9 cockroaches

There are books which are difficult to adapt for a screen. This story is one of such cases. Several years ago there were rumours about future film but it never became a truth. Maybe the director just didn't find enough money. I wish they made the film. I like the story to much not to wish to see its visualisation. But the movie hardly can transfuse all the feelings and thoughts of the herione. And here these is the most important thing. Every action takes place only for the following reaction of the character. But still in the right hands it could become such a pleasure like "Fight Club" movie was.

8 cockroaches

The most mysterious character of the story is of course the main heroine. Unnamed beautiful model with her jaw shot off. Everybody in the book have their variant of personal drama. She has her parents going crazy after her homosexual brother's death. "Now what I wanted my folks to talk about was me. I’d tell them how Evie and me were shooting a new infomer-cial. My modeling career was taking off. I wanted to tell them about my new boyfriend, Manus, but no. Whether he’s good or bad, alive or dead, Shane still gets all the attention. All I ever get is angry".
This attention to her apperiance from strangers as long as she's very attractive and ignorance of her as a personality with thoghts and wishes brought her to the catastrophy. After the accident she says: "Birds ate my face". In this words i see her attempt to forget her past, hide herself in a direct and an extended sense. No memores and silence becomes her permanent fellow passenger. This girl is a generalized character of every human being. All of us try to hide something behind the veils. Otherwise we are too vulnerable.
“Veils,” Brandy says as each color settles over me. “You need to look like you’re keeping secrets,” she says. “If you’re going to do the outside world, Miss St. Patience, you need to not let people see your face,” she says.
“You can go anywhere in the world,” Brandy goes on and on.
You just can’t let people know who you really are.
“You can live a completely normal, regular life,” she says.
You just can’t let anybody get close enough to you to learn the truth.

7 cockroaches

“If you were on a game show,” Seth says about his two types of people.So you’re the winner of this game show,” Seth says, “and you get a choice between a five-piece living room set from Broyhill, suggested retail price three thousand dollars— or—a ten-day trip to the old world charm of Europe.”
Most people, Seth says, would take the living room set.
“It’s just that people want something to show for their effort,” Seth says. “Like the pharaohs and their pyramids.
Given the choice, very few people would choose the trip even if they already had a nice living room set.”
This is a simple idea i came across in the text. What's the point? People are too materialistic in their nature. Our well-being depends on so many factors like tasty food safety and a comfortable house with lots of devices making life easier that we've already got used to that any advantage is some thing which makes life better somehow. Thing which you can touch and show someone else. And unfortunately we forget that the most important is usually non-material: feelings, emotions, ideas and experience. Like in this fragment we see the experience of the traveller which you could share as well as show your new living-room.
The idea isn't new for Palahniuk. It became one of the central discourses in his famous "Fight Club".

6 cockroaches

Having read 5 chapters of the book i feel like it's time to sum up some ideas and thoughts about the story. As I've already said the biggest peculiarity of this work is in non linear narration. Soon after the beginning of the story the author divides it in parts and throws them about like a puzzle. Such a system troubles all the guesswork about the future events leaving a reader face to face with questions arising. So that's what i have for now: a young beautiful girl working as a model once becomes a victim of an unknown person who shoots right into her face. The girl survives but the lower part of her face is crashed into pieces so that  her beauty turns into ugliness. As a result she loses her fiance and her job - her entire happy life as long as her trauma deprives her of the ability to contact normally with people, she's not able even to speak now. At this moment of a crisis she meets Brandy Alexander.

"Brandy Alexander and the way she looked turned the rest of the world into virtual reality." She does turns her world upside down. She helps her to hide her face and pain inside her behind the veils and takes her into the strangest travel which becomes her life. Brandy, her and their accomplise Seth move about the country robbing wealthy houses for sale pretending to be customers. Every day new name and new lifestory. Everything to forget the past for all of them. So what are my predictions? Hardly something definite. Judging by the begging this story is one big mystery. Who's Brandy Alexander? Who shooted into the main character and why? Who's their fellow traveller and what are his reasons for such a life  style? Too much questions. The only thing i'm sure about is that somebody can die every moment or tell something shocking which would change the ploty seriousely - the story is unpredictable.

5 cockroaches

gush - хлестать

boo-hoo - плакать, рыдать

malice - злость

ennui - тоска, апатия

rampant - ярый

sacrilegious - богохульный, святотатственный

aubergine- баклажановый

I won't open any details of the script. It's not just about the story. To feel the book completely you should read it by yourself. Quite unusual style and ineffable composition. 

Some interesting ideas and thoughts of the chapter:

"Shotgunning anybody in this room would be the moral equivalent of killing a car, a vacuum cleaner, a Barbie doll. Erasing a computer disk. Burning a book. Probably that goes for killing anybody in the world. We’re all such products."

"Another thing is no matter how much you think you love somebody, you’ll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close."

4 cockroaches

The book I've chosen had a long hard road to its readers.

It is the third Palagnuik's novel to be published, though it was his second written novel. The novel was originally supposed to be Palahniuk's first novel to be published, but it was rejected by the publisher for being too disturbing. After the success of his novel "Fight Club", "Invisible Monsters" was given a second chance, and a revised version of it was published in 1999.

3 cockroaches. A trifle of an introduction.

A couple of years ago I could say that Palahnuik is one of my favourite authors. Now I'm not so sure about it, but my attitude to his works is still rather positive. Palahnuik became my personal Rubicon to the underground universe. My literary love affair began when I watched "Fight Club." "I was impressed" - aren't quite right words to describe my feeling about this movie. I believe  it was a catharsis, the small explosion inside of me when I understood that instead of being "for" you can be "against": against the rules, against the morality, against the stereotypes, against these goddamned public opinion what you should or shouldn't do with your life.
Far and by, very soon I got the book of a hardly known to me writer who had created my unofficial Bible. It was the beginning of the end you know. I surrended to this talented guy from New Orlean.