Chuck Palahniuk is an interesting author because he tells his stories through a different format than normal books. In Fight Club, he told the story through one viewpoint, but they spoke in third person and referred to themselves by their name. Rant, is an oral history told through many different interviews with different people. In my honest opinion, Fight Club is by far way better than Rant, but I still was able to get through the story and enjoy it.
First off, if you are wondering what the picture above depicts, it is a cow’s heart which plays an important role in characterizing the main character. Looking at the cover, this is not a book I would usually pick up, but seeing as how much I had liked Fight Club, I was willing to give it a try.
Palahniuk had some really good ideas that he put into this book, but not all of them were executed smoothly. Sometimes the book felt patchy, and a lot of times I found myself going back through the book to remember what role the characters had in Rant Casey (the main characters), life. The book is supposed to be taking place in a somewhat current America, but some of the plot seemed out of place for what is “normal”. As well as this, it is very difficult to link some of these ideas together as you come to the end of the book.
One idea that was interesting to me, was the idea of “Party Crashing” in which teams of 4 steal or bid on really nice cars, and then at night drive these cars and attempt to demolish other teams cars. For one of Rant Casey’s team members, they started because it was a way for them to get over their fear of being in a car crash, as she had been in a car crash before that killed both of her parents. The idea to start Party Crashing was sparked from the government who originally would purposely pose car crashes to see how it effects the flow of traffic and how best to handle crashes after they have happened.
What makes the book a little confusing, is adding in the idea of time travel and immortality. Yeah, I know, its a lot of things to pile into one book. It is proposed that if you go back in time and kill your mother before you were born, you would not change reality making yourself unborn in the future. Instead, you make yourself virtually immortal as you are still a person in the present, but you were never born in the past, making yourself unable to be killed as you already have been. Well at least, that’s what I picked up from it.
Overall, there were multiple times I found myself laughing at the ridiculousness of some of the anecdotes, and I think there was a solid goal in mind for the end of the book. Personally, I think it may have been hard for me to link some of the suggestions, but also the setting threw me off as well. I would give this book 2/5 stars as I do have a wide variety genre taste, I just thought this book could have used some reorganizing.
