Review of "Fight Club" by Chuck Palahniuk

A distillation of the toxic masculinity in the world, with all the violence and resentment that implies. I'm not entirely sure whether it's supposed to be a satirical critique of all that or a paean to it - in the manner of such things, it seems to want to have it both ways. I watched the film a long time ago, and so I remembered the images of that as I read the text - I couldn't imagine Marla except as Helena Bonham Carter, for example. 

I think that in some ways the film was more subtle, and more ambiguous about the apparent merging of the two main characters - was Tyler Durden always a version, or a personality disorder, of the first-person narrator? 

One major difference, at least as far as a remember the film, was the prominence of a castration theme - more than one character is threatened with castration in the book, though it doesn't seem to actually happen. All part of the ugh factor.