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    Choke
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    Choke
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    Choke
    Audiobook7 hours

    Choke

    Published by Penguin Random House Audio

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Victor Mancini, a medical-school dropout, is an antihero for our deranged times. Needing to pay elder care for his mother, Victor has devised an ingenious scam: he pretends to choke on pieces of food while dining in upscale restaurants. He then allows himself to be "saved" by fellow patrons who, feeling responsible for Victor's life, go on to send checks to support him. When he's not pulling this stunt, Victor cruises sexual addiction recovery workshops for action, visits his addled mom, and spends his days working at a colonial theme park. His creator, Chuck Palahniuk, is the visionary we need and the satirist we deserve.


    From the Trade Paperback edition.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateDec 3, 2002
    ISBN9780739304815
    Unavailable
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    Reviews for Choke

    3.5/5

    3,501 ratings92 reviews

    What did you think?

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    • 1/5
      disgusting. 100%
    • 4/5
      This is the first book I have read by this author and I was very surprised by his audacious writhing. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and I thought the ending was great in that it had some nice twists and an open ending.
    • 3/5
      Only on occasions does the blurb on the back of a book stray from the actual narrative. But Choke for me was such an example -- we learn of Victor Mancini, a Med-school drop out who "earns" money to fund his mother's elderly care expenses by choking on food at restaurants, so that those who save his life later feel responsible for checking up on him and sending him money. You can't really argue with that sort of a synopsis; it was unlike anything I had heard of, and so I eagerly jumped to buying this book. The truth is that all of the other aspects of Victor's life (which the back cover does also mention) take more of the center stage than the scamming itself. As a reader who expected to read into the mind of a deranged character and his frauds, it was a major disappointment to find only two instances where Victor actually carried out his scheme. Instead, we get countless of scenes showing how the self-loathing anti-hero hustles miserably at his job at a colonial theme park and visits his demented, ailing mother. Oh, and also of him carrying out a broad range of sexscapades with other sex addicts who, like him, are undergoing a 12-step addiction recovery program.What must be respected, however, is that the character of Victor is set up wonderfully. There are flashbacks of Victor's rocky childhood, during which his mother repeatedly nabs him out of his foster homes to give him the "true" vision of life and society, as opposed to the school-taught "nonsense". A traumatizing (although oddly comforting) moment in his life where he chokes on a corn dog and is saved by his mother appears to be the subconscious starting point of Victor's scamming, which, as we discover, not only supplements him with money but also the emotional comfort he has lacked his entire life. Snarky psychoanalysis at its finest.There is a lot to this book, which is of course the case when you have a man as brilliant as Chuck Palahniuk fleshing out the gritty, satirical scenes that he does, with a humor as sharp as a razor. Despite this being my first Palahniuk book, it wasn't hard to pick up on his ingenuity, but it is also quite clear that this is one of his weaker works. The overarching issue I had with Choke is that the story simply does not work, no matter how capable the author is. At the end of the day, how can someone collect enough money from this ludicrous scam to fund medical payments that cost 3000 dollars a month? Wouldn't word spread about his conducts? Why would someone feel so responsible for saving Victor's life that they would pay for any expense he makes up over the course of multiple years? None of this really made sense in my mind, and it is most certainly a gaping hole in the novel. Yet it is a breezy and entertaining read, so why not give it a chance.
    • 5/5
      Loved this book. Took me twice to try to read it to get into it, though. I picked it up one day, wasn't impressed, and then I waited several months before trying it again. I'm glad I re-tried it! This book is definitely in my top 10. This book is more than just a good story; it's good literature. It takes some adjusting to look past the shock value and harsh words: but trust me, there IS literary value in this book.
    • 4/5
      Palahniuk's best book.
    • 3/5
      Writing style and the topic isn't for me personally. But it was an interesting view into the life of an addict. Interesting read.
    • 4/5
      Very enjoyable novel if you enjoy moral decay and bleak humour.
    • 3/5
      Sex addict. Pretends to choke for attention.
    • 5/5
      Loved this book. Took me twice to try to read it to get into it, though. I picked it up one day, wasn't impressed, and then I waited several months before trying it again. I'm glad I re-tried it! This book is definitely in my top 10. This book is more than just a good story; it's good literature. It takes some adjusting to look past the shock value and harsh words: but trust me, there IS literary value in this book.
    • 2/5
      The more I read by him the less I like his books.
    • 4/5
      Very enjoyable novel if you enjoy moral decay and bleak humour.
    • 2/5
      fiction, sex, sexaholic, mother child relation, Italy, Jesus, delusional, childkidnapping, Alzheimer's disease, themepark, stripper, medical school, themepark
    • 5/5
      So I went into this book having seen the movie first. As with Fight Club, I was not disappointed. Palahniuk has a way of creating this world where you are instantly sucked into the characters, the events, the surroundings...everything. At first glance, Victor Mancini (our main character and narrator) seems like a creep; in reality he is just a screwed up individual with a plethora of problems and mommy issues so deep that even Freud would say he has issues.Of course, Palahniuk loads this book down with facts and information based on extensive research. If this isn't your cup of tea, then Palahniuk just isn't for you as he throws a lot of research into all of his books. Choke is intelligently written with a good story that provides a great deal of background on Victor. We are juggled between past and present day in a balanced way that sheds light on the world of Victor Mancini and the man he has grown to be.
    • 3/5
      This one is middle-of-the-road for Palahniuk--not bad, but by no means his best (that honor still goes to Diary, in my opinion). I'd recommend it to any Palahniuk enthusiast.
    • 2/5
      Rare occasion where the movie was better
    • 3/5
      Chuck Palahniuk's book "Choke" is a tough one for me to rate. I didn't enjoy reading it at all but I can really appreciate that the writing style integrates seamlessly with the overall tone and story of the book. Victor, our narrator, grew up in and out of foster care with a mother that snatched him from his foster care placements periodically. He has a whole host of 'mom' issues but has given up his life to pay for her care in a facility as she wastes away.This is definitely not a book to read if you're feeling depressed about the state of humanity -- it is not going to help your views. I'm not sure it's really a good book if you're feeling particularly hopeful about humanity either. At any rate, this isn't something I particularly liked but I can appreciate why others might.
    • 3/5
      This entire story was a descent into madness. From the opening scene to the climactic (in multiple ways) ending, the characters in this story start out unlikable and steadily worsen. Mental illnesses reign and those are the bright spots. This author seems to find ways in each of his stories I’ve read to continue to churn out characters worse than his previous ones, and impressively, that’s quite a challenge. Sadly, though, the realism of these characters helps to put into perspective the truth that the author writes about as far too often, these scenes play out all around the world each day
    • 2/5
      I listened to the audiobook read by the author.

      Chuck Palahnuik has one of the most annoying, whiny voices ever. It's not as irritating as Fran Drescher's, but it's way worse than Woody Allen at his most wheedling.

      That said, he's not a bad vocal performer. It's just that his accent is painful.

      The novel itself is pretty good. Parts were fairly predictable, but there were a couple of nice twists at the end.

      Misanthropy bores me, so I spent a while waiting for something compelling to happen. The sex addict plot was a little gratuitous, although the sex (and there's a lot of it) is well-written. The anti-feminist railing claiming the women see men only as a life-support system for their cocks is all kinds of ironic given that the narrator only sees women (who aren't elderly) as sex objects.

      The Oedipal issues are fascinating, but only in a train wreck sense. They don't go far enough to be really interesting.
    • 3/5
      Enjoyed this one but not saving for husband to finally get around to reading anymore. Donating as I'm clearing my bookshelves for a move.
    • 4/5
      This book is really more about recovery than you might expect.
    • 2/5
      In my younger and more vulnerable years (i.e. when I was young, stupid and immature), I rather enjoyed Palahniuk's writing. Now I see it for what it is - shock for the sake of shock. It's no different than a middle schooler scribbling dicks all over everything while saying "DEEZ NUTZ." It offers no real insight or interest beyond trying to get the audience to go "He can't say that! OMG, I can't believe he just said that!" What a snoozefest.
    • 3/5
      Definitely not his best. Somehow the film adaptation turned out wonderful though.
    • 4/5
      Very long, drawn out story for a kind of lame ending. But still good, I need to watch the movie now to better appreciate it.
    • 3/5
      This one is middle-of-the-road for Palahniuk--not bad, but by no means his best (that honor still goes to Diary, in my opinion). I'd recommend it to any Palahniuk enthusiast.
    • 3/5
      This book starts off ok but just gets silly. The characters are totally unbelieavable. The story itself is quite original and does make you think. I just wish it was a bit more true to life so I could relate to it. For my notes Victor is a sex addict who pretends to choke in Restaurants so people save his life and send him money so he can pay for his sick mother who is in a home.
    • 2/5

      Everyone and their auntie (well, probably not their auntie) has been telling me I should read some Palahniuk, and so finally I've gotten around to it.

      In a world where urban legends very likely have a factual basis and you might actually meet the guy who stuck a live hamster up his rectum, Victor Mancini is working as one of the historic characters at a colonial re-enactment tourist attraction while making his real money going to restaurants in the evenings, pretending to choke on pieces of food, being saved by fellow-diners proud of their knowledge of the Heimlich manoeuvre, and thereafter sponging off them on the grounds that, as the old custom dictates, if you save someone's life you're indebted to them for ever. He needs the dough because his mother who turned his childhood into a years-long madhouse, is now in the madhouse herself -- stricken early by senile dementia or some semblance thereof, and likely to die soon -- and her medical treatment ain't cheap. For his sex life Victor largely relies on trawling around the sexaholic-recovery groups, where at any particular moment there are bound to be plenty of women attendees in the process of relapse. Then he meets one of the psychiatrists working at his mother's clinic, the sexually provocative Paige Marshall, who deduces that his mother bore him in consequence of a DNA-recovery experiment using Christ's foreskin, stolen from a European cathedral.

      And so on.

      After a while, I found reading this to be rather like watching a stand-up comic who hasn't worked out when to stop milking one joke and move on to the next. Crammed willy-nilly into Choke are stacks of ideas -- most of them based in real or perhaps sometimes invented urban legends -- that someone like Roald Dahl might have used individually to produce a whole string of superbly caustic, incisive, well honed stories. When Dahl combined such elements into a novel, he produced the endlessly entertaining -- and spectacularly smutty -- My Uncle Oswald (1979). One senses Dahl put a whole lot of effort into crafting that novel; I didn't get that sense at all from Choke. Rather, it seemed to me that Palahniuk decided he'd found a formula for pandering successfully to the fashionistas, and was adhering to it. All in all, the book seemed more faux-cleverness than substance, an empty codpiece of a text. The plentiful sexual; passages seemed introduced as a form of writerly freewheeling ("If I can't think of anything else to add today I could always rattle off fifteen pages of smut"); sometimes they're very amusing, but most are awfully tedious. The text in general is of the kind that's exceptionally easy to write assuming you have a basic gift of the gab, which Palahniuk quite evidently has.

      Elsewhere my pal Andrew Hook has given the thumbs-up to a different Palahniuk novel, so maybe I'll give it a try. "Or maybe not" is perhaps not the right phrase, but it's the one that comes first to mind.
    • 3/5
      Same narrator as Fight Club, just a little more f'd up. . .
    • 4/5
      Oh my. I do not even begin to know where to go with this book.

      Second Palahniuk book....first after Fight Club, and all I have to say is that if you thought some of the things in FC were intense--this book holds more. I cannot relate the ridiculousness of this book....or how entertaining it was.

      The protagonist, Victor, is an jerk--by choice he claims--who goes to sexual addiction recovery meetings not to get better...but to pick up chicks. His mom was diagnosed with some kind of psychotic problem. When the protagonist was a child, she would kidnap him, tell him crazy stories, and then get sent to jail.

      The present tense of the novel, mom is in a private hospital, slowly dying to death, and he goes to a different restaurant every night, pretends to choke until someone saves him. This helps him feel loved. He deludes himself into thinking that he is helping others feel like heros.

      Of course, none of these things can last forever....and the twist at the end. Phew. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in getting perspective on their own lives.

    • 5/5
      Chuck Palahniuk is either the most brilliant contemporary author I've ever read or the most messed-up person I've ever heard about -- or a little of both. This book is fabulously luminous and one of my favorites of his... but be forewarned that it's not for everyone, particularly the prudish or weak of stomach.
    • 5/5
      Bloody loved it. Had all the darkness, wit and humanity that makes him a great writer. Marvelous stuff.