Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut

What an interesting book this one is.  Where to start?

Listen: there is always the plot. But there really isn't one. On the other hand, there is a general conception of the story.  The universe is hit by a timequake, and time is rewound by ten years.  Everything then starts to run forward again, exactly in the way and order it had happened before the timequake.  Exactly the same way!  The big casualty is free will.  Humans have memories of the ten years that now lie ahead of them, but they are unable to change a single word or a single action as their lives unfold a second time.  They just have to go on auto-pilot until the re-run, well, runs out.

Vonnegut gets up to more of his post-modernist tricks as the pages turn. Timequake was first published in 1997; however, the narrator tells the story from the view point of 2001 (then four years in the future), not long after the supposed re-run has finished.  Is the narrator Vonnegut, or a fictional Vonnegut? We are given clues but we can never be sure.  The narrator interacts with other characters, some fictional, and some who really existed.  Kilgore Trout, the failed science fiction writer and Vonnegut's alter-ego, is a major character in the story.  Trout frequently slips in and out of his role as a fictional construct and his role as someone known personally by the narrator.

The narration blurs the boundaries between fiction, memoir and polemic. The narrator tells us Timequake will be his last novel.  As he looks back on a long life, one that has been made ten years longer by the timequake, he tells us quite a few things about his politics and philosophy of life, which are basically socialist and humanist:

[Uncle Alex] said that when things were really going well we should be sure to notice it ... Uncle Alex urged me to say this out loud during such epiphanies: 'If this isn't nice, what is?'

He quotes his son Mark: 'We are here to help each other through this thing, whatever it is.'

Eugene V. Debs (1855 - 1926), the American union leader, is a favourite of the narrator, and his words have been quoted in previous Vonnegut novels:

While there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

As in a few of Vonnegut's previous books, there are suicides in this story.  It is notable that there are an awful lot of them; and the narrator also tells us of the deaths by illness and misadventure of many of the people he has known and loved.  Tolkien said that the inevitability of death was the key spring of his stories, and this would seem true for Timequake's narrator, too.

The reader can rest assured that the narrator leavens his dark themes with wit and compassion; and he has this to say about the consolation of literature:

Many people need desperately to receive this message: 'I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don't care about them. You are not alone.'

'You are not alone.'  Yes, I think that is the real reason why I read Vonnegut, and why I will continue to read and re-read him.  Between you and me, this is the second time I have read Timequake.  I like it that much.

Hocus Pocus by Kurt Vonnegut

It was very interesting to read this book in the wake of the shooting massacre at the Sandy Hook Primary School.  Although Hocus Pocus was first published almost a quarter of a century ago, its central themes are still greatly relevant to contemporary American life.

Hocus Pocus is set in the year 2001, eleven years in the future of its actual publication date.  It is narrated by Eugene Debs Hartke, who is 61 years of age and is looking back on the events of his life.  Hartke tells us of his life as a school child, a professional soldier in the Vietnam War, a school teacher, a prison warder and, finally, a prisoner.  Many of the people he knew are dead - most through gunshot wounds, some through cancer, and many that he didn't know also met violent gun-related deaths.  Hartke himself directly killed scores of people.

The present action takes place in an economically decaying America.  The assets of the country are being sold to the highest bidders, usually Japanese corporations and Arab princes.  The prison system has been taken over by the private sector and increasing numbers of Americans, usually blacks and Hispanics, are being incarcerated.  Gun ownership has never been higher.

This is a future that Vonnegut did not need to invent.  In 1990, Japan had been the rising economic power for the previous thirty years (although its economic growth severely diminished in the 1990s).  In the wake of the so-called War on Drugs, incarceration rates in the U.S. increased markedly (from about 500,000 inmates in 1980 to about 2,500,000 inmates in 2010).  In response to this, the number of privately operated prisons has increased. Nowadays, the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world (0.7%), a rate about five times higher than the U.K., China or Australia.   The U.S. also has the highest rate of gun ownership in the world.

It is against this background that Vonnegut explores the human condition.  It is in the context of greater crimes that we are shown the small sins and virtues, the hopes and disappointments that make up our lives.  Hartke asks:

Who on this Earth hasn't made a mistake or 2? 

He also wants to pass on to the young what he has learned about life:

I am not writing this book for people below the age of 18, but I see no harm in telling young people to prepare for failure rather than success, since failure is the main thing that is going to happen to them ... It's misleading for people to read about great successes, since even for middle-class and upper-class white people, in my experience, failure is the norm.  It is unfair to youngsters particularly to leave them wholly unprepared for monster screw-ups and starring roles in Keystone Kop comedies and much, much worse.

Of black prisoners, Hartke says:

They all believed that the White people who insisted that it was their Constitutional right to keep military weapons in their homes all looked forward to the day when they could shoot Americans who didn't have what they had, who didn't look like their friends and relatives, in a sort of open-air shooting gallery we used to call in Vietnam a "Free Fire Zone."  You could shoot anything that moved, for the good of the greater society, which was always someplace far away, like Paradise.

This sounds like a good analysis, and it is a sentiment that Michael Moore echoed in one of his films, but I wonder if the belief matches the reality.  It certainly doesn't reflect the recent mass shootings, which seems to be white folk killing white folk.  I wonder about the 11,000 other gun-related deaths that occurred last year in America?

As is the case in many of Vonnegut's novel's, the narrator's story moves back and forth through time.  The language used is simple and direct, and the story is made a little more complex only by the fact that events unfold in a non-chronological sequence.  Like in a few of his other works, Vonnegut makes use of some unusual devices.  Numbers are written as numerals throughout ('seven' is written as '7').  The various parts of the novel are purported to have been written on many scraps of paper, with each scrap being separated from its predecessor by a solid horizontal line.

In the end, I wonder about this book.  On face value it is pessimistic.  Taken as a satire, it certainly holds up a mirror to our individual and societal foibles, but it is satire unleavened by any real humor.  Even so, I find myself liking this book, although I don't really know why.  I suppose it is the pleasure we can get from seeing a master storyteller at work.

I read the Rosettabooks e-book version, which I highly recommend.  It is well-formatted and contained only one typo that I noticed.

God Bless You, Mr Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut

There are certain books I don't mind re-reading.  There are some books I read over and over again.  This is second time I have read God Bless You, Mr Rosewater.  I enjoyed it so much that I intend to read it again someday, if I live long enough, oxalá.

It is 1965, and Eliot Rosewater, the heir to the Rosewater family fortune, suddenly finds himself with an income of $10,000 per day, including Sundays. That's about $250,000 per day in today's money.  It's a lot of money.  

Faced with this enviable problem, Eliot hits the booze, abandons his childless marriage and goes on a road trip across America before winding up in the unremarkable mid-west town of Rosewater.  Here Eliot rents a moldy office-come-bed-sit with a telephone, and here he can sip booze all day while he answers the phone.  And who would want to phone Eliot Rosewater?  The poor of Rosewater, of course, because word has got out that Eliot is giving his money away to the least in the community.

And there has to be consequences to this kind of behaviour, but you will have to read the book to find our what they are. 

I really like this book.  I think it is my favourite Vonnegut novel (but I haven't read them all yet).  There is the trademark Vonnegut style of plain language telling rather than showing the story.  There is the irony, the grim humour and the deep insights into human nature, a nature that Vonnegut reveals as oh-so-flawed and yet deserving of dignity and respect.

And, of course, God Bless You Mr Rosewater marks the debut of Kilgore Trout, the down-at-heel sci-fi writer (who is possibly Vonnegut's alter ego.)  I like Kilgore Trout. A lot. As did Eliot Rosewater.

God Bless You, Mr Rosewater was first published in 1965.  I read the Rosetta Books e-book edition, which I thoroughly recommend. Review.

Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut

This is the tale of two men on a collision course.  Dwayne Hoover, a successful business man living in Midland City (somewhere in the American mid-west), is going quietly insane.  Kilgore Trout, a down-on-his-luck sci-fi writer living on the East Coast, is invited to speak at the opening of Midland City's new arts centre.  We follow Trout as he travels first to New York then to Midland City.  As he gets closer to his destination, we see the incremental disintegration of Hoover's mental state.  What will happen when the two men finally meet?

Breakfast of Champions is a strange, funny and disturbing novel.  Vonnegut uses many post-modern techniques to tell his tale.  He collapses the distinction between genres by peppering what is, on face value, a realistic story with snippets from Trout's sci-fi writings.  In addition, his narrator enters the story as a character, and one is not sure if the narrator is Vonnegut himself or just another fictional construct.

Vonnegut explores many themes.  Mental illness and suicide are front and centre in the tale.  The marginalisation of minorities also figures heavily.  On this theme, Vonnegut displays his wonderful talent for metaphor and summarising:

...Skid Row.  It was a place where people who didn't have any friends or relatives or property or usefulness or ambition were supposed to go. People like that would be treated with disgust in other neighbourhoods, and policemen would keep them moving.  They were as easy to move, usually, as toy balloons. And they would drift hither and yon, like balloons filled with some gas slightly heavier than air, until they came to rest in Skid Row.

Vonnegut also covers urban violence, and the legitimisation of art.  One notable feature of Breakfast of Champions is the many drawings by the author that are littered through the pages, and they serve to amplify his themes.

A Vonnegut book would not be complete without irony.  The author uses the "N"-word repeatedly throughout the novel although never disparagingly.  The delivery is off-the-cuff but the irony intended is evident.

Yes, Breakfast of Champions is a strange and disturbing book, but is worth the time and effort.  Vonnegut himself considered it one of his lesser works, preferring Mother Night and Slaughterhouse Five.  Good, better, best.  Despite Vonnegut's estimations, Breakfast of Champions remains a good book, even almost four decades after its initial publication.

Midland City is the setting of another Vonnegut novel, Deadeye Dick

Deadeye Dick by Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut is no Hermann Hesse. In his essay "Why They Read Hesse", Vonnegut states:  

Hesse is no black humorist. Black humorists' holy wanderers find nothing but junk and lies and idiocy wherever they go.  A chewing-gum wrapper or a used condom is often the best they can do for a Holy Grail.

Deadeye Dick is perhaps the blackest and least humorous of Vonnegut's novels that I have read so far.  In it we find junk and lies and idiocy.  One stray bullet alters, possibly for the worst, the lives of a clutch of people in the fictitious Midland City, Ohio.

The protagonist Rudy Waltz narrates the story.  He tells the tale of the decline in the fortunes of his family members.  Along the way we are shown the collateral damage done to those that come into contact with them.  No-one, except the Haitian cook and voodoo master, seems to come away unscathed.

The satire is dark, unrelenting and almost unbearable because of the absence of clowns -  Deadeye Dick, lamentably, is a Tralfamidorian-free zone.  Reading this book is certainly an experience, but a harrowing one. Admire the craftmanship, by all means, but be prepared for the essential horror that is life, as told by Kurt Vonnegut.

Midland City is the setting of another Vonnegut novel, Breakfast of Champions