I met Kilgore once at a book signing, in the Harvard Square Coop. He was dour and resigned to the fawning multitudes.

I smiled at him and nodded my appreciation. He actually smiled back! Hahahaaaaha!

God, what a terrible book of nonsense.

The two main characters are just overly weird and bizarre for the sake of being bizarre. And I mean really really bizarre. (I suspect many people say they like Vonnegut because he is so damn weird, but theres gotta be a purpose to it. You can't just have completely random ridiculous thoughts that do not have any purpose towards the message of the story. When you do that, its like the intellectual version of VH1 reality; people love it for shock value, while I, and others like me, are disgusted by its lack of substance. You feel dumber for having spent part of your life dedicated to it.)
Theres zero suspense as you are told what the ending will be in the first chapter. The entire book is a build up to that "event" which ends up being a short, disappointingly mild one.
The entire book was written in an obnoxious tone, speaking about everything "humans" do in an condescending manner. As if the author considers himself not only separate from, but better than the human race and its tendencies.
Finally, as if the book wasn't self indulgent enough for Vonnegut, he inserts HIMSELF as a character for the last third of the novel, telling us what he can and can't do if he wishes and how every characters actions are predetermined by his will, even as he interacts with them. This came across as so arrogant and narcissistic that it was almost too much to bear.

It is clear to me after reading Breakfast of Champions that Kurt Vonnegut's biggest fan, by far, is Kurt Vonnegut himself.

When I read this novel as a teenager, I remember finding the following paragraph strikingly witty:

1492. As children we were taught to memorize this year with pride and joy as the year people began living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America. Actually, people had been living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America for hundreds of years before that. 1492 was simply the year sea pirates began to rob, cheat, and kill them.

Though since then, the point has been made even more economically by the well-known poster below. Maybe it was directly inspired by Vonnegut?


_______________________

If you want a slightly longer version, this page is very good.

I wonder how the world would have turned out if folks like Vonnegut controlled things...

"As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I had become more and more enraged and mystified by the idiot decisions made by my countrymen."

Me too, Mr. Vonnegut. Me too. I'm not quite approaching my fiftieth, but yeh, me too.

In Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut writes as an author writing an author and their hapless creations. He uses satire to poke fun at things like:


n  Capitalism: n
"The chief weapon of the sea pirates, however, was their capacity to astonish. Nobody else could believe, until it was much too late, how heartless and greedy they were."

n  Stereotypes:n
"If a person stopped living up to expectations ... everybody went on imagining that the person was living up to expectations anyway."

n  White-washed American history:n
"1492 -- The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them."

n  "Group mentality:n 
"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.”


Vonnegut also uses this book to question whether any of us has free will. Are we at the mercy of some creator, our stories already written? Are we at the mercy of our brain chemistry, which dictates what we do and when we do it?

I generally love satire and Vonnegut does it well. There were several "chuckle moments" in this book. There were also a few parts where it dragged but for the most part, I enjoyed it. 

I will note that the "N" word is used extensively. It's offensive (I hope) to modern ears, but it gets our attention and forces white people to reflect on our own ugliness and complicity in racism. It shoves a mirror right up in our faces.

Vonnegut uses stereotypes of Black people in order to speak against racism, which is a prevalent theme throughout the book. The stereotyping of his characters was used to portray the idiocy of seeing people with preconceived ideas based on one aspect of who they are.

I appreciate that Mr. Vonnegut placed the problem of racism firmly on the heads of white people. When his characters filled a stereotype, it was because white people had given them no other choice.

For example, Black characters were sometimes criminals and drug dealers, but that was because white people either wouldn't hire them or, when they did, wouldn't pay them a living wage. The characters were left with little choice but to engage in criminal behavior in order to support their families. 

White people often create stereotypes for minorities, force them into filling it, and then blame the minority for fitting the stereotype instead of placing the blame where it truly belongs.

It infuriates me when I hear white people talk about crime in inner cities, usually to turn the topic away from Black people being brutalized and murdered by police. They use the stereotype (news alert: most Black people are not criminals) in order to place the blame on the victims. 

But we deserve the blame. We created the extreme poverty in which many Black and Latinx people live. We created the drug problem. We need to start accepting responsibility for the problems we created. Not Blacks, not Latinx. Us.

So don't give me that BS about drugs in the inner city and "black on black" crime (as though white people never kill other white people). It's a poor excuse and you know it.

(Not to mention that even if someone does engage in criminal activity, they never deserve to be murdered because of it.)

So anyway... back to the book.

The more I think about it, the more I appreciate the clever way in which Vonnegut used this book to speak against institutional racism. 

Though this is a very serious subject and the book is philosophical at heart, it is written in a light-hearted way. It's a quick and easy read and I didn't even quite notice what Vonnegut was doing until I reflected on the book after having finished it. 

There are many truths in this book and Vonnegut's use of satire to point them out was brilliant.

(June 2020 classic-of-the-month)

Breakfast of Champions came out in 1973 which was a year that happened between 1972 and 1974. These years are numbered after the birth of Jesus Christ who was a radical religious teacher from Judea. Judea was in the Roman Empire. The Romans came from Italy, some of them are probably still living there. Actually after some digging around they found there was a mistake and Jesus was really born around 4 BC. BC means Before Christ. So that means Jesus was born four years before Jesus.

Kurt Vonnegut writes like a drunken person who feels he has to explain the simplest thing to the reader, so he keeps adding helpful definitions of things as he goes along, such as that the Star of Bethlehem was a whole galaxy going up like a celluloid collar. Celluloid was the first type of plastic they made. It was a homogeneous colloidal dispersion of nitrocellulose and camphor. They used it for everything, collars included. Collars were – okay, you know what a collar is.

This is the story of Dwayne Hoover, a big shot in a nowhere town called Midland City, which is referred to many times in an unkind way as the asshole of the universe. There are some real Midland Cities in the USA. I wonder if anyone who lived in one of those ever had words with Kurt Vonnegut. He would have said well, I made up my Midland City, and they might have said Yeah? Have you got any proof of that?

This is also the story of Kilgore Trout, sort of, who was a failed science fiction writer. He must have been fairly terrible because he could only get his stories published in porn magazines, as filler material between the pictures of what Kurt Vonnegut calls beaver.

Readers should be aware that this book’s woozy deadpan humour includes some terminology that might raise contemporary bloodpressure. There are like a bajillion uses of the n word. These are used ironically, sarcastically, despairingly, anguishedly and deliberately shockingly. Deadpan is a form of humour where the joker never cracks a smile to show you it’s safe to laugh. Pan was an old slang word for face.

This book is one of those not uncommon merrygorounds where the author becomes a character in his own book and explains to the other characters that he’s made them all up and can get them to do anything he wants to. You might think that would be a big existential crisis and all but the characters are having too many problems to concentrate on the philosophical aspects of this, problems like being attacked by a guy having a psychotic breakdown, etc.

This book has a broken bitter heart of despair, you can feel its dark heat behind each joke, each nonsequitor and each surreal spiral. You heard of a love letter, well, this is a hate letter to the America Kurt Vonnegut found himself to be living in. I read this a long time ago and I thought it wouldn’t have any bite left, but it really did.

Breakfast of Champions = Goodbye Blue Monday, Kurt Vonnegut

Breakfast of Champions, is a 1973 novel by the American author Kurt Vonnegut.

His seventh novel, it is set predominantly in the fictional town of Midland City, Ohio and focuses on two characters: Dwayne Hoover, a Midland resident, Pontiac dealer and affluent figure in the city and Kilgore Trout, a widely published but mostly unknown science fiction author.

Breakfast of Champions has themes of free will, suicide, and race relations among others.

تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز دوم از ماه ژانویه سال 2017میلادی

عنوان: صبحانه قهرمانان؛ نویسنده: کورت ونه گات؛ مترجم: راضیه رحمانی؛ تهران، ققنوس، 1393، در 312ص، مصور، شابک9786002781147؛ موضوع داستانهای نویسندگان ایالات متحده آمریکا - سده ی 20م

صبحانه قهرمانان، رمانی طنزآمیز است؛ دغدغه‌ های ذهن نويسنده، درباره ی دو پیرمرد سفیدپوست لاغر اندام است، که روی سیاره‌ ای در حال مرگ زندگی میکنند؛ «کیلگور تراوت»، نویسنده‌ ای پرکار، و در عین حال، ناکام است، که به جز یک خوانشگر، هیچ‌کس انبوه کتاب‌ها، و داستان‌های او را، نخوانده‌ است؛ روزی با اعمال نفوذ همین تنها خوانشگرش، به جشنواره ی هنر شهر کوچک «میدلند سیتی» دعوت می‌شود؛ او که از این دعوت شوکه شده، تصمیم می‌گیرد تا به آنجا برود؛ حضور «تراوت» در آن شهر، رخدادی است، که زندگی چندین شخص را دگرگون می‌کند؛ یکی از این اشخاص «دواین هوور» است، که فروشنده ی ماشین‌های «پونتیاک»، و از ثروتمندترین شهروندان «میدلند سیتی»، هست؛ «ونه گات» در واقع، شخصیت‌هایی آفریده، که با آن‌ها خود را متحول می‌کند، و به این نتیجه می‌رسد، که انسان‌ها دو بعد «ماشینی» و «مقدس» دارند؛ تا زمانیکه یک انسان، ماشین‌وار عمل کند، وضعیتش پیچیده، تراژیک و خنده دار خواهد بود؛ اما در درون همه ی موجودات، به طور یکسان، ماهیت مقدسی نیز، وجود دارد، که نویسنده آن را «نوار لغزش ‌ناپذیری از نور» می‌نامد؛ این ماهیت، در وجود تک‌ تک این موجودات، شعله می‌کشد؛ «ونه گات» در این رمان، از تکنیک‌های بسیاری سود برده، تا اصول سنتی داستان نویسی را، در هم بریزد؛ وی از همان آغاز داستان، درباره ی چگونگی، و پایان آن سخن می‌گوید، اما رخدادهای پیش بینی نشده، در این میان، خود حدیث دیگری هستند

نقل از متن: (سرآغاز کلام: «صبحانه قهرمانان» نام انحصاری نوعی برشتوک صبحانه از شرکت «جنرال میلز» است؛ هر گونه استفاده از این عبارت در سراسر کتاب، و برای عنوان آن، نه مبنی بر ارتباط با شرکت «جنرال میلز» و بهره مندی از حمایت ایشان است و نه به منظور بی اعتبار ساختن محصولات خوبشان؛ «فیبی هرتی»، که کتاب به او هدیه شده، به گفتاری آشنا، دیگر دستش از دنیا کوتاه است؛ «فیبی» بیوه ای اهل «ایندیاناپولیس» بود، که در پایان دوره ی «رکود بزرگ» با او آشنا شدم؛ آن زمان، «فیبی» حدوداً پنجاه ساله بود، و من شانزده ساله بودم، یا در همین حول و حوش؛ «فیبی» مایه دار بود، منتها چون در تمام دوران جوانی اش هفت روز هفته، سر کار رفته بود، دیگر برایش عادت شده بود، و دست از کار نمیکشید؛ او نکته های منطقی و گیرایی در ستون «توصیه هایی به عاشقان دلخسته» مینوشت، در روزنامه «ایندیاناپولیس تایمز»، روزنامه ای که زمانی معتبر به حساب میآمد، ولی حالا دیگر منسوخ شده؛ منسوخ؛ او برای فروشگاه زنجیره ای «ویلیام اچ بلاک» آگهی مینوشت، کسب و کار این فروشگاه هنوز هم، در ساختمانی که پدرم طراحی کرده، رونق دارد؛ «فیبی» برای حراج تابستانه ی کلاه حصیری، آگهی زیر را نوشت: «این کلاههای حصیری اونقده مُفته که میتونید بخریدشون واسه سایبون گلهای رُز باغچه تون، یا حتی رو هم بچینیدشون تا اسبتون بپره از روشون!»؛ «فیبی هرتی» مرا استخدام کرد، تا از روی آگهیهایی که برای تبلیغ لباس نوجوانان مینوشت، رونویسی کنم؛ بخشی از کارم پوشیدن لباسهایی بود، که ازشان تعریف و تمجید میکردم؛ با هر دو پسرش که هم سن و سالم بودند، رفیق شدم، و تمام وقت خانه آنها پلاس بودم؛ «فیبی» در صحبت با ما و دوست دخترهایمان، اصلاً عفتِ کلام نداشت، و حرفهای رکیک میزد؛ از این گذشته، شوخ طبع بود و کاری به کارمان نداشت؛ از «فیبی» یاد گرفتیم که نه تنها وقت حرف زد�� از امور خصوصی، بلکه در صحبت از مدرسه، تاریخ «آمریکا»، قهرمانان سرشناس، نحوه توزیع ثروت در جامعه، و خلاصه هر موضوعی بی ادب و جسور باشیم؛ من خودم تا به حال از صدقه ی سر همین بی نزاکتی، توانسته ام لقمه نانی به دست بیاورم، اما هنوز در این مقوله خیلی ناشی ام، و مانده تا به «فیبی هرتی» برسم؛ مدام سعی میکنم از بی ادبی «فیبی هرتی»، که بسیار برازنده اش بود، تقلید کنم؛ به نظر من، آن زمان، به خاطر حال و هوای رکود اقتصادی، داشتن جذابیت برای «فیبی» بسیار آسانتر بود تا الآنِ من، چون او به همان چیزی اعتقاد داشت که اکثر «آمریکایی»های آن زمان بهش معتقد بودند: این که وقتی رفاه اقتصادی از راه برسد، مردم خوشبخت و منطقی و منصف خواهند شد؛ دیگر هیچ وقت این کلمه را نشنیدم؛ منظورم «رفاه» است؛ این کلمه قبلاً مترادف با بهشت بود، و «فیبی هرتی» معتقد بود آداب گریزی ای که به همه توصیه میکرد کمک میکند تا بهشت «آمریکایی» محقق شود؛ هنوز راه و رسم آداب گریزیِ «فیبی» مُد است، اما دیگر هیچکس بهشت «آمریکا»یی را باور ندارد؛ البته هیچ کس، الا «فیبی هرتی»؛ در این کتاب، از تصوراتم درباره ماشین وار بودنِ آدمها خواهم گفت؛ این دیدگاه در دوران کودکی ام شکل گرفت، زمانی که مبتلایان به مراحل پیشرفته سیفلیس و اختلال حرکتی ــ به ویژه مبتلایان مرد ــ مضحکه تماشاگران سیرکها و مردم پایین شهرِ «ایندیاناپولیس» میشدند؛ سیفلیسیها اسیر موجوداتی فنری شکل و گوشتخوار بودند، موجوداتی آن قدر ریز که فقط با میکروسکوپ میشد مشاهده شان کرد؛ این میکروبها، وقتی از گوشتِ بین مهره های ستون فقرات قربانیان عبور میکردند، باعث به هم چسبیدن مهره ها میشدند و، در نتیجه، مبتلایان به شکل ترسناکی باوقار و شق و رق به نظر میرسیدند، گویی چشمانشان دارد از حدقه میزند بیرون؛ یکبار، در تقاطع خیابانهای مِریدیِن و واشینگتن، فردی مبتلا به سیفلیس دیدم؛ زیر ساعتی ایستاده بود که پدرم طراحی کرده بود؛ مردم محل به آنجا میگفتند «تقاطع آمریکا»؛ مرد سیفلیسی سخت به فکر فرو رفته بود که چگونه با پاهای رنجورش روی خط کشی خیابان قدم بردارد، و خود را به آنطرف خیابان «واشینگتن» برساند؛ تنش رعشه خفیفی داشت؛ انگار درون بدنش موتوری کوچک کار گذاشته بودند که درجا کار میکرد؛ مشکل از اینجا ناشی میشد: مغزش که بایست به پاها فرمان حرکت میداد دیگر کار نمیکرد، چون موجودات ریز، زنده زنده خورده بودندش؛ رشته های عصبی و اتصالاتی که بایست دستورالعملها را منتقل میکردند هم یا دیگر عایق بندی نبودند یا همان موجودات ریز کاملاً جویده بودندشان؛ کلیدهایی هم که در مسیر اتصالات قرار داشتند یا مسدود شده بودند یا کاملاً به هم جوش خورده بودند؛ او حدوداً سی ساله بود، اما بسیار پیرتر به نظر میآمد؛ فکر میکرد و فکر میکرد؛ آنوقت، مثل زنان گروه همسرایان، دوبار پشت سر هم پایش را به جلو پرتاب میکرد.؛ آن زمان، که بچه سال بودم، او درست مثل ماشین به نظرم میرسید؛ در آن دوران فکر میکردم آدمها تیوبهای پلاستیکی ای هستند که درونشان واکنشهای شیمیایی در حال فعل و انفعال است؛ وقتی بچه بودم، افراد زیادی را دیدم که گواتر داشتند؛ دووِین هووِر، فروشنده پونتیاکی که قهرمان این کتاب است، هم چنین کسانی را به چشم خود دیده؛ این ساکنان بدبختِ زمین غدّه های تیروییدشان چنان ورم میکرد که انگار در گلویشان کدوخورشتی پرورش داده اند؛ همانطور که بعدها ثابت شد، تنها کاری که مبتلایان به گواتر بایست انجام میدادند مصرف روزانه یک سرِ سوزن ید بود و بس؛ آنوقت میتوانستند زندگی آرامی داشته باشند؛ مادرم مغزش را با داروهای شیمیایی درب و داغان کرد، داروهایی که مثلاً قرار بود باعث شوند راحت بخوابد)؛ پایان نقل

تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 05/07/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 11/06/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی

Koks jis žaismingas ir, kaip reta, įvairiapusiškai ideologiškas. Labai aktualus.

trying to savor everything he’s ever written but i have no patience

I'm confused.

I was thrown (or more accurately, threw myself) into Kurt Vonnegut's work blindly and completely unprepared. After finishing Breakfast of Champions , a book about nothing in particular and which doesn't necessarily lead anywhere, I was left with the distinct impression that I am yet unable to fully grasp and appreciate Vonnegut's humor and satire. In a less than shocking twist of fate however, I happen to love books that challenge me, and I've already formulated a plan to devour Vonnegut's entire opus over the coming months.

Nevertheless, I loved it. Breakfast of Champions is hilarious. It is also semi-tragic, which makes it even funnier. What really got me, the coup de grâce , if you will, is the narrator's self insertion. I live for this kind of thing. He was my favorite character by far. The rest of the book encompasses a cast of eccentric characters and an absurd little narrative, both of which are clever hosts for a not-so-disguised satirical look at American culture, with all its horrors and absurdities. The point of the book? There isn't any. Don't think too much about it.

And so on.

A novel is a dead tree with words on it. Breakfast of Champions is a great dead tree with words on it.

The Abominable Snowman has arrived. If I'm not as clean as most abominable snowmen are, it is because I was kidnapped as a child from the slopes of Mount Everest, and taken as a slave to a bordello in Rio de Janeiro, Where I have been cleansing the unspeakably filthy toilets for the past fifty years. A visitor to our whipping room there screamed in a transport of agony and ecstasy that there was to be an arts festival in Midland City. I have escaped down a rope of sheets taken from a reeking hamper. I have come to Midland City to have myself acknowledged, before I die, as the great artist I believe myself to be.

I could have started with the opening phrase of the novel, one of the best I've ever read, but then I would have had to stop there, because it really says it all about the book ( This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast. ) . I prefered to start with the end ( or anyway, something close to it), with the arrival of Kilgore Trout at his destination, because it helps me make some points about the novel:

- 1 - this is not really a science-fiction novel, this is a novel about science-fiction writers, artists in general, and the way they reflect the world we live in. Kilgore Trout, Philboyd Studge, even Rabo Karabekian - the minimalist painter - are all alter egos of the author, sounding boards for his artistic credo, ambassadors at large to the Earth from a paranoid and pessimistic parallel universe (did you know that all the mirrors are called 'leaks' because it is through them that one world crosses into another?). In a typical Vonnegut moment, on the wall in the toilet of a bawdy house stands this question : What is the meaning of life? . Kilgore Trout has an unguarded poetic moment, where he forgets to be annoying and provocative:
tto be
tthe eyes
tand ears
tand conscience
tof the Creator of the Universe,
tyou fool.

So, the artist becomes the conscience of our times and place in history, refusing to allow us the easy comfort of denial and cheap escapism into imaginary worlds where we don't see the ruined rivers, the despoiled forests, the extinguished species (like the Bermuda Erns). His job is to provide the tough love of a strict parent who knows we need a good kick in the behind, not comforting platitudes. Here's another quote from an exchange between Trout and Milo Maritimo:

- Oh, Mr. Trout, teach us to sing and dance and laugh and cry. We've tried to survive so long on money and sex and envy and real estate and football and basketball and automobiles and television and alcohol - on sawdust and broken glass!
- Open your eyes! said Trout bitterly. Do I look like a dancer, a singer, a man of joy? Open your eyes! Would a man nourished by beauty look like this? You have nothing but desolation and desperation here, you say? I bring you more of the same!



- 2 - 'sawdust and broken glass' : this is a dark novel, dragging us through a desolate landscape of broken dreams, through all the 'junk' accumulated over a lifetime (the author remarks he is in his 50th year and wants to clear out his mind of garbage and lies). What does he sees as 'junk'? Here's an example:

1492
The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them.

If Kilgore Trout is the conscience of the world, his counterpart in the novel is the product of the modern world. Dwayne Hoover is a pillar of society, a rich businessman in Midland City, a champion of pain and alienation hidden under a success story. He is a tragic character of Biblical proportions, announced from the opening stanza : an extract from the Book of Job. At one point of the narrative, Dwayne remembers a visit to General Motors, where they have a division caled 'Destructive Testing' : Everything you're not supposed to do to a car, they did to a car. I saw that sign, and I couldn't help wondering if that was what God put me on Earth for - to find out how much a man could take without breaking. . God in this case is the Philboys Studge persona, taking an active role in the plot in a metafictional twist where the writer, the reader and the hero of the story interact onscene in a style reminiscent of Italo Calvino.

- 3 - I mentioned metafiction: there erally isn't much of a plot or character development in the novel. Random thoughts, images and characters are thrown together in a stream of conscience progression, featuring often familiar faces and themes borrowed from previous Vonnegut stories. Trout spawns science-fiction ideas as easily as he breaths, throwaway sketches of potential novel and short stories whose inspiration comes from a fast food sandwich (In the future, porn films will depict aliens fantasizing about eating fresh food instead of oil and plastic derivates) or from a glass of bourbon ( he 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. ) . Beside throwaway stories, we also have throwaway characters, like Sparky, the dog who had to fight all the time because he couldn't wag his tail and show that he is friendly. Like other postmodern pieces of literature, Vonnegut includes the commentary on his technique and approach in the book: I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would also be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead.

I'm not going to try to explain everything he tries to do in here. I would rather use a movie trailer technique and give you just the punchline, as a teaser to go and discover its context in the book:
It's all like an ocean! cried Dostoievsky. I say it's all like cellophane.

- 4 - this is a funny story; critics are calling it 'gallows humor' for a reason - it's ugly, foul mouthed and irreverent to so-called sacred symbols (flags, national anthems, historical figures, etc), lambasting democratically everything in sight. Among the numerous running gags is one trying to decide what you want written on your tombstone, another about the cosmic significance of brands written on long-haul trucks, mentioning the particular shade of colour for every African American character, and a habbit of mentioning penis length and diameter for every male character introduced and bra size, waist size for every female one (did you know that this is a marketing technique for making the consummer feel inadequate?)

- I can't tell if you're serious or not, said the driver.
- I won't know myself until I find out whether life is serious or not, said Trout. It's dangerous, I know, and it can hurt a lot. That doesn't necessarily mean it's serious, too.

Some of the acid commentaries may be addressed to fellow authors, overtly or not: Trout trudged onward, a stranger in a strange land. . Trout could be thus considered as a reaction to Heinlein's grokking alien, and in a more radical simile, a critique of the easy sentimentality of St Exupery in Le Petit Prince. It was the inclusion of doodled illustrations and the theme of looking at Earth's follies from the point of view of an alien that made this connection for me.

Great book - it goes straight to the favorites shelf.