Pygmy - Chuck Palahniuk

And so to my latest update - again a long time in the making. Perhaps my reading has been distracted by the endless hours of work - but more likely the technological delights of twitter, spotify and the iPlayer have been soaking up my time away from reading. I miss not riding the bus to work as this provided ample reading time, I am tempted into buying some kind of eReader or iPod touch to facilitate audio book listening on the morning stroll to work

But enough with the distractions of modern life and to my latest book review

I'm a fan of Chuck Palahniuk (not an obsessive fanboy however), when anyone asks me who is my favourite author then he is the answer I give. His books have plots I like full of crazy situations and occasional twists, but more than that he develops a rhythm in the writing that becomes a kind of shorthand as the book progresses

His latest book is Pygmy. In it we are presented with agent number 67, nicknamed Pygmy by the American family who take him in under the guise of an exchange student. Throughout the book we are shown flashes of Pygmy's training in the home country and his and the other agents attempts at infiltrating American society in order to set up Operation Havoc. But for me this book became not about the story but the reading of it. As we are told the story through the eyes, thoughts and words of Pygmy we are presented with some very twisted broken English. To start with I couldn't get my head around the language, couldn't get a grasp on what was happening. I normally devour a Palahniuk swiftly and with great relish but this was something new to me. I put it aside after the first chapter for a day or two as I didn't want to get frustrated. When reading it at my parents house I found that by treating the text almost as poetry I was able to get through it much easier, working with the punctuation the rhythm of the writing became clear and as the story began I started to really enjoy it, phew!

There is plenty of satire here on modern American culture and in particular the school system and its pupils, the use of language is great but I found it to have a slight anticlimax the great ending for me never came.

This is a short book, not as short as his previous novel Snuff however, but it took me a long time to read. If you are new to Palahniuk then this certainly is not the place to start, I'd recommend Lullaby or of course Fight Club but if you are interested in books that play with and almost create their own language like Clockwork Orange then give this a try