Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon

3.5, teetering towards a 4, out of 5. I've read enough interviews with Palahniuk and seen him enough times now to know one refrain of his perfectly: he wants to capture moments. That's his driving force, as a writer: to capture a moment for posterity. Maybe it's a perfect sentence, maybe it's a place he loves, maybe it's a person he knows or an anecdote they told. And that's what he does here, in an unadorned and beautiful way. Yes, this is a travel guide - but it's also a reflection on a time and a place and a man. Portland has changed a whole lot in the 10 years since this book came out and I'll bet it'll change more before I go back again... but it gave us the man who wrote all these wacky books. This was his chance to give a little show more something back.

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Lately I have been considering a move to the other Portland, the one in Oregon with more culture and less snow. The first book I could find about P/O was Fugitives and Refugees by Chuch Palahniuk. It did not inflame my desire to pull up stakes.

Palahniuk specializes in gross, scary, oddball, grotesque fiction: Fight Club, Haunted, et cetera. So naturally his take on P/O is full of stuff you wouldn't want your mom to see. Here are all the sex clubs! Here's where I threw my tonsils out a window! Here are all the supposedly haunted old buildings! Here are the drag queens! Here's the underground tunnel where a performance artist threw a "fetus" at me!

To be fair, Palahniuk does throw in a healthy amount of info on eateries, gardens, zoos, et show more cetera. And his beyond-the-fringe style can be very vivid, as a true tale about a mother tending her dying son attests. But all in all, Palahniuk left a bad taste in my mouth. I don't want to live in the underbelly, thanks. show less

On a recent trip to Portland, Oregon (that eternal rival for Minneapolis’ title of “most bike friendly city”), I found that Fugitives and Refugees, Chuck Palahniuk's autobiographical travel guide to the iconic Pacific Northwest city was an invaluable companion to my visit. Describing the towns various quirks; the Voodoo Doughnuts, Shanghai Tunnels, and Powell’s City of Books (all of which I, tourist that I am, had to experience on my stopover), Palahniuk’s essays present a lot more than a mere travel guide. In spite of being more than a decade old at this point, Palahniuk’s personal tour through a few of the odder denizens and locations in a very odd city paints a vivid and affectionate portrait of the history and background show more of Portland, both in the grand scheme and in Palahniuk’s personal relationship with the city. Exploring the city’s seedy underbelly of sex shows and hauntings, Palahniuk’s ties his own experiences deeply into the culture of Portland through various “postcards” written from different periods of his life there.

Particularly useful was the glossary and list of slang and pronunciations so the visitor can blend in with the locals. In the years since this book has been written, as indicated the presence of the tv series Portlandia, Portland continued to rise in prominence as a home for America’s “fugitives and refugees” (as Palahniuk attributes to Geek Love and Portland-dweller Katherine Dunn) and as an urban renaissance “city that works. It is interesting to see in Palahniuk’s account the very beginnings of this growth of Portland as a city “young people go to retire,” a place more than just a grungy small Pacific Northwest town filled with weirdos, but as a poster city for such a movement. Portland, I must say, is on my short list of American cities were I ever to leave Minnesota, and Fugitives and Refugees, I feel, presents a thought provoking background. show less

Chuck Palahniuk's nonfiction is so drastically different from his fiction that, if it weren't for the comfort and confidence of his voice, you'd think they were two totally different authors.

In this book, he tries his hand at something akin to a travel guide in a surprisingly firm sense: he takes us to various spots in Portland, often elaborating for pages when he's got a great story to tell, but willing to settle on a mere paragraph when all he wants is for you to take notice. Interspersed with these sightseeing suggestions are "postcards," short autobiographical interludes of his own twisted history in Portland that add a personal insight to some of the demented destinations he takes us to.

And while most of the stops he suggests are show more far from the kind of extreme things you'll see in Fight Club or Haunted, they are just off the beaten path enough to raise a few eyebrows. Yet Palahniuk treats all of them with a tone that is equal parts journalistic detachment, fascination, and genuine interest, turning them not into a catalog of freaks but simply an eclectic set of destinations that are treated with far more respect than they are revulsion.

It is this smoothness of delivery that makes what could have been an otherwise mundane or macabre text become something truly intriguing and compulsively readable. show less

3.5, teetering towards a 4, out of 5. I've read enough interviews with Palahniuk and seen him enough times now to know one refrain of his perfectly: he wants to capture moments. That's his driving force, as a writer: to capture a moment for posterity. Maybe it's a perfect sentence, maybe it's a place he loves, maybe it's a person he knows or an anecdote they told. And that's what he does here, in an unadorned and beautiful way. Yes, this is a travel guide - but it's also a reflection on a time and a place and a man. Portland has changed a whole lot in the 10 years since this book came out and I'll bet it'll change more before I go back again... but it gave us the man who wrote all these wacky books. This was his chance to give a little show more something back.

More at RB: show less

[a: Chuck Palahniuk|2546|Chuck Palahniuk|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1391203076p2/2546.jpg] seems much better suited to this non-fiction writing than his usual books. In [b: Fugitives and Refugees|22289|Fugitives and Refugees A Walk in Portland, Oregon|Chuck Palahniuk|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1429316063s/22289.jpg|141049] he manages to convey the heart and strange soul of Portland in a very human way. The oddities that he mentions he does so with a humble love and wry smirk that is difficult to not find utterly endearing. It made me want to visit Portland rather badly, though I unfortunately didn't quite have a chance.

The section on Santa Clause is particularly memorable. As is, always, the myriad of strange societies he seems show more to have taken part in. show less

This is the most unusual 'travel' book I've ever read. It's enormous fun, and gives you a highly unusual view of Portland. The travel info sections are interspersed with bits of memoir.