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Sep 01, 2019baldand rated this title 4 out of 5 stars
Warning: Contains spoilers. As even Chuck Pahlaniuk said, the film is better than the novel, but the film could never have been made if Pahlaniuk’s dark comic genius had not created it. if you have already seen the film, as I had before I read “Fight Club”, the book is still well worth reading, as there are some parts of the novel that director David Fincher could not transfer to the screen. The novel isn’t really the love story that the film is. The film ends with the narrator and Marla Silver holding hands together on the top floor of a skyscraper as they watch empty office towers explode around them. It’s a pity that the novel didn’t end the same way. Instead of this, there is a silly scene in the afterlife that was incongruous with what had gone before. In the novel Marla tells the narrator after they have had sex that she wants to get pregnant by him and have his abortion. I thought it was funny but I can understand why others wouldn’t, including, apparently, Fox executive Laura Ziskin. According to Fincher the line didn’t get used in the film only because the bedroom scene between them was shot, improbably enough, in the rectory of a church, and it seemed sacrilegious to do so. Maybe so, but it is a line that doesn’t work so well in a love story either. The line that replaced it,“I haven’t been f--ked like that since grade school,” apparently had Helena Bonham Carter in stitches. Not that it matters but on p.218 there is a typo that really should have been corrected in this later edition of the novel. “Then, when they’re exhausted, the men and woman [should be “women”] go to church.” The later edition, not the original, is the one to read, as Pahlaniuk has a fascinating afterword on what inspired his novel, and everything that has transpired since it was published.