Choke tells the story of Victor Mancini, who works in a colonial-era theme park with a motley group of losers and breezes to sexual addiction support groups for entertainments. A medical school drop-out, he cannot afford the care of his feeble mother, so he resorts to consistently going to various restaurants and purposely causing himself to choke mid-way through his meal, luring a “good Samaritan” into saving his life. Why? “I do this because everybody wants to save a human life with a hundred people watching.”

By choking, you become a legend about themselves that these people will cherish and repeat until the die. They’ll think they gave you life. You might be the one good deed, the deathbed memory that justifies their whole existence.

Somebody saves your life, and they’ll love you forever. It’s that old Chinese custom  where if somebody saves your life, they’re responsible for you forever. It’s as if now you’re their child. For the rest of their lives, these people will write me. Send me cards on the anniversary. Birthday cards. It’s depressing how many people get this same idea. They call you on the phone. To find out if you’re feeling okay. To see if maybe you need cheering up. Or cash.

Along with Bret Easton Ellis and Irvine Welsh, Palahniuk has often been described as an MTV generation writer, with general characteristics that include hip, outrageous themes (“black comedy”), conspicuous distrust of the “regular life” , dysfunctional (usually young) characters and catchy quotable sentences. If you love Fight Club, American Psycho, Trainspotting, Haruki and Ryuu Murakami’s books, Donnie Darko, you might like this too.

The movie version has won a Special Jury Prize at 2008 Sundance Film Festival and will be released on September 26, 2008. For more information on this movie, visit the official site: http://www.foxsearchlight.com/choke/

This is a collection of more than 150 non-fiction pieces (critical essays, movie & book reviews, prologues, introductions) grouped chronologically from his earlier (disowned) writings to the year of his death in 1986. Some of these pieces have also appeared in Labyrinths. Most are short, with longer pieces dedicated to certain subjects well-associated with Borges (The Thousand and One Night, time, dreams, labyrinth…).

Readers will notice recurring themes and subjects — Quixote, H.G. Wells, Chesterton, Poe, Joyce, Gibbon, etc. — even repetitions (of phrases, sentences, paragraphs, even pages), running through these vast range of essays. As Eliot Weinberger wrote in the introduction, Borges was fascinated with the infinite possibilities of reassemblies of old elements. (I rather pity the glaring absence of The Saragossa Manuscript, at least in When Fiction Lives in Fiction, whereas The Thousand and One Nights is discussed alongside The Golem and At Swim-Two-Birds.) Borges is notable for the incisive-strength with which he discusses vast range of subjects in accessible manner, his polyglot nature never to intimidate. His movie criticism, however, came nowhere near the erudition and range of his literary oeuvre.

Borges has often been accused of political inertia and detachment; Weinberger’s inclusion of Borges’ writings against Peron dictatorship, anti-Semitism, etc. might challenge this archetype. (Yet, at the same time, I don’t deny Borges’ “political Brahmanism”, his voluntary seclusion from reality into his invented universe — see Clive James’ Cultural Amnesia for an interesting comparison with Ernesto Sábato.)

This collection comes with Index, valuable for a book so brimming with thrilling ideas, and is well-translated.

Also available by the same author

Labyrinth
The Complete Fictions
Introduction to American Literature

A collection of metaphysical short stories set in various times and places, luminously darkened with the themes of fate and death’s impenetrability. With strong political undercurrents and recondite personal insights, Kiš’s reworked facts, Gnostic, Biblical, Koran myths and legends, political situations, rural folktales, depicting the delicate multitude and vicissitude of human life, perhaps with less faux vérité style than A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, yet with the same finely-crafted prose, subtle ironies and detachment that is both powerful and constrained.

The first, heroic, version was upheld and promulgated — orally and then in writing, in their chronicles– by the sans-culottes and Jacobins; the second, according to which the young man hoped to the very end for some magical sleight of hand, was recorded by the official historians of the powerful Hapsburg dynasty to prevent the birth of a legend. History is written by the victors. Legends are woven by the people. Writers fantasize. Only death is certain.

Readers familiar with Kiš’s life and other works (particularly garden, ashes) might feel some semi-biographical elements in The Encyclopedia of the Dead (A Whole Life), but in his insightful post-script, Kiš wrote about how, 6 months after the story was first published,

The person who dreamed the dream and to whom the story is dedicated to” (written for M. — K.) found an article in Yugoslav magazine about top-secret archives that contain names of eighteen billion people, living and dead, carefully entered on the 1,250,000 microfilms compiled to date by the Geneological Society of the Church of the Latter-Day Saints […]

The names in these extraordinary archives come from all over the world; they have been copied painstakingly from the most varied records, and the work goes on. The ultimate goal of this stupendous undertaking is to enter on microfilm nothing less than the whole of mankind — not only the part that is still living but also the part that has passed on to the otherworld.

With the shadows of pogroms, holocaust and fascist regimes looming in the background, Kiš casts doubts on commonly accepted notions (that “books serve only good causes”, that To Die for One’s Country is Glorious). Using a more or less familiar case (The Protocols of Elders of Zion), Kiš conscientiously reconstruct the story, imagining the obscure history, concealing the well-known “conspirator” figures whose sources Kiš discloses at the end of the book in his post-script, all the more creating blurred penumbras of facts and fictions.

Michael Henry Heim did a wonderful job — too bad he didn’t write any introduction.

Much love to L. for getting me this book.

I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.

With that hokum-slash-truism, the novel begins the story about Osman, a young student who became obsessed about a book, as well as those who have read it, looking for some sorts of answers, common threads, and comparisons to how the book affects their lives and gives the possibility of a new life (a sentiment shared by many readers, I’m sure).

He begins tracking Janan, whom he first saw the book being held by, and her friend/lover Mehmet, believing that they know something about the world of the book, but both of them soon disappear. Leaving his home (and his past life?), Osman embarks on aimless bus trips fraught with many fatal yet nonchalantly-written accidents (that may or may not be a bit much to some readers). He found Janan, and together they search for Mehmet in metaphorical, dreamlike coach rides, encountering darkly comical Dr. Fine with his hired “watches” that seeks to annihilate the book and its corrupting influence (I might turn potential readers off with that sentence, but it’s not that simplistic, my brain just refuses to write a better review) and uncovering the truths behind the grandeur signs of fates, hopes and dreams he had obsessively associated with and projected into the book, along with Janan.

The New Life is rather similar to The Black Book, although generally Pamuk is one of those writers whose works are permeated by similar characters — downbeat writers/artist/thinkers/drifters, beautiful, elusive woman — and themes — unrequited love, lost hope, east vs. west, disillusionment, identity, art — but he has the skills to whip these ingredients with the right amount of local culture & history, melancholy and humour into novels that work on different levels but ultimately hard to put down.

Also available by the same author:
My Name is Red (Faber, English)
The Black Book (Faber, English)
Snow (Faber, English)
The White Castle (Serambi, Bahasa Indonesia)