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.