palahnuik’s Invisible Monsters has many similarities to Fight Club and clear influences from Sartre and John Barth.
It’s disjointed, fragmented, almost incomplete, and yet, he raises complex questions and makes brilliant observations. I don’t think he is so much nihilistic as he is post-modern and just doesn’t believe in culture de jour, readily satirizing at what needs to be poked fun.
Rating: really liked it
This is, and always will be, one of my favourite Palahniuk books. Something about it just grabs me by the throat, punches me in the throat and leaves me breathless! I love how truly fucked up and twisted this story is, no one does fucked up and twisted quite like Chuck does! It’s been years since I’ve read this book so I had forgotten most of the story and it was like I was reading it again for the first time and it reminded me why I love Palahniuk’s writing.
Rating: really liked it
It very seriously makes me sad that there are people that haven't read Invisible Monsters. Invisible Monsters is the most amazing work of art I have ever experienced and reading it for the 3rd time was the best decision I have made this summer. Of course, this is the remix version, so it was different than the original Invisible Monsters but mainly just in the formatting and some added chapters.
* If you haven't read Invisible Monsters before and you decide to read it, I would recommend the original version. This version was Chuck Palahniuk's original vision for this novel. It reads like a Vogue. At the end of the prologue it says, "Now, Please, Jump to Chapter Forty-One." So you flip to page 284. Then turn jump to chapter 1,40, and so on and so on so that you you are going back and forth after each chapter. And when you finish the book you realize that there are still chapters left that you didn't read. There's 6 chapters actually that aren't really part of the main story. And two of the chapters are published with flipped text so that you have to put the book up to a mirror in order to read them. All of his 'gimmicks' make sense and are really interesting but maybe I'm just a lazy reader because I thought it kind of detracted from the reading experience. Some of the extra chapters were short 'stories' on a few of the characters and some of them told more about Chuck's background and his experience writing Invisible Monsters years ago.
* I did like that this edition was hardcover and even if the chapter jumping wasn't my favorite thing to do, I like his ideas and I like the fact that he'll do something different.
* Ultimately, this is the best book ever (other than the original version), and reading Invisible Monsters for the first time was one of the most significant points in my life and led to so much for me.
Edit: Sorry, there are a few more extra chapters than I originally thought, so make sure to look through the book a few times for all the extra chapters I guess.
Rating: really liked it
Chuck Palahniuk is the hugely popular author of modern, edgy books like Fight Club (also a movie with Brad Pitt--go ahead, act surprised) and Choke. For this reason I did not expect to like Invisible Monsters, originally published in 1999.
The story is told by a nameless narrator: a young woman who used to be beautiful. After a series of bizarre, haunting events involving a freeway, birds and a few other things those days are gone forever. Her face disfigured, her voice gone, the narrator is invisible. And a monster in the eyes of most. Desperate for someone to save her, the narrator meets Brandy Alexander at just the right time. Brandy embodies the life that the narrator used to have--except for an important operation that Brandy still needs to have.
Riding off with Brandy, the narrator starts fresh. Life is a story. If you don't like the story you have, make up a new one. As the lives Brandy offers up as truth continue to change and the lies threaten to fall apart, it becomes clear that no matter where you run eventually you have to face the facts and really decide what story you want to tell.
That's the story. But it's really not even half the story.
Stylistically, this novel has a lot going on. It's written in the first person, present tense setting up a tone that is both conspiratorial and conversational. Despite that, the narrator remains aloof, unreliable. Talking to the reader like an old friend, the narrator reveals the smallest details of her past while leaving key plot points to herself until the right moment. There are few male novelists who can write as convincingly in the voice of a woman as Palahniuk. The narration is amazingly authentic even when the story becomes more and more over-the-top.
Palahniuk also brings a high level of complexity to the narrative, writing the story in a non-linear format. The novel opens with the final scene as the narrator tries to explain how she got to that point. Along the way flashbacks are interwoven with "the present" and other points in the time line of character's lives.
This is the kind of book that requires a lot of attention. Like the modeling world that the narrator comes from, nothing in this novel is exactly what it seems. Characters lie, information given as fact turns out to be false. Palahniuk manages all of these elements impressively well, making it all work despite the bizarreness and absurdity inherent to certain parts of the plot.
More than anything, though, this book is really a character study. Palahniuk creates a lot of unique characters whose lives intertwine unexpectedly. As might be expected from the plot description given above, many ofthe relationships between characters in Invisible Monsters are dysfunctional. But it is the dysfunction that allows Palahniuk to look at how people interact and what it really means to love someone. So, while it is utterly strange, this novel definitely puts the "fun" in dysfunctional.
You can find this review and more on my blog Miss Print
Rating: really liked it
REVIEW ALSO ON: http://bibliomantics.com/2012/06/01/a......
We’ve all seen extended edition and director’s cuts of movies, but this is the first time I have ever come across an author’s cut of a book. With this hardcover release of Chuck Palahniuk’s third published novel (but his first in terms of writing), he took the opportunity to change the linear format that was originally published in 1999 and release it the way he initially envisioned it. The intention was to give the reader the feel of literally getting lost inside the book, as one would be with a Vogue magazine. Which you have to admit is kind of perfect for a novel centered around beauty, perceptions, and transformation. Sadly no Madonna songs though.
So how exactly is this achieved? The narrative flips the reader around from chapter to chapter (41, 1, 40, 2, 39, 4, 38, 5, 37, 6, etc.) with the instructions at the end of each chapter to, “Now, Please Jump to Chapter …” So polite. This makes things intriguing, because unlike in a typical book where a dwindling number of pages signal the end is coming, you don’t know exactly when Invisible Monsters Remixwill reach its climax. And as with the original Invisible Monsters, the narrative itself skips around in time, so you will be well and truly lost in the events while you read. It’s a non-linear format inside a non-linear format, a mirror image. It couldn’t be produced as intended initially, but now at least it can be read and enjoyed by Chuck’s legion of fans.
One downside to this format, is that you might inadvertently see key bits of information as you flip through from chapter to chapter. This will lead you to wonder exactly how the narrative could lead there, so at least it’s not a total spoiler. Think of it as a darker version of “How I Met Your Mother”, but more akin to, “How I Lost My Face”. Page numbers would probably be easier for a reader to navigate from place to place, but I imagine it would be a logistics nightmare in terms of publishing every time the book gets re-released or the format is changed. This way at least is manageable for everyone except the dyslexics, but let’s be honest, page numbers would be even more difficult to follow.
While the original novel was published in a straightforward manner to please readers and make it more marketable, this version is Palahniuk’s original vision. Due to this, in addition to jumping around from chapter to chapter, there are also additional chapters outside this “straightforward” narrative. Twelve to be exact, split up into three sections which instruct the reader to loop between chapters over and over again. For example chapter 3 to chapter 16 to chapter 30 to chapter 3. Lather, rinse, repeat. Even after you’re done with the main story there’s even more to discover. We’re back to the Vogue magazine idea here.
Most of these side stories deal with the process of revision and re-imagining famous movies, as Chuck did with this novel, while others detail where our narrator is now (after her story). These sections are all new additions to the original novel, and some chapters are even written backwards, forcing you to read the words in a mirror. It’s a pain, but there is a purpose about reflections and mirrors and being forced to look at yourself while you read. You’re reading while watching yourself read while you read… You get the picture. It’s the idea of multiple reflections which function the same as the chapters that repeat on a loop. Where does it all begin and end? So many moebius strips, so little time.
The third and most interesting of these narrative diversions contains biographical stories about Chuck’s own life. There are three separate stories in this loop, one which deals with a road trip that inspired this novel, one about when he was writing his first manuscript, and a third about being on set for the film of his novel turned movie, Choke. Since the fictional story deals so much with impossible sounding coincidences (even though our world is a small one), Chuck shares some of his own coincidences in these stories, from a shared memory between him and a friend he hadn’t met yet, to the death of the mother he wrote about correlating to his own mother’s death, and all the coincidences in between. They’re poignant, beautiful, and most importantly true.
As with most of Chuck P. novels, there is a repetitive element throughout the narrative. Where in Fight Club it was “I am Jack’s” insert organ of the body here (my personal favorite is “raging bile duct”), this story also has a similar narrative trick. In this novel, weaved throughout is the flash of a camera taking photos with a wide variety of emotions being yelled out as if by a fashion photographer. The most memorable line being, “Give me lust, baby. Flash. Give me malice. Flash. Give me detached existentialist ennui. Flash.” There are also paragraphs starting with the phrase, “Jump to…” to tell the reader that the story is once again jumping in time and location. Spoiler alert: this happens more than in a “Doctor Who” episode.
There are plenty of reasons why this new structure works so well in this choose your own adventure type chapter hopping format, but I appreciate it even more for what it says about life. The end of a book generally doesn’t signal the end of a character’s life, unless you’re reading a historical fiction novel, and Palahniuk knows that. So rather than bring the end of the narrator’s story to the end of the novel, he wisely ends it somewhere in the middle, where stories generally leave their protagonists on their journey through life. Bravo on that Chuck.
Rating: really liked it
Jump to me reviewing Palahniuk's
Invisible Monsters. If
mindfuck was a genre, this would be one of its most characteristic works. Palahniuk states at the introduction that it won't be linear, the story won't be in the form of
and then and then and then. So what he does is at the end of each chapter he tells you to please, jump to this or that chapter. It was a first for me having only a vague idea of my progress in a book.
As for the plot, it's better to not know anything before reading it. Palahniuk draws his characters as caricatures but that is not a problem at all because that is simply not the point. Besides, the type of people he describes, are little more than caricatures in real life too.
Invisible Monsters is nihilistic and cruel, while sensitive and deep at the same time. The point of it is not as simple as one may initially think. On the contrary, it has many sides, all of which are touched in multiple ways and in all possible manners. Nothing better than a book which describes the most extreme dysfunctionalities modern society brings about, in such a delicate and unpretentious manner. This part from the intro says a lot:
Nowadays, whatever purchase you moon over, whatever person you lust after, most likely it’s presented on a smooth glass or plastic screen. On a laptop or a television. And no matter what the technology, you’ll catch sight of your own reflection. In that electric mirror, there hovers your faint image. You’ll be superimposed over every email. Or, lurking in the glassy surface of online porn, there you are. Fewer people shut down their computers anymore, and who can blame them? The moment that monitor goes black, you’re looking at yourself, not smiling, not anything. Here’s your worst-ever passport photo enlarged to life size. Swimming behind the eBook words of Jane Austen, that slack, dead-eyed zombie face, that’s yours. That’s you.
Now, Please, Jump into the river and die with me
(The End)
Rating: really liked it
The main character in this book is nameless, and disfigured. She was once a beautiful model, and now feels invisible. She hides under a veil after being called a monster. When she lost her face she saw the true colors of everyone in her life. Her fiance leaves, and her best friend constantly steals her clothes while she's in the hospital. In speech therapy our main character meets Brandy Alexander, and the story unfolds.
This is probably my least favorite book so far by Palahniuk, but it was still enjoyable. I wish I hadn't read the synopsis of this book, and just went into it knowing nothing at all. Another problem is my expectations. When I heard this was Palahniuk's first book he ever tried to have published, and it got rejected as "too disturbing" I thought this was just what I was looking for at the moment. Well, I came to the conclusion that either other people get disturbed and/or offended too easily, or I am truly becoming incapable of being shocked. So either way this is not the book's fault...
Some of the "twists" in this book I saw coming within the first few pages. I will admit that there were a few that got me, but most were predictable. Again, had I not read the synopsis maybe I would have had a completely different opinion, but I have no way or knowing that for sure.
So that's what I didn't like, but here is what I did like. Invisible Monsters is a book that's not about the plot. It's really about the characters. None of them are likeable, but that makes them fun to read about. Like me, you will probably wind up not caring about any of them, but they will make you laugh with their outrageous plans and crazy antics. I really could not stand the main character's parents, though. Oh jeez, these parents were like...cliches of idiotic parents that embarrass their children...times 10 thousand. Just wow. Very interesting character study, anyway.
I enjoyed how the story was told with lots of scene jumping, magazine style, using the word FLASH like flash photography. I also thought Chuck did a decent job writing a woman's perspective, and he honestly captured the way some extremely superficial women think. There are definitely some inspired parts, and it's very fast paced. The story never got boring for me.
Rating: really liked it
It was a long time ago I read the original version so I can't say for sure on what was added material.
Again I feel like I lost out on some of the experience by going audiobook instead of physical book...in the audiobook it would have you switch to a different disc and track where I'm assuming the paper book would have had you go to a different page. I did like the almost wandering feeling of not knowing how far through the book I was.
As always with my #1 fav author, absolutely wild ride, never a dull moment and just a freaking awesome read for anyone, especially if you feel like a f*&* the world vibe. 😙
Rating: really liked it
****DO NOT LOOK THIS UP IN WIKIPEDIA IT GIVES AWAY EVERYTHING I REPEAT DO NOT LOOK IT UP! In fact, don't even read the synopsis, I would just dive right in knowing nothing.****
THE START:
So far it is pretty good. It says right from the start that you are going to read this book feeling like you are missing things and it's very true.
I am having a hard time holding on to any solid plot but am captivated from what I can grasp. It's the same author that wrote Fight Club and it kind of has that same feel where certian things happen and you're like, "wait what just happned, what did I miss?" when in reality you didn't miss anything, nothing has been revealed yet they are just going on in the plot as if you know it already.
Only about 1/4 into it...more to follow! (This is a FABULOUS idea ps!)
UPDATE:
So I am now 3/4 of the way through and it is all(finally!) starting to come together. I feel like I am going to have to re-read it now that I am starting grasp the plot and characters(yes, it really is that confusing!)
It's a trip.
I have to say I am relieved that it IS starting to make sense. When explaning how ramdom it was to people I used the movie Mulholland Drive to give an example.
The thing is, that movie never ended up making any sense(at least to me)so while read I was concerned it was just going to be this artsy "deep" book left up for interpretation that I wasn't cool enough (or drugged up enough)to understand.
Don't get me wrong still a very weird book but highly entertaining. I recommend that you read it carefully and try to remember details even if you don't understand it at the time.
Almost done!
FINALE:
WOW! I did NOT see that coming! If you are reading this and are going to now read the book I say again, pay attention! I am going to re-read the book now that I know where all the pieces go! I felt like I was watching a movie with a big black bar going through the middle and now it has been lifted and I want to watch it again. It was good, different, but good! I would have given it 4.5 stars if that was available. Well done! ****I also just read that they are turning this book into a movie to release late this year sweet!
