I'm convinced that Vonnegut's novels don't need any kind of spoiler alerts because he's probably gonna spill the beans on all the major plot twists & ending in the first 20 pages itself.

Preface:
This is a review a book titled BOC/Goodbye Blue Monday, the latter might trick you into thinking that after reading this absurd satire on pretty much everything that is wrong with our civilization, from our stories to over-population/pollution, that one can finally be free from procrastinating on Mondays. Nope! A book though was a written or printed work consisting of pages made of Lignin polymers, when stored for years these polymers broke down to give a vanilla like fragrance, it was glued together along one side and bound in covers.It looked like this:

In later times at planet earth a lot of obstinate readers still continued to read books, but eventually they got completely replaced by the so called cheaper & reliable eBooks which looked like this:


Review:
Vonnegut wants to clear his mind of all the useless ridiculous nonsensical doodley-squat & take all the junk(illustrations included) that he's inculcated over his 50 years on earth & hand it down to coming generations/aliens because he's pissed off. Anyway this junk is genius.

A very different theme that this book captured was that pretty much for all problems in the world, the culprit are our stories. People want to shape their lives the way stories are. Everyone only cares about the protagonist. Interesting! So in this book all characters have been treated pivotal, getting their thorough background becomes exasperating by the end albeit.

The book is about the meeting of two not so average guys, rich charming Pontiac dealer D.Hoover whose at the verge of getting insane only to land up in a lunatic asylum, finally to live his life in a ridiculed street, & not so charming pulp sci-fi writer K.Trout, living in a body bag, in poverty, at the verge of meeting the creator of his universe, only to win a noble prize later in 1979, becoming one of the most famous & respected men in history.

When we realize we are all insane life stands explained. This pretty much summarizes the book for me, was quoted by Mark Twain a cult American writer famous for writing The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn which I'm yet to read had influenced Vonnegut's writing & looked like this:

بگذارید بهتان بگویم این چهار تا ستاره را به‌خاطر ویژگی خاصی در اثر مثل زبان، فرم، دیالوگ و... نداده‌ام. بلکه همه‌ی کتاب یک‌جورهایی مجابم کرد که کم‌تر از این کوتاهی در حق کورت ونه‌گات و اثر بامزه‌اش است و «از این حرف‌ها». این ترکیب داخل گیومه هم مُدام در کتاب تکرار می‌شد. فکر می‌کنم طنز ونه‌گات همان‌اندازه که پنهانی خواننده را می‌خنداند هرگز به سمت لودگی و ننربازی نمی‌رود. و برای آدمِ نسبتاً تلخی مثل من این نوع خندیدنِ درونی و گاهاً بیرونی خیلی هم لذت‌بخش است.

Parece una comedia y yo diría que es una “falsa novela humorística”. Parece un relato machista y racista y tampoco creo que sea ni una cosa ni la otra. Lo que menos aparenta sin embargo es tratarse de un relato existencialista y sin embargo estoy convencido de que realmente es algo así.

Tiene una carga filosófica divertida en cuanto al hastío existencial del narrador, que narra como desganado, finalizando cualquier microrrelato o párrafo aparentando hacerlo de cualquier forma: usando muchas veces finales como: “ETC” y “…y cosas por el estilo”. O comienza los párrafos también como desganado por “Y entonces”. Incide en el comportamiento mecanizado de los humanos sin tener un efectivo libre albedrío, estando preocupada la raza humana por pequeñas miserias casi siempre materiales.

Esto lo viste como un experimento loco y divertido, pero a la vez y aunque parezca contradictorio, muy lúcido. Difícil de explicar pero lo intentamos. Hago mías las palabras de un personaje accesorio, opinando sobre uno de los dos protagonistas principales, al decir en un momento dado que: “no sabe nunca si está hablando en serio o en broma ese tipo”. Eso mismo te da por pensar del autor, sobre todo al comienzo. En una palabra, el lector no sabe de inicio si los protagonistas y el mismo autor son listos o tontos.

Una de las primeras preguntas que te haces de inicio (yo al menos) es la siguiente: ¿Quién es el narrador? Conoce a los dos protagonistas y se dirige al lector como si fueran niños. Se irá descubriendo y anticipo que es relevante y peculiar.

Esta novela da algunos diagnósticos muy certeros y ácidos de la particular idiosincrasia de su país USA: ese mito de los padres fundadores, la ridícula letra del himno nacional americano, la particular historia que inventan para justificar la invasión de los europeos del continente y la aniquilación de los pueblos oriundos, etc… Luego sin venir a cuento mezcla el tamaño de los penes de muchos de los protagonistas, las medidas del busto, cintura y caderas de ellas, etc y te quedas como pensando lo que comentaba: ¿estamos en serio? En cualquier caso muy divertido y con mensaje.

I shouldn't like this book. It does things that I've disliked other modern writers for doing, authors like Adam Levin or Dave Eggers. I don't like excessive cleverness that smells like pretension. I think a story can usually stand on its own without illustrations of staplers, and if it cannot then it probably wasn't a very good story to start. I don't care for bells and whistles - they're loud and distracting and jarring.

Kurt Vonnegut might be the Godfather of Bells and Whistles. And, by god, he managed to do it without being insufferable. And, holy shit, he actually had something to say along the way.

Years ago I had surgery which took me out of commission for a while. I was staying with my boyfriend during my recovery, and we had only been together for about a month or two at the time. I wasn't able to work, I had a gaping wound, and so my days basically consisted of popping pain pills and sleeping during the day and then being up late at night. While I was up at night, I'd peruse this guy's bookshelves. It was then that I read the shit out of some Vonnegut. Somehow I never got around to reading this one - either it wasn't on my boyfriend's shelf at the time or maybe I healed up enough to be able to go back to work at that point and just never got to it.

But now, years later, in a different apartment, surrounded by different dogs, under different circumstances (ie, no gaping wound, no pain pills), I find myself up after 1 in the morning finishing off another Vonnegut book. The only thing that is the same is the boyfriend himself, in another room, sound asleep.

I think Vonnegut is the sort of author that deserves to be read in one sitting, preferably at night. No distractions. Vonnegut was a master writer, playing tricks on his readers and creating dimensions between his characters that most authors are not skilled enough or confident enough to be able to pull off.

For all intents and purposes, based on my history reading other authors who clearly were inspired by Vonnegut but failed because they thought they were being too cute, I should hate this book. But I don't. Maybe it speaks to my disdain for most of society, maybe I feel something for the schizophrenic narrator.

Mostly, though, I think it just feels like home, reading Vonnegut. Kilgore Trout is practically family.

This past December I was flung to the earth by the force of gravity, which never relaxed for a second.

This resulted in an bad ankle injury which has required an ortho boot, limited activity, and physical therapy.

(I couldn't help wondering if that was what God put me on Earth for—to find out how much a [person] could take without breaking).

Two weeks ago, I received a shoulder shrug from the doctor and his advice: “You need an MRI if this doesn't improve soon.”

Almost all the messages which were sent and received in his country, even the telepathic ones, had to do with buying or selling some damn thing.

Getting an MRI is right up there for me with shopping naked at my regular grocery store or being hog-tied, gagged and deposited in the trunk of somebody's Buick.

So, I procrastinated making the call for days, then finally took a deep breath, put on my happy face, and called the person who scheduled the MRI appointments. You could say I put my best foot forward, when I made that call (at the moment, that would be my left foot).

A woman answered, and right from the first words out of her mouth, I was greeted with vitriol. Hatred, almost. (Some persons seem to like you, and others seem to hate you, and you must wonder why).

I couldn't believe it. I had dreaded making the call in the first place and then I was put on the phone with this woman. Was it the pandemic that had brought this employee at this medical office to this place, or had she always been such a condescending and miserable person? She must have hoped to get through what little remained of [her] life without ever having to touch another human being again.

Such a small remark was able to have such thundering consequences because the spiritual matrix. . . was in what I choose to call a pre-earthquake condition. Terrific forces were at work on our souls, but they could do no work, because they balanced one another so nicely.

After she knocked me out with three unprovoked verbal blows in a row, my voice was quivering and I almost hung up the phone, but instead I said, “I called you to schedule an appointment, and you have been rude to me from the first word. (Which wasn't hello). You have no idea how much courage it took me to make this phone call or how stressful it is for me to have another MRI. How can you have this job, of scheduling people for stressful appointments, without any compassion or professionalism? This is not okay, and I am hanging up now and I will schedule this appointment at a later time.”

I hung up the phone and sat down on my bed and cried. (A writer off-guard, since the materials with which he works are so dangerous, can expect agony as quick as a thunderclap). It may sound dramatic to you that I cried, but sometimes a little kindness can make all the difference in the world, and when someone stuffs their fist in your mouth instead, you can't help but fall apart.

A lot of 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.

It took me a full week to summon the courage to call again, and, naturally, when I did, the same woman answered the phone. We were both fully aware that it was the same person from the previous week on the call, but we danced around the issue. My goal was to stay professional and make an appointment; I think her goal was the same, but she couldn't resist one verbal barb at the end.

When I arrived at my appointment yesterday, it was the same woman again. I could not believe it. (Truly, is she the only employee there or what??). She greeted me with, “I just called your phone. I looked at the time and wondered if you'd show.” (I was supposed to arrive at 9:15 and it was 9:17).

I didn't want further conflict, so I said, “I'm sorry. When I'm nervous, I start peeing and it's like I can't stop. I've spent most of the morning on the toilet.” Then I pulled down my mask and showed her the dried blood on my lower lip. I started to laugh (I was a nervous wreck) and I said, “I broke out with a cold sore last week, thinking about this MRI, and I ripped the scab off with my fingernail when I tried to spray Rescue Remedy in my mouth in the car. I filled two napkins with blood. I'm a mess.”

She stared at me for a moment, then handed me the paperwork. I was standing at the counter, filling it out, when she said, “I haven't been very nice to you, have I?” I looked up, but I didn't say anything. She said, “I was rude to you on the phone and you called me out on it. I've been thinking about it all week, and I've realized that I've been slowly turning into a person that I don't like anymore.”

You could have knocked me over with a feather. I responded to her honesty by saying, “It's a tough time, and we're all dealing with a lot of stress right now. I'm sure you're trying your best.”

She said, “Nah. I wasn't trying my best. I've been turning into this person long before the pandemic. You're right; I wasn't kind to you, and I hope you'll accept my apology.”

I accepted her apology and asked her to please forgive me, too. Then two incredibly cheerful and compassionate men ushered me back to the MRI. I discovered I was able to go in “feet first” (thank you, Jesus!). Chopin was playing on the headphones.

I decided: some days are really shitty, some are almost divine.

[Their] situation, insofar as [they were] a machine, was complex, tragic and laughable. But the sacred part of [them], [their] awareness, remained an unwavering band of light.

This was the first Vonnegut book I read, a friend loaned it to me in high school. I loved it and afterwards I read every Vonnegut book I could get my hands on.
Recently I reread slaughterhouse five and still loved it.
I believe I still love this one too but like slaughterhouse five I now see past the satire I enjoy so much to some of the subtext.
There’s a lot I didn’t remember about this one, the Kilgore trout stuff really stands out in my head, he’s one of my favourite literary characters.

though Im sure was meant it was to be progressive at the time and focus on the race/class divide in America I have a feeling that it would be considered racist today because of its use of language and portrayals of some of the black characters.

I’d also forgotten how meta this book gets, it seems pretty common now but it must have seemed crazy at the time or maybe it’s just me because I read don quixote this year and the second part has got to be the most meta book ever.

I’ve gotta do some more rereads and figure out which ones I didn’t get to.

“We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.”

A great book if you enjoy dark humor, which I really do. It also helps if you were around in the 1970’s and ate your Wheaties of the title, wore a POW bracelet, and recall a time when “much of the conversation in the country consisted of lines from television shows, both present and past.”

His tone is very ironic, to the point that may make people uncomfortable. It’s playful in the extreme, with the basic drawings he includes in the text, his crazy characters, and the ridiculous plot. It’s very meta, the way he remarks on his characters looking like his father or acting like his mother, and even writing himself into the story, conversing with his characters as their creator.

He’s also playing with narrative itself. “Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done.”

But what he’s doing is making you think, delving into depression and racism and suicide and cruelty and the arts and how much we are really in control of our lives.

“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.”

His humor is absurd, sure, but as often with sarcasm, it’s there to point out hypocrisy.

“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.”

A fun and illuminating read. Not as good as Slaughterhouse-Five, but not to be missed by Vonnegut fans.

Wide open beavers, golfing with Zog, Mexican beetles, smooth fingered Valentine, the Bunny Hooper, writing meat machines, the 3x5 Guinness record and Harry transvestites in grass skirts.

And so on.

This has it all.

Vonnegut is truly a satirical genius with the sense of humor of a 14-year-old boy. I dig that about him. I honestly don’t know how he pulls it off. His stuff should be a hot mess. Instead, it’s fantastic.

DNF 68%
Gostei tanto de Matadouro Cinco e de Cama de Gato que tenho de ficar por aqui com este livro, que nada tem a ver com os outros dois. Adoro o cinismo peculiar do autor, mas esta história está a lançar-me no caos. Lamento.

This is the second book I've read by Kurt Vonnegut, the first one was the masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five.

Breakfast of Champions is right up there alongside it, another masterpiece.

This one tells the story of Kilgore Trout, an unpopular science fiction writer who travels to Midland City to speak at a convention. Before the convention, a car salesman named Dwayne Hoover goes insane after reading Trout's book written from the perspective of the Creator of the Universe. Hoover goes on a killing rampage and the narrator of the novel frees Kilgore Trout.

The book is written from the perspective of a zany omniscient narrator who satirizes modern society, culture and the human race.

It's a sad, hilarious, and absurd roller coaster of a novel.

I am revisiting this novel after a period of heavily re-thinking my sense of Vonnegut, and I can’t read it outside the context of the arc of Vonnegut’s larger career. This book matters, I think, because it is his first after Slaughterhouse-Five. Clumsy and broken as it is, I think it takes what power it has from that historical fact.

I read Vonnegut very much within his own bibliography. Player Piano (his first) is solid enough, though its narrative shortcomings compromise it. Sirens of Titan is the first time he seems to get his act together, but he isn’t all that serious, and he inflects his trauma over his World War II experiences to a goofy sci-fi sub-plot.

The first of his must-reads is Mother Night. It’s the first time he deals with the war directly, and he raises some powerful questions. Unlike Hannah Arendt, who is struck by the “banality of evil” when she observes Adolf Eichmann’s trial, Vonnegut finds a potentially darker conclusion: we are all evil for our complicity in the system that produced such catastrophe. Another’s guilt is simply our excuse. (If you’re looking for under-appreciate Vonnegut, start with this one.)

Then comes Cat’s Cradle, which is wonderfully clever and one of the great accessible meditations on the limits of spirituality and the potential for human self-destruction. It deserves its reputation as Vonnegut’s second-best work. Still, it deals with the war indirectly, folding Vonnegut’s personal trauma into a more global anger at the arrogance, and childishness, of our world leaders.

Then it’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, a moving meditation on the possibilities of Christian decency in a society that, to the avowedly atheistic Vonnegut, has lost all sight of authentic Christianity. Crucially, we see Elliot Rosewater brought to his benign state of decency as a result of his own World War II trauma.

The great power of Slaughterhouse Five, then, comes from Vonnegut finally confronting the trauma he has so long subordinated in his other novels. Most of Slaughterhouse, especially the early parts, reads as a man going somewhere he doesn’t want to go. It picks up on a Vonnegut theme of books that get started and not finished, but this time – perhaps this one time – it does finish the story it sets out to tell. The whole novel works for me. It’s clever and horrifying all at once, and it offers a damning critique of 20th Century humanity. But its final 3-4 pages, when Vonnegut describes the horrors of Dresden, work for me as the true center of his literary career. Having written them, having at last said what he deferred saying in such creative ways for so long, he reaches a catharsis that still lives on the page.

The great challenge of Breakfast of Champions, then, is to find something to say after Vonnegut has said his most secret and central truth. And, truth be told, it’s frustrating to watch him as he searches through possible topics.

He does sound out the prospect of exploring his other great life trauma, the suicide of his mother, but he doesn’t deal with it in any sustained fashion, nor does he find ways to inflect it onto a story as compelling as his earlier novels. He talks throughout about “bad chemicals” as a clearly unsatisfying explanation for human evil of the sort Dwayne Hoover unleashes at the end, but that’s an uninspired reflection on violence and self-violence.

You can sense his frustration, though, a frustration he takes out on the banality of popular culture, advertising in particular. He implies that the trouble he’s having with his story comes from the failure of language and literature. Everything has been coopted into marketing, into something designed to compel others to do things they might not necessarily have done.

Our old friend and Vonnegut stand-in Kilgore Trout represents that matter directly. Until he appears in the novel (courtesy of his one fan, Elliot Rosewater) he has been an abject commercial failure. Ironically, that’s his salvation from this corrupt, marketing-saturated world. He has the capacity to imagine authentic stories – silly, yes, but authentic in the way they are designed to interrogate the flaws of our contemporary culture – because no one reads or cares about his work. But Vonnegut damns him here as well, cursing him to a wide readership, economic success, and irrelevance – an irrelevance (or at least fraudulence) that we can sense Vonnegut accusing himself with.

It should be no wonder, then, that his “story” here consists of nothing more than a man who, because he is insane, attacks a series of characters Vonnegut has brought together. It’s a deconstructed showdown, one we’re warned about long in advance, and one that – in the end – is no more complicated than a story we could hear most nights on most big-city newscasts.

This book is pretty awful on its own terms, then, and I discourage anyone from reading it who hasn’t worked through Vonnegut’s earlier stuff.

That said, there is real power here in the way it self-consciously reflects on the shadow of Slaughterhouse Five and its predecessors. This is a novelist with something to say – at least one who had a great deal to say until he said the kernel at the heart of it – and it’s heartbreaking to see him confront the possibility that he has nothing left in his typewriter but clichés and repeated slogans.

This novel is no more the “breakfast of champions” than is Wheaties or the martinis a young waitress supplies. It’s depressing in its failure, but it’s illuminating in the way it owns that failure and meditates on what it means to attempt to write anything in our age.

My working theory is that this is the last Vonnegut novel worth reading, and that it is so largely as the bitter dessert to the novels that work so well before it. I am testing that by reading more of his later works, but so far none of those have seemed to me to matter especially much. This one is Vonnegut confronting the possibility that he no longer has anything to say. I worry that might have been true.

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My original review from 2016

I read everything Vonnegut had written when I first got into him in high school more than 30 years ago. A lot of it was still fairly new then, and I felt pretty good about myself for reading stuff that felt like the sign of a serious collegiate thinker. I’ve made it a kind of project to revisit it over the last few years to see if it holds up, and the verdict has been, for the most part, yes. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and Cat’s Cradle are still really satisfying. They’re novels that raise some heavy ideas in the guise of light comedy, and they tell stories that become compelling the longer they go.

If those other, more polished novels didn’t exist, I’d give Breakfast of Champions a higher rating. As it is, though, a lot of what makes this one memorable comes to us more skillfully in those others. This has some intriguing and memorable sections. “What kind of a man turns his daughter into an outboard motor” is still funny, still as outrageous as when I first got it as a youth swimmer myself.

But large portions of this seem mannered, seem almost as if they are Vonnegut trying to imitate Vonnegut.

Kilgore Trout may be a striking figure in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, but here he is largely a projection of Vonnegut feeling sorry for himself. At his best, he brings a Bukowski seediness, but by the end, he runs out of gas. At the risk of spoiling something, he winds up in conversation with Vonnegut himself, part of the novel as a character, in an exchange that seems almost an admission that Vonnegut has written himself into a corner.

Some of the tropes get old as well. I get the insight that humans as “meat machines” is sardonic and cynical, but the ninth or tenth time we get the size of someone’s penis or a woman’s bust/waist/hip measurements, the joke gets old. Too much of this is recycled, too much Vonnegut trying to recapture something he’s dealt with earlier.

All that said, there are still many joys here. This novel comes at the end of Vonnegut’s best run, and there’s a boldness to it – especially at the beginning – that you can’t ignore. Even if it reassembles earlier successful characters, it announces itself as a radical experiment in cynicism and despair. It’s dark in an earned way, an effort to figure out what’s left when you’ve decided there’s nothing left to say. Still, bottom line, I can’t help feeling this is likely where Vonnegut ‘jumped the shark,’ where he went from being one of the real voices of his generation to a man who could no longer quite find the form for his idealistic pessimism, for his sense that we human beings are squandering the remarkable existence we’ve been granted.

Kurt Vonnegut was the man. I loved the guy. His head and heart were in the right places. He understood the vast messy insanity of humanity. He had a wonderful sense of the absurdity of existence. He demolished prejudice, skewered the conventional, questioned modes of thought and order and tradition. Yet, he also possessed a clear empathy for even the most damaged among us, those damaged by things outside their control and those damaged with their own stubbornly clung-to willful ignorance.

At the same time, the whiff of snark is there; the assertion of God-like authorial authority reigns in the pages, especially in this book. Vonnegut could be a Greek God as capricious and cruel as those of the ancients.

On page 233, Vonnegut draws an elaborate illustration of the molecular structure of plastic, partly to suggest the complexity of the human experience but also to suggest that much of reality is built on prefabricated norms. Right before that, he writes this: "'It's all like an ocean,' cried Dostoevsky. I say it's all like cellophane."

That's how this book felt to me: like a too-easily wrought plastic contrivance.

As I read its rapidly unfolding series of cosmic punchlines, woven in a helical daisy chain of running gags, intricate wordplay, repeated and revisited motifs, and whimsically random flights of fancy, I often marveled at the piquant insights, the profound observations, and the outright funny jokes. Yet, all the while, I wondered and asked: "OK. This is some kind of fiction, but is it a novel?"

I knew it was a novel because there was a story, and there were characters. The two main characters, Kilgore Trout and Dwayne Hoover, we are promised early on would be meeting each other at some point. I kept waiting for that much-anticipated meeting. As it kept not happening for over 200 pages, and as the author began to break the fourth wall and insert himself into the narrative and mock the audience's powerlessness, I began to start fighting with Vonnegut. He was being a dirty trickster, and openly admitted as much. And then came all the authorial justifications, defensiveness and apologia. In numerous passages he starts to say, and I paraphrase: "Life isn't linear, life is messy, stories (like life) do not go where we want them to, and, I'm the author, so I can dash your expectations, and I will, goddamnit!"

And so he did.

And I wasn't cool with it.

Yet, even as he did it, I had an appreciation for it. I can't deny the truth in this: "Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done. If all writers would do that, then perhaps citizens not in the literary trades will understand that there is no order in the world around us, that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead."

Vonnegut as deconstructionist? Maybe. But I'm not entirely sure that's what he does here. He definitely constructs. His authorial intrusions feel like Deus ex machina, and I don't think he would have argued the point. And then there's that part of me that says, "Author, I know the world is chaotic, and I know modern art wants to reflect that -- and that's partly why you've created the character of the painter, Karabekian, as a mouthpiece for that. Still, when I sit down to read, I want you to bring order to the world." That's called a POV. You are creating a world by putting words on paper. Writing is an exercise in order and presentation, in bringing order to the randomness of it all. Chaos is fine, but when you start trying to attach puppet strings on me to jerk me around, that's where I draw the line. I abhor control. It's why I detest the movies of Michael Haneke.

I want to make it clear, that I *get* Vonnegut. I understand his humor and sense of the absurd. It speaks to me. I recognize it. It makes me laugh. I totally grasp his modus operandi: I don't find his structure or tangential, tightly woven circles of repeated references to be confusing at all. Vonnegut is easy to follow. He tests our capacity for remembrance and recognition. And, he's funny.

At the same time this book feels like it was written in a manic frenzy with all cylinders clicking, with Vonnegut hell-bent on throwing in every bit of detritus he could, showing how clever he is at re-referencing some silly concoction within a new context. You read it and think to yourself, "Ah, he's worked that back in," or "Ah, he's gotten back 'round to that again; he's cleverly (and sometimes not so deftly) woven that bit of business back in. Bravo, sir."

And yet, for all that, it seems like the creation of an author having too easy a time of it; as though the mad skills he enhanced after Slaughterhouse-Five meant he could sit at a typewriter and spin off any flight of fancy and throw enough profundity and cleverness in to divert attention from the fact that it really doesn't hang together all that well.

I felt like Vonnegut had a chalkboard in front of his desk with a bunch of motifs/topics written on it to remind him of things to throw into the book, and each time he did so he scratched off a line through the word on the chalkboard.

Vonnegut had mad skills. But I was looking for a little more discipline.

One of the appeals of Vonnegut, I think, is that he gives you the nuggets of wisdom and the originality -- and because you haven't worked as hard at getting at those things as you might have with other novelists, he makes you feel *smart* without having had to put forth too much effort. Maybe that's good, maybe it's not. Maybe it's both.

Regulars, of course, will recognize all the familiar names and motifs that he throws in from his other novels (jailbait, Rosewater, unstuck, God bless you, Kilgore Trout, etc.) and that's fun. I kind of like when authors do that kind of self-referential thing; it reminds you we are engaging part of a canon.

But, at the end of the day, I was irritated by Breakfast of Champions. Despite that, I still adore the guy and still believe he was not an asshole, as much as he was trying to be in this book. An asshole, as he vividly depicts for us, looks like this:



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(KR@Ky 2016)