Reviews

Not Forever, But For Now by Chuck Palahniuk

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shmadsie's review

1.0

Not sure who the audience for this book was but I do know that I was not in it. The throughline for this was just: icky, which is not a disqualifier for a good read (there was a very similar ickiness in The Shards, by Bret Easton Ellis, a five-star read for me from just earlier this year) but that was literally the only thing holding it together. There was no plot; instead the narrative zigzagged all over the place to 'oo, that's an interesting bit,' or 'wouldn't it be weird if' and it just ping ponged that way for two hundred plus pages, no baseline to get back to, leaving everything feeling half-started, half-thought through, half an idea. Otto and Cecil were, well, nothing. I have no idea what their motivations were, what they wanted, why they were, they were dragged through these goofy or icky things on the same ride I was. As Cecil admits himself, he was pretty much just his brother's shadow so he, knowingly, had absolutely nothing going on but..... neither did Otto so. Like I said, no idea who the audience was for this but I didn't see the point of any of it.

aliciasrealm's review against another edition

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3.0

Born into a family of assassins, brothers Otto and Cecil have grown up hearing stories about the people their grandfather killed. With their father missing and their mother often away on business, the boys spend their days watching nature films, writing letters to serial killers, and murdering the hired help. Otto begins an apprenticeship under their grandfather, but living up to the family legacy isn't easy, and failure might be deadly.

TW: murder, gore, animal deaths, incest, sexual depravity

Reading this novel was a bizarre experience. Cecil is an unreliable narrator and leaves breadcrumbs of stories scattered throughout the novel; if there was a story I didn't quite understand, eventually Cecil would go back to provide more detail. It's full of animal metaphors, sexual euphemisms, and conspiracies. I found myself deciphering binary code and translating Greek to read parts of the story. Honestly, I didn't understand the point of this book; it was weird, and not in a way that particularly appealed to me. Maybe readers more familiar with his work may better grasp what he was getting at here, but unfortunately I wasn't able to fully appreciate the story. If you're like me and your only prior exposure to Chuck Palahniuk was Fight Club, I would not recommend starting with this book.

Important context to keep in mind while reading: the brothers are adults in their thirties. The first chapter gave me the impression that they were young children, but subsequent chapters imply otherwise and their ages are later explicitly revealed (albeit in Greek). It's easy to miss that they are NOT children.

Thank you to Simon & Schuster for the advance copy of this book.