I needed this book. You have no idea how much so. Vonnegut is just so hilarious. There is a certain sense of wisdom in perfect irony, and Vonnegut’s irony is anything but perfect. It boarders upon the outrageous and plain mad. His ideas are crazy yet strangely perceptive; it’s like he sees beyond the idiotic surface world of human culture, of life itself, and makes fun of it. He points at it and has a good old laugh. If you read his books, he’ll share it with you too! He's good like that.

“The things other people have put into my head, at any rate, do not fit together nicely, are often useless and ugly, are out of proportion with one another, are out of proportion with life as it really is outside my head.”

His novels are so individual in their weirdness. He explores, and perhaps even defines, an anti-narrative style. The first chapter of the book, along with its many intertextual references to the real world, tells you how the plot is going to end. He tells you what’s going to happen to his wacky characters; he informs you that they will die, and even goes as far as to explicitly say when. This isn’t a spoiler: it’s on the first page of the book. But, that’s merely the surface level of Vonnegut’s brilliant writing.

He also uses self-reflective addresses in the middle of a narrative sequence: his own personal voice comes through, the voice of the individual, and acknowledges the fact that this is actually a book. This may not sound like much, but it’s very unusual. How many books randomly point out the fact that they are actually a book? In the middle of chapters there are so many interruptions; they’re semi-autobiographical statements because Vonnegut, oddly, stops and explains his characterisation of Killgore Trout. He stops and informs you of the choices he has made. This is wonderfully comic. It may even sound like an interruption of the story, but it’s not. Vonnegut is part of the story. Without the use of such an inventive and transgressive mode of writing, this book would be comparable to one of Trout’s failed science fiction novels.

“Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne.”



If you’ve made it this far into my review, you may wonder what I’m actually talking about. If you’ve not read anything by Vonnegut, then my review may come off as a little strange, but Vonnegut is strange. Superbly so. He is witty in his bizarrely written narrative. You have to read his books to understand. I’m having a certain degree of trouble to actually express what I mean here. Vonnegut is just unique. Trust me: he’s worth your time.

There were moments in his book that produced within me real gut wrenching laughter. Not a simple chuckle or a casual outburst, but real laughter. The type that brightens your day and make other people think that you, too, have gone slightly mad. But who cares? I’ve not laughed like that in a long time. Perhaps since the last Vonnegut book I read. The persona that narrates this novel is a real oddity; it’s almost like Vonnegut has written a story about his imaginary friends, and about imaginary parts of himself. I’m not entirely sure how he manages to pull it off. Few others could.

Postscript- I gave this book five stars because I enjoyed it immensely, but it wasn’t as good as Slaughter House 5. I wonder if any of his other books actually will be. Also the image in my review is one of many ridiculous images Vonnegut includes within the story. Because why the hell not?

Napisat ću osvrt poput Vonneguta u Doručku Šampiona:
Doručak šampiona je genijalna knjiga koju je napisao genijalac sam sebi za pedeseti rođendan. Rođendani su dani kada ljudi slave približavanje smrti svakih godinu dana. U knjizi se govori o Americi, pljuje se po stereotipima, kažnjava se neljudskost i predstavljaju se ljudi kao slučajni prolaznici na planetu koji baš ništa ne znače i tu su samo da kvare dojam prirodi, itd...
Način pisanje je maestralan - ta je riječ valjda dobila ime po maestralu, vjetru na Jadranu a on je osvježavajući sjeverozapadni vjetar koji u toplim danima puše s mora na kopno. Vjerojatno jer je i sam stil osvježavajući, ali je teško odrediti je li stil sjeverozapadni i puše li samo u toplim danima s mora na kopno.
Satira počinje s prvom, a završava sa zadnjom rečenicom. Tjera na smijeh cijelim putem, a smijeh je ono što razlikuje čovjeka od životinje i ono što nam je Stvoritelj Neba i Zemlje podario kako bi se razlikovali međusobno. Jer opće je znana stvar da se neki ljudi smiju poput magaraca, neki poput koza, neki poput majmuna, što je zapravo vrlo netočna usporedba - oni se tako glasaju dok se smiju - smijeh je karakterističan samo za ljude i crne i bijele. Postoje ljudi drugačije boje kože, i njih Vonnegut idealno objašnjava. Jer ljudi drugačije boje kože, pogotovo u kolijevci humanosti i demokracije Americi, se dijele na crnčuge i one normalne. Barem tako piše u ovoj knjizi koju je napisao bijelac govoreći o crnčugama. Iako se na nekim stranicama pojavljuju i Žuti - to su isto ljudi samo se razlikuju od bijelih po tome što su žuti. Nije do kraja razjašnjeno koju boju bijeli više ne voli - crnu ili žutu.
Knjiga je i potresna, poučna, groteskna i ponizna. Govori i o dužini penisa kod muškaraca i o dubini vagine kod žena. Gotovo svaki lik je karakteriziran dužinom penisa, ali u colima. Col je anglosaksonska jedinica za dužinu i odgovara duljini tri suha zrna ječma postavljena tako da im se krajevi dodiruju - inače se naziva i Inč i ne koristi se u metričkim sustavima. Autor ove recenzije ne zna kolika mu je dužina penisa u colima... ITD.
Savršena knjiga!!!

Take a little-known pulp writer of science fiction and the links to his work in porno mags; a convict released into a society in which he doesn't really belong; and an unstable car salesman who is losing the plot, and you have another wild satirical romp from Vonnegut that I thought at first felt like a bit of an incoherent mess with its scattergun approach - plus drawings!, but then once I became accustomed to the style, this turned into another impressive work that has a serious message and raises important questions within the crazy and chaotic plot: one of his lest polished narratives for sure. One of those universal questions being: 'What is the purpose of life?; what is the meaning of being alive in an unreasonable world?
Filled with gallows humour and paradoxical insights it's one that might infuriate some and be blessed by others. Not his best work - even he said so himself and didn't think much of it - but every time I return to him I've yet to be bored or let down. Only a couple of his novels left to read now. Mother Night still being my fave.

I have no idea what it all means, will have to think about it or read a bit about it to work it all out. But it was a very enjoyable romp. The metaness of Vonnegut’s story and John Malkovich’s deadpan delivery were a perfect match. I am especially fond of his descriptions of the author’s drawings. Hilarious. I wish the publisher had seen fit to include a pdf of the drawings. They seem kind of integral.

“Like most science-fiction writers, he knew almost nothing about science.”

Breakfast of Champions is not my favorite Kurt Vonnegut novel and I have a bit of difficulty to understand why. Maybe because it was crazier than the others that I’ve read, with long passages without any sense. There weren’t one or two deeper themes that I had to dig between the irony and the absurd. It was more of a collection of crazy talk (or talk by crazy men) mingled with the author’s ideas about the world. I enjoyed the latter parts more than the former, I laughed out loud many times but it wasn’t enough.

For the whole novel we are prepared for a momentous meeting between our main characters, the still undiscovered, aging, soon to become monumental, SF writer, Kilgore Trout and Dwayne Hoover, a successful Midwest car dealer. Dwayne, due to bad chemicals in his brain, is slowly going crazy and the meeting with the SF writer will make him derail irrecoverably. The story switches between Kilgore’s trip to reach an Art festival in Midwest to Dwayne’s increasingly weird mind. At some point we also get to meet the author, which was an interesting feature.

The plot offers Vonnegut the opportunity to launch in a bleak satire on race, politics, social standards, sexism, etc. I don’t know how Vonnegut can be pessimistic and funny at the same time.

“As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I had become more and more enraged and mystified by the idiot decisions made by my countrymen. And then I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave so abominably, and with such abominable results: They were doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books. why were so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as paper facial tis-sues? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales”

For more than half of the book, I listened to the brilliant narration of John Malkovich. I believe the actor’s voice and Vonnegut’s work go perfectly together. However, I do not usually listen to audiobooks so it might have altered my reading experience somewhat.

I enjoyed the novel, it’s Vonnegut duh, but I felt he crammed a bit too much inside the pages. I also don’t believe it is the place to start if you are a newbie to his work. Slaughterhouse 5 would still my first choice. By the way, Kilgore Trout is a character in that novel as well. There are many characters, themes and places that appear in more than one novel of the author and that is a prize for his fandom, of which I am still part of.

“Dear Sir, poor sir, brave sir." he read, "You are an experiment by the Creator of the Universe. You are the only creature in the entire Universe who has free will. You are the only one who has to figure out what to do next - and why. Everybody else is a robot, a machine. Some persons seem to like you, and others seem to hate you, and you must wonder why. They are simply liking machines and hating machines. You are pooped and demoralized, " read Dwayne. "Why wouldn't you be? Of course it is exhausting, having to reason all the time in a universe which wasn't meant to be reasonable.”
“So, in the interests of survival, they trained themselves to be agreeing machines instead of thinking machines. All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking, and then they thought that, too.”

Back before I nicked a diploma and put that particular time and place in the rearview, there were only two authors that nearly all of my fellow Liberal Arts College English majors blabbered-on about unendingly: Chuck Palahniuk and Kurt Vonnegut. (Lucky for us all that the Second Coming of Christ didn’t happen just once but twice!) Even though I had read and liked Slaughterhouse Five as a young, emotionally-stunted and delusional fifteen year-old, I had also dutifully read through six of Chucky’s stinkers by the time I got to college. Add to the equation the variable that most of these hep cats thought Shakespeare and Hemingway (two of me best mates at the time) were talentless hacks, and what you get the other side of that equal sign is an Anthony that is going to take his chances and steer clear of the Vonnegut circle jerk sessions.

With that introductory diatribe out of the way, I can now say that, yes, I was wrong about Vonnegut, and so now we can all move right on along to my review.

Breakfast of Champions is a sad and gloomy slice of metafiction that still manages to find a sense of humor about what an awful fucking nightmare it is to exist in this sad sorry sack of shit of an excuse for a world. If read aloud, every sentence in this book should end with a sigh and a defeated glance out the window at nothing but a bleak view of nothing.

Vonnegut writes this book, as he does with most of his books, through the 1st-person-POV guise of being a weary misanthropic novelist named Kurt Vonnegut, whose thankless job it is to write another goddamned book about all of these horrible (but also (sometimes (very seldom) ) wonderful) people we’re stuck with in this life. BoC goes about this in a conversational, vernacular-heavy, cliché-ridden prose style that still manages to be quite charming and clever. The focus of this book is the hours leading up to a chance meeting between Kilgore Trout, a loser who writes off-beat science fiction novels that nobody reads, and Dwayne Hoover, a successful car salesman who is starting to lose his shit in a major way. Along the way there is plenty of time for digressions full of deadpan takedowns of American culture as well as for dozens of endearing little doodles from our author.

The end result is a novel that reads like something an off-beat science fiction novelist would write if given the task of explaining the United States in the 1970’s to an alien species. Vonnegut makes it clear that there is so much in this world that makes him angry, and getting older does nothing to ease his resentment. But even in the face of murder, hate, racism and greed, Vonnegut can’t help but care about people and sympathize for what it must be like for not just his characters but for every last one of us who goes about chug-chugging along through this nightmare we all share together. And it’s that big god-damned heart of Vonnegut’s that’s the real treasure of this wonderful novel.

When is the moment you realize that it isn't just the book that's a favourite of yours? It's the author as well? I love Kurt Vonnegut.

It's kind of difficult to explain his books, I suppose you can tell the plot, or explain what you think of it but you can't really convey the feel of them. You need to experience them.

Well, Breakfast of Champions is a very intimate book about life, humans, those of who we think matter, and those we don't, about dreams and how they mean the whole world to somebody, and how insignificant they are to everybody else. It's about our roles in life, about how we react to different situations, about America and its place at the top in the world, and about depression and how it leads to insanity.
It's filled with drawings from the author, the most trivial doodles that make Vonnegut so very dear to you. He's your confidant in this book, your companion, your God.

n  "I had given him a life not worth living, but I had also given him an iron will to live. This was a common combination on the planet Earth."n

Liked Slaughterhouse more, but the illustrations in this book were outstanding!

“in nonsense is strength”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions



Sometimes, I think of Breakfast of Champions as top shelf Vonnegut (five stars). Sometimes I think of it as second shelf Vonnegut (four stars). I think it could exist easily on both shelves. Since I own a couple copies, and have read it a couple times, I will forever physically keep it on two shelves (Library of America on one, Laurel Mass-Market Paperback on a lower shelf). The Laurel Mass-Market is also the one I try to bribe and incentivize my son into reading. I'm sure the picture of the asshole and the beavers might just be the inspiration my sixteen-year old needs to start this book.

Here is a picture of Vonnegut's drawing of an asshole tattooed on a young man's arm:



Here is a picture of Vonnegut's drawings of beavers, in what looks like a Finnish copy of Breakfast of Champions (if you look really close you can also see Vonnegut's drawing of women's underwear bleeding through in blue):



Speaking of vaginas. Today is Valentines Day. Christians, and by Christians I mean a Pope (I can't remember who), tried to turn a Roman festival into a Christian holiday honoring a martyr (this also could be a common myth). I'm more fascinated, however, by Roman festivals than I am by martyrs or myths. Anyway, Valentines was supposed to smother out Lupercalia, a day where men dressed in the skins of sacrificed goats, in imitation of Lupercus, and ran around the walls of old Rome, with the thongs called februa in their hands whipping people (mostly people with XX chromosomes) who happened to be around.

Here is an artsy painting of men dressed in goat skins whipping women:



Women, girls, and childbearing young women would line up to receive lashes from these whip-wielding Romans. Supposedly this was meant to ensure fertility, or at least prevent sterility, in women and ease the pains of childbirth (I'm not sure how the math works -- as if Pain from a whip is a negative (-) and pain of childbirth is a positive (+)). Anyway, I started and finished this book on Valentines. I also took my wife out for Mexican food tonight and bought her exactly 2.2lbs of dark chocolates.

Here is a graphic showing how people decide which restaurants to go to on Valentines:



The only reason I bring this up is today is Valentines and also because Vonnegut wrote published this book in 1973. Since I was born in almost in the dead center of 1974, the reality is I spent some period of 1973 -- as this book was flooding the Earth -- being conceived (I try not to think too hard about this) and gestated (or this) and eventually birthed (or this either). I think, perhaps, my birth was so easy for my mom because of Vonnegut's book. Well, this book. Yes, I am saying that in February 1974, this book with a drawing of two beavers in it, might have been a literal februa for my mother. Perhaps, Vonnegut pounding these words into existence somehow helped in my conception. Perhaps, Vonnegut is the ONE man in the Universe completely responsible for my existence. Well yes, there is my father, but this is way beyond Fathers and Sons. All I know for certain that part of my brain since my teenage years has been marked, folded, energized by Vonnegut. Not through magic or some mystical force, but rather through the teeth and bite and whip of his words. The old fashioned way.

Here is a picture of my brain receiving its extra fold from Vonnegut's at age 5 months:

[image error]

I should have liked this book more. It's about as "Vonnegut" as Vonnegut books go - with Kilgore Trout as a leading character, and Vonnegut mixing his views into the narrative to the point of eventually inserting himself, as author, into the story. And, of course, the book is filled with Vonnegut's humorous drawings and ability to return to an earlier observation in a way not unlike an incisive stand-up comedian. A modern-day Mark Twain, Vonnegut has been one of my favorite authors for years. So why would I give "Breakfast of Champions" only three stars (and even vacillate between two and three)? I'm not really sure...but the book just didn't flow for me. Perhaps my views are colored by the final Harry Potter, which I read right before "Breakfast of Champions." When I picked up Vonnegut, I really wanted a *story* and Vonnegut's plots are, well, not the point. His characters are paper-thin - intentionally so, but I wanted to get pulled into another world, not poke fun at the one I currently live in (or, at least, a 1970s version of it). I still recommend this book for Vonnegut lovers everywhere - just make sure you're not really in the mood for a fictional escape. In many ways, "Breakfast of Champions" is as much a clever and humorous essay as it is a fictional narrative.

This was written half a century ago, but its relevance seems greater than ever. Here is a book whose cynicism has come of age – infused with a suspicion that humans might just be machines, that the earth's atmosphere will ‘become unbreathable soon’, and even that ‘humanity deserved to die horribly, since it had behaved so cruelly and wastefully on a planet so sweet’.

In the United States, in particular – because this is a novel completely drowning in bitterness towards America – many citizens ‘were so ignored and cheated and insulted that they thought they might be in the wrong country, or even on the wrong planet, that some terrible mistake had been made’. Public discourse has collapsed, since ideas now are merely

badges of friendship or enmity. Their content did not matter. Friends agreed with friends, in order to express friendliness. Enemies disagreed with enemies, in order to express enmity.

This is explained in Vonnegut's narrative by means of a simple, declamatory style, as though writing to a child, or perhaps more accurately as though writing to a being from another planet, introducing them to the dismal situation here. It is interspersed with simple line drawings, illustrating creatures or concepts referred to.

At its best, Vonnegut's reductive satire clarifies things wonderfully well. I particularly liked his answer to the question of why we are here:

n  To be
the eyes
and ears
and conscience
of the Creator of the Universe,
you fooln

…though personally I would remove the words ‘the Creator of’ from this formula.

But despite these moments, overall I prefer Vonnegut when he's in a slightly more hopeful mood. The pessimism here is so strong that it feels oppressive and a little aimless, which can muddle his message. His comments on racism in America, for instance, though clearly satirical, are so cynically made that they end up feeling like part of the problem.

A lot of this book seems to have to do with Vonnegut's self-doubt as a writer, and he introduces himself as a character so that he can reflect (negatively) on his own work. This culminates in a kind of anti-mission statement about his writing:

I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done.

To me, this self-reflexion tended to undermine the rest of the book, since he insisted so many times that other characters were not real and he was just making them up that you start to lose any interest in them. So there is still some of the familiar Vonnegut magic here, but it seems to be wrapped in a rather despairing and unmotivated mood.

I read this book in the uncomfortable summer of 1973. I had the shakes that summer, and my shrink said I needed bennies - badly. No guff.

My shakes could only be cured (and in most cases that were caused by straight chlororomazine) by Benzotropine Mesylate. Eureka! It worked immediately. My shakes ceased.

But it didn't heal my cold clammy skin. So Vonnegut gave me extra relief!

You’ll have to forgive me for saying this, but having spent a violent youth under somewhat violent circumstances, this innocent bystander’s bird’s eye view of a total fracas hit the Golden Buzzer for Vonnegut in my young eyes.

He could henceforth do no wrong for my jejune and confused self because he Was that innocent bystander.

Vonnegut’s Nom de Guerre, in case you missed his point, is Kilgore Trout.

Yes, Trout is Kurt’s alter ego.

He was a shell-shocked recluse of a great SF writer (Vonnegut’s beginnings were in SF writing, like his Player Piano), who, like Stephen Dedalus, viewed the world from a coolly remote vantage point:

“Disinterested... paring his fingernails.”

A sensitive onlooker in the grotesquely violent American political landscape of the 1970’s.

And no, it is surely no accident that - back then - political repression was increasing as the mores of a post-Pill public (like his schizophrenic son, Mark) were getting looser!

C’est la guerre.

And ‘Kilgore’ Vonnegut - caught in the crossfire of craziness as Watergate boiled over and his sick son Mark called out for help - is suspended, shell-shocked, within the mad violence of a local car dealer’s armed schizophrenia.

No, it’s not a happy read.

But Kurt Vonnegut had to write it.

For had he not let off steam by writing it -

The same Grim Ghoul of Madness woulda torn him apart.