The only real knowledge I had about Chuck Palahnuik was though the film Fight Club. (Which a terrific flick and excellently directed and photographed. It’s gotta be in my top 25-50 of all time.) I had never read one of his books before. Until now. I checked Lullaby out of the library as I was browsing around looking for something new and interesting. The librarian who checked me out remarked that he is one of her favorite authors and she owns all of his books. So I was intrigued. And this book?It’s good.Imaginative, bold, and seething with scathing commentary on contemporary American society and its willingness to be governed by consumerist culture, and content in its indifference and ignorance, Lullaby is a richly padded and darkly nihilistic parable about morality and power, with a dash of hopelessness sprinkled in.It may sound like a downer but Chuck Palahnuik‘s charm lies in his use of language. He has a gifted hand, aided by a thoughtful mind. Reading it, each word seems deliberate. The book isn’t so much nuanced as it is direct. Carl Streator tells it like it is. How he sees it. How he feels about it. Unusual in its tone and unapologetic in its message, Lullaby is narrative that is strangely pleasurable despite the nightmare it weaves.The novel is also peppered with repeated phrases, slightly altered each time it appears. They begin to take on a sort of sing-song quality in and of themselves. And how appropriate for a story named after a kind of song. “Sticks and stones may break your bones but words _____.” — “These _____-oholics. These _____-ophobics.” — “For whatever reason, I thought of _____.” Another repeated technique is that as Streator describes color–what someone is wearing for instance–he assigns it the color of a fine dining dish. It’s really kind of cool.Since the film Fight Club was about all I knew about Chuck Palahnuik, I must admit that the themes and overt messages of Lullaby are familiar. Like the narrator in Fight Club, Carl Streator rants on about people. Their irritating manners. Their rude behavior. Their sick minds. But it still feels fresh and relevant. You respect the viewpoint because you can understand it. Streator is a lonely man, a bitter man. He does little more than exist until his life is forever-changed by the power a single poem holds. This story is an adventure.There’s a high body count. He can’t control himself. But he wants to. All he has to do is think the poem the person that has inflamed his annoyance drops dead. He practices counting exercises to direct his death wishes away from unknowing victims. “Counting 345, counting 346, counting 347…” Hmm, yet another repeated phrase.The book is a lot of things. Thrilling. Depressing. Satisfying. All at once, and not necessarily in that order. The ending leaves you contemplating the new world order that now exists in the Lullaby world and I found myself thinking, now that would be an interesting television show! This story is filled with a variety of vividly imagined characters, each with their own views on modern life and morality. And they are all chasing the power of magic, hoping to wield it for their own uses.This was a fascinating read. Even a fun one. The words themselves are lyrical and flitter off of the page in a wonderful melody.Sticks and stones may break your bones but these words are quite astounding.
Brilliant. That's the word, the only word, that came to mind as I started reading Palahniuk's Lullaby. I struggled to keep reading, as I was too impressed with the prose. As a writer, reading Palahniuk made me feel like a dancing monkey in comparison. By the time I hit the halfway mark, I struggled to keep reading for an altogether different reason. It had become too fragmented, repetitive, and just plain boring. At the beginning, this passage stopped me. Full stop. Absolute. No going further out of awe:"Helen, she's wearing a white suit and shoes, but not Snow White. It's more the white of downhill skiing in Banff with a private car and driver on call, fourteen pieces of matched luggage, and a suite at the Hotel Lake Louise."By the time I had reached page 116, about halfway through, I've read about twenty passages stylistically the same. This color. But not color like this, more like this extended metaphor. Dull. First time, brilliant. First few times, brilliant. Twentieth, dull. Okay. I might be exaggerating with the twenty mark. I didn't count, but it's repetitive enough to make it annoying. Unlike his other "choruses," like "I know this because Tyler knows this" or "these noise-aholics, these peace-aphobics" (and all the variations on that theme) or the counting to remain calm, it doesn't tie anything together. It doesn't do a thing past a look-at-how-well-I-can-write. Over and over, which defeats its own purpose. It's like those movie scenes so overdone they're obviously this-is-my-Oscar-winning-performance-scene. Again with the ads Oyster, one of the many despicable characters in this novel, takes out to blackmail corporations. Really. Really. Old. I get it. I don't have to be beaten over the head with it.**spoilers** -- **trigger warnings** Then, on page 177 (Ch 29), after I skipped dozens of pages of the same-ol', same-ol' repetition, where no new character development is revealed nor is the plot projected forward, I came to the part where Streater remembers orally and vaginally raping his dead wife. Of course, he only thought she was unconscious, so it was just rape, not necrophilia. "It's not rape if they're dead."This is where I stopped reading.Not sure which was more disturbing, the fact that Streater calls it "the best he had" since before his child was born or that he didn't even bother to check on her after he got off with her unconscious, unresponsive form. I'm utterly disgusted by Palahniuk, and I'm not sure I'll be reading anymore. Darkness is one thing. Disturbing is one thing, and I like things very dark, but something about this is beyond revolting. Thankfully, the protagonist and everyone, really, are all horrific people, so at least the rape isn't brushed off as something acceptable. That's the only thing that might get me to try another book.This is the first Palahniuk book in which I'd gotten this far. I'm partially into Fight Club at the moment, the second time I've tried to read it. The first I found difficult to keep going for the same reason at the beginning: blown away by the prose. That, coupled with the movie playing in my head, made it hard for me to read. I'm trying again, and I hope to get through it this time. Two stars, only because of the brilliant prose. I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone.
What do You think about Lullaby (2003)?
Moj prvi susret s Palahnikom - privukao me fantasy dio priče - "kletva".Nisam čitao Fight Club (mislim da ni neću - gledao film pa me nešto i ne privlači radnja), a osim priče Guts jučer ni išta drugo tako da ne mogu suditi o njegovoj navodnoj ozloglašenosti no Uspavanka ima samo neke sitne izljeve bijesa.Druga je stvar tko i iz kog razloga izgovara kletvu (koja stvarno "radi")Što bi vi uradili da imate tako neku zanimljivu kletvicu u pripravi? Možda bi vam Palahniuk dao koju ideju pa pročitajte, nije loše.Solidna trojka.
—Krbo
Palahniuk, the Portlander (Oregon, not Maine) who wrote the cult classic Fight Club, has four other novels. One of them is Lullaby, which might or might not be just as off-the-wall as its more popular brother.The book opens with a scene from a real estate office. Helen Hoover Boyle and her assistant Mona listen to a police scanner for deaths (and potential sales) and field calls from frightened new homeowners who have bought what Helen calls "distressed" (haunted) houses. Helen sells the same homes over and over, creating a niche market with a steady income.Chapter two is from the perspective of an unknown character, whose identity isn't revealed until much later in the book. This narrator is hunting miracles: the Flying Virgin, who appeared in New Mexico and wrote "STOP HAVING BABYS" in the sky with a can of Bug-Off brand insect fogger; the Roadkill Jesus Christ/I-84 Messiah, who restores dead animals to their pre-accident conditions; the Judas Cow, at the Stone River Meatpacking plant in Nebraska, who refused to lead a herd of cows into the slaughterhouse, and instead took a seat and spoke at length about giving up meat, taught its audience a Hindi song, and answered questions about the nature of life and death.The third chapter brings us to Carl Streator, a journalist trained to note details. Assigned to do a series of stories on crib death for the Lifestyles section of his newspaper, he visits the parents and homes of recently deceased babies. On his first visit, he notes, among other things, an open library book on a wicker chest in the nursery. This book, Poems and Rhymes from Around the World, is open to page 27. Carl diligently writes down the eight-line traditional African poem - a culling song, a lullaby, the book says - in his notes. This poem shows up at each of the homes he visits; he's found a pattern.In his editor's office, he reads the poem aloud. The next day, the editor doesn't show up for work.Carl has a problem with anger management and soon discovers bodies piling up around him. Mona, the realtor's assistant, is a Wiccan who recognizes Carl's power and the story just gets stranger from there. Carl, Helen, Mona, and Mona's boyfriend Oyster set out on a road trip to track down and destroy every copy of the poem.Palahnuik's writing style is sometimes choppy and repetitive, which took a little to get used to. This story, which might be considered a magical realism murder mystery, is brilliantly conceived. The plot doesn't just twist, it writhes. For a little while, I had no idea what was going on. I became mildly frustrated. But I was already hooked, so I pressed on and finally things started coming together. The trip was worth it. And I think Palahniuk effectively taps into that irritated, misanthropic side of humanity that would never publicly admit that, "Yeah, once in awhile, I wouldn't mind having a culling song handy..."
—Catten
Like all of Palahniuk’s work, Lullaby is a fairly strange, twisted take on society. In this case, the focus is on folklore and the rather corrupt moral compass that seems to drive modern man. For anyone who’s read Palahniuk before, you probably already know what to expect from his writing. He uses a fairly informal tone and relies on short, rapid sentences to keep the action moving. His characters are painted in vivid, near comic terms at times, and their motivations are fairly transparent. The paths of his stories, however, are typically less obvious, and Lullaby is no exception. For this novel, Palahniuk asks the question – what would you do if you had the power to kill painless, without any violence or noticeable evidence of the crime? It’s a question that naturally came to Palahniuk after his father was killed by the ex-boyfriend of a woman he was dating. The question as asked in the novel is folded into the idea that certain African lullabies — culling songs – are infused with the magical ability to kill the people who hear them. When an inquisitive reporter begins to do a feature piece on babies who have died of SIDS, he slowly unearths the cause that links them together. While this sets off the main course of the novel, it also gives Palahniuk the tools he needs to examine the broader question of how our society would actually use this ability. As one would expect, the variety is huge, ranging from social correction to personal gratification to pure impulse killing. Throughout Palahniuk’s exploration, the reader is fairly consistently challenged with characters that are less than moral and yet somehow likable even in their absurdity. And so you never forget who’s writing the story, the details can turn strange or twisted at the drop of a hat. Even though I wouldn’t call it a horror novel, I will say that the premise and structure of Palahniuk’s work is interesting to behold. For fans of Fight Club, you won’t find the same fast paced, surprising revelations in Lullaby, but you will be treated to the same sardonic, black humor.
—Tim
