The thin line between facts and fiction
STRANGER THAN FICTION
By Chuck Paluhniuk
233 pages
Published by Double Day
THE journalist is a writer in a hurry, always pounding on the keys to beat the deadline. The journalist writes objectively, detached from his or her piece, and restricted by the banal who-what-when-where formula.
The “writer writer,” as Chuck Palunhniuk calls it, is someone who writes leisurely and more creatively. The writer writer uses his own style as the formula.
The difference between the journalist writer and the writer writer reflects the difference between regular hardcore news that is purely informative, and an article that creates vivid imagery and literary pleasure offered by fiction.
Palunhniuk’s “Stranger Than Fiction” happily combines hard facts and pleasure reading.
“Stranger Than Fiction” is a collection of nonfiction materials that read like fiction. It contains 23 essays and journalistic pieces written in a delicious prose so delightful to read. His sentences have rhythm and crisp that uniquely characterizes his fictional works such as “Fight Club,” “Choke” and “Diary.”
“Stranger Than Fiction” is about real events and real people, whose characters Palunhnuik vividly portrays with full dimension and in a manner that will not leave you indifferent to the person being portrayed.
His report about the demolition in a Washington town called Lind gives complete keen details about what members of the demolition team is wearing, how they came to town and what the place is like.
The segment about a college wrestling in Waterloo, Iowa reads exactly how he describes the piece: “What happens on this page isn’t wrestling, it’s writing,” he writes. “At best, this is a postcard from a hot, dry weekend in Waterloo, Iowa. Where meat fines from.”
Other essays include the wild sex festival in Missuola, Montana, the murder of Paluhniuk’s father and the trial of the killer, his encounters with clairvoyants, the side story of “Fight Club” before it was made into a movie starring Edward Norton and Brad Pitt, and stories that he collected from therapy groups and hospitals.
The book’s conversational tone will make you want to keep on “listening” and get you interested in the otherwise mundane details of events that are otherwise tritely reported in the newspaper.
Palunhnuik adds a new character to the American literary scene.
