Book Review: Pygmy

Pygmy

by Chuck Palahniuk

This is Palahniuk's latest book, and carries on his usual tradition of wacky, completely off-the-wall crazy, convoluted plot. Also, as is his usual fashion, it involved gratuitous amounts of rape, sex, violence, and a touch of romance. Pygmy comes with a solid 18A rating.

Pygmy follows the story of the a foreign exchange student, hailing from an unnamed totalitarian nation, whose goal is to implement a deadly terrorist attack on the United States of America.

The entire book is written from the first person point of view of the main character Pygmy, and narrated in his broken english. At first this was extremely confusing, and actually almost made me quit reading. I can really see it turning off less dedicated readers, especially if you aren't a fan of Palahniuk in the first place.
But sure enough, after a couple chapters, I picked up on Pygmy's phraseology and got sucked right into the insane story.

Overall, I give Pygmy by Chuck Palahniuk:

9/10

It was good. Really good in fact. It's definitely something I'm going to re-read, because early in the book I probably missed some stuff while struggling with the broken english narration. In fact, late in the book I had to skip back to the beginning to make sure I didn't miss something important.

It was a story unlike any other I've read, and the main-character, despite being a teenage potential-mass-murdering rapist, was very endearing.

But I really have to detract points for the narration. It may be uncouth and unappreciative of me, but I didn't like it. It was there to add realism to a very, very, unrealistic fantasy, and to make the vexations and hatred Pygmy feels for Americans almost tangible. I have no problem wrapping my mind around that one, but it was just too much.

A book that dealt with foreign languages and translation really well was World War Z. WW-Z was also written in a first person narrative, but the entire thing was “translated” by an interpreter. I strongly feel that something along those lines would have done this novel's story better justice.

I'll note here that I started out only wanting to give this book a 7/10, but the more I wrote about it the fewer bad things I had to say. So the narration is only a minor detraction (for me) from an otherwise excellent read.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who likes Palahniuk; Pygmy is easily one of his best. Also, if you like books with terrorism, intrigue, and comedy, this one's for you.

It isn't recommended to people who don't like violence and sex in their books. There's a lot of it in this one. It's %100 integral to the plot, so don't expect to be able to read this book either and just be able to skim over the dirty parts.