karenika - books - invisible monsters

Invisible Monsters

Most of my adult life so far has been me standing on seamless paper for a raft of bucks per hour, wearing clothes and shoes, my hair done and some famous fashion photographer telling me how to feel.

Him yelling, Give me lust, baby.
Flash.
Give me malice.
Flash.
Give me detached existentialist ennui.
Flash.
Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism.
Flash.

[ skipped a few pages ]

My point it, unless the meter is running and some photographer is yelling: Give me empathy.
Then the flash of the strobe.
Give me sympathy.
Flash.
Give me brutal honesty.
Flash.

I hope you know what I mean. I'm not sure why, but I really like this style and I've never seen it elsewhere.

Today's passage is a bit unusual in that I just started reading this book. If you've ever heard of Chuck Palahniuk, it's most likely to be in relation to Fight Club. I picked Fight Club randomly at a bookstore and was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. Chuck has a very unusual writing style (as well as quite unusual stories) and I found it really pulled me in. One of my favorite things about his style is the repetition of a word/idea dispersed in the middle of other sections of the story. This is hard to explain but if you've read Fight Club, a great example of this is the airport sentences.

I just started another one of his novels called Invisible Monsters. He's doing the very same thing here, so I figured I'd make it today's passage.