Pygmy by Chuck Palahniuk

The next book from Chuck is an interesting book that uses a toy/cartoon world to convey serious images. Much like Animal Farm did with Communism, this does with toy soldiers? Yeah, a big departure from the last book Snuff. I recall Snuff as being one of the most raunchy books I've ever read in a serious manner. Sure, I read the Ron Jeremy book in a weekend, but Snuff took things to all new levels, and most people that read it probably hated it for it's obvious pornographic literary material.

Then again, you can talk about 600 men having sex with one woman, but you can't have manga that depicts bestiality.

I will digress...the latest book from Chuck is interesting and a recommended book for fans of Chuck Palahniuk and beyond!

Here is a review from Publishers Weekly:

Palahniuk's 10th novel (after Snuff) is a potent if cartoonish cultural satire that succeeds despite its stridently confounding prose. A gang of adolescent terrorists trained by an unspecified totalitarian state (the boys and girls are guided by quotations attributed to Marx, Hitler, Augusto Pinochet, Idi Amin, etc.) infiltrate America as foreign exchange students. Their mission: to bring the nation to its knees through Operation Havoc, an act of mass destruction disguised as a science project. Narrated by skinny 13-year-old Pgymy, the propulsive plot deconstructs American fixtures, among them church (religion propaganda distribution outlet), spelling bees (forced battle to list English alphabet letters) and TV news reporters (Horde scavenger feast at overflowing anus of world history), before moving on to a Columbine-like shooting spree by a closeted kid who has fallen in love with the teenage terrorist who raped him in a shopping mall bathroom. Decoding Palahniuk's characteristically scathing observations is a challenge, as Pygmy's narrative voice is unbound by rules of grammar or structure (a typical sentence: Host father mount altar so stance beside bin empty of water), but perseverance is its own perverse reward in this singular, comic accomplishment.

Oh and just when you thought I was done, I was able to dig up a review via The Washington Post....here's a clip from that:

Sloppy yet smart, Chuck Palahniuk's "Pygmy" veers from sublimely ridiculous to just plain ridiculous, sometimes within a single paragraph.

An infiltrating agent from a nameless authoritarian country, Pygmy poses as a high school exchange student and joins the Midwestern family of Donald Cedar. "Host father," as Pygmy calls him, works for the Radiological Institute of Medicine and has access to biotoxins. Pygmy and his fellow undersize operatives hope to unleash a biochemical Operation Havoc on an unsuspecting United States.

You can read the full review of Pygmy online via Washington Post Online.

Pygmy is NOT a long book, but it has a deep amount of language and meaning, if you're the kind of person that likes arguing and thinking about themes in books. It's less raunchy then Chuck Palahniuk's other books, but it has its moments too.



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