Слухайте: це історія про Кілґорта Траута - письменника-фантаста, романи, оповідання котрого виходили у порнографічних книгах з "розчахнутими бобриками" на обкладинках та Двейна Гувера, власника фірми продажів понтіаків.

Слухайте: це історія також про пластикову одноразову Америку і суспільство.

Слухайте: найцікавіше що мені зустрілося. манера оповіді така, наче автор сам є присутній у книжці - Творець - розповідає про Землю комусь, хто нічого не знає про людство, цивілізацію, про банальні речі, накшталт ягнятка чи розмноження.

Слухайте: Вавилонська бібліотека - любов любовна. Дуже по-воннеґутівськи видання. обкладинку, яку зробиш сам, текст доповнений малюнками

I think I had temporary amnesia while reading this because I don't remember a single thing about it. Since I gave it 5 stars it must have been awesome! lol

A re-read is a must in the near future for a proper review.

Biting satire, crude drawings, crazy characters--a deliciously low-brow humor. This is an amazing accomplishment.

Who is Kilgore Trout? I’m Kilgore Trout, you’re Kilgore Trout. He is every hack writing who ever felt overwhelmed by his creativity and underwhelmed by his talent. He is anyone who has ever tried and failed. I suppose there is a little Trout in all of us, especially if you like seafood.

One of the great things about the book is Kilgore Trout’s endless imagination and his ability to come up with a science fiction story for just about anything. Kilgore Trout reminds me of Douglas Adams.

Was Douglas Adams of a figment of Kurt Vonnegut’s imagination?

In a way the book is written with all the subtlety of a middle schooler--of course, underneath is the mind of genius. But then again, we were all smarter in middle school. We were also free to use our imaginations before the forces out there told us that our writing and imagination was actually poo-poo.

The book is squarely the child of the 1970s. It is blunt, childish, full of anger at Vietnam and the pollution of the earth. I know this is a bad comparison, but why not a bad comparison--Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.--anyone? anyone? After all, it seems like Vonnegut imagined Douglas Adams before Douglas Adams was Douglas Adams the writer.

Quite a few of the chapters and sections end with the words, “And so on.” As if we are doomed to repeat the same asinine things throughout life.

In the end, does the book have an ending? Do the pieces fit? I have great admiration for Stephen King, but unfortunately, many of his books have no ending and sometimes the pieces don’t fit.

I should also say this--there is also a lots of fourth wall breaking. In other words, the author refers to himself within the book as the creator of the book (VALIS is another great example of this technique--it’s a marvelous book) Can anyone explain to me what the first three walls are? (This wikipedia article may have some answers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_four...)

By the way, Vonnegut’s book consistently made me think of this short video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfPdh...

My view of this book is one of 3,227 on goodreads. This can either make me feel insignificant, as one in an ocean of 3,227, or it can make me feel part of a community. Honestly, I’m just happy that that many people still read.

Yes, a lot of fourth wall breaking. I want to say happy 50th anniversary to the author, but then I realize the book was written in the early 1970s and Mr. Vonnegut has since passed on.

Thank you Fujisawa library for letting me read this book free of charge! Classy move Fujisawa library, classy move.

At points in the novel, Vonnegut falls into bouts of laziness and pessimism so deep and lonely that only words such as “And so on” and “ETC” can pull him through. Things--terrible things continue to happen to all us humans because we’re robots and we can’t help ourselves.

So, instead of trying to make meaning of things, he inserts crude drawings and uses these repetitive literary devices to make the story move.

And you know what, that’s okay. In fact, it’s more than okay. If I could, I would draw a thumbs up.

This is only the second Kurt Vonnegut book I’ve read. I’ll read more later.

After reading Vonnegut’s biography on Wikipedia, I wonder: Did somebody just make that up? Do people really live lives that interesting? Orson Welles did. But he was a director and movie star, not an author.

My life is nowhere near that interesting.

By the way, this is a fantastic book. You should read it on a day when you feel stuck, approaching the age of fifty, or just want to ponder the great questions like, “What’s it all about?”

Breakfast of a Champions could be described as something of a ‘dog’s breakfast ‘ in that, as Vonnegut explains in the prologue, he is ‘clearing his head of junk’ and that as ‘there is no order in the world around us, we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead.’

So, in this searing social satire, the plot is irrelevant : Vonnegut invents a metafictional parallel universe that mirrors and highlights the absurdities and worst traits of humanity. He uses a deadpan caustic humour in a crude adolescent style to contemplate the horrors of contemporary existence and specifically the hypocrisy in US culture, which cannot have endeared him to the establishment. For instance, he refers to the American National Anthem as ‘gibberish sprinkled with question marks’ ( a description which could probably apply to most national anthems, to be honest).

His novel of ideas is so full of memorable snippets of wisdom that it is impossible to choose which to quote, but Vonnegut is at pains to stress the importance of the right sort of ideas and warns of the danger of confusing fiction with facts.

‘We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.’

Vonnegut points out how the wrong ideas have led to disaster - they become 'badges of friendship or enmity’ – a prescient forecast of the rise of identity politics which poisons our modern societies - and, along with the era of 'fake news' - shows how far ahead of his time he was.

A cheerful & cynical work. It’s the best novel in the English language.
Why?
It has its footnotes in the main text.

Here’s a Two-bite Brownie:

1.
“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.”

2.
“You know what truth is?” said Karabekian. “It’s some crazy thing my neighbor believes. If I want to make friends with him, I ask him what he believes. He tells me, and I say, ‘Yeah, yeah—ain’t it the truth?’”

+++

Want more?

Here's the premise of a random book:

Life was an experiment by the Creator of the Universe, Who wanted to test a new sort of creature He was thinking of introducing into the Universe. It was a creature with the ability to make up its own mind. All the other creatures were fully-programmed robots.

The book was in the form of a long letter from The Creator of the Universe to the experimental creature. The Creator congratulated the creature and apologized for all the discomfort he had endured.

Would it drive you mad? Would it make you feel special? Do you already live your life this way?

+++

Want more?

How about some author-inside-the-novel meta-reality?

Here is a sample of an author talking to his lead character as he chased him through his novel:

“I am approaching my fiftieth birthday, Mr. Trout,” I said. “I am cleansing and renewing myself for the very different sorts of years to come. Under similar spiritual conditions, Count Tolstoi freed his serfs. Thomas Jefferson freed his slaves. I am going to set at liberty all the literary characters who have served me so loyally during my writing career.

So, isn't it the best Novel this side of Andromeda? Or am I crazy?

“For reasons obvious to us all, this galaxy is dissolved!”

Adios.

I can't believe that my first exposure to Vonnegut's brilliance happened an embarrassingly few years ago. And that this is only the second book of his that I've had the good fortune to spend some time with. My only complaint is that this proved to be far too quick of a read, as I could have happily spent hundreds more pages with this kind of storytelling. I have too much fun with the way Vonnegut navigates a story. It's an absolute treat to get lost in a book when the writing's this good.

I have such a fierce respect for any writer who can make modern art a more complex entity than the human machine, especially when said writer can make me giggle like a maniac while perfectly encapsulating so many of my own notions about both people and the failures of society. This is the kind of book that makes me love reading.

Phew, it has been a LOOONG time since I've read Vonnegut. I mean "classic" Vonnegut. It feels good to be back!

I mean no offense to his most recent work, but it just doesn't compare with what he put out from about the '60s through to the '80s. It's all good stuff. I mean, I've read about a dozen books of his and I don't recall a true stinker in the lot. But if I'm going to recommend "a Vonnegut" to the interested and uninitiated, it's going to be something like Breakfast of Champions from 1973.

This chuckle-full and sometimes hilarious tour de force of satirical wit is a razor-sharp criticism of humanity's worst traits: its greed, its pure and unadulterated avarice, its lack of a moral compass...

Ah, that last one is a tricky one. Vonnegut was no saint and he doesn't expect anyone else to be. However, a little decency and compassion would go a long way. Jesus fucking Christ, Vonnegut seems to say in just about every one of his books, can't we all stop acting like shits for second?!

I won't try to describe the plot of Breakfast of Champions. The plot is seldom the point in a Vonnegut novel. Oh sure, things happen, after a fashion. But it's more about people and ideas, and people with ideas, for better or worse.

I will however say that this book is a good starting point - not a necessary one, but a good one - from which to begin a Vonnegut reading journey. His recurring character, the strange and often estranged author Kilgore Trout is fully explained here, much more so than in other books in which he makes an appearance, at least in the ones I've read. In fact, many of the theories and rules of Vonnegut's world, his parallel universe, if you will, are laid out in this one, so I highly recommend starting here. Then again, you won't go wrong starting elsewhere. Just start.

Good old Kurt (God rest his soul) has truly helped me understand what all this fuss is about "wide open beavers".
This is a quick and rewarding read (with funny drawings) that makes you think about the world in a totally new way. I love how Vonnegut writes about America as a civilization which died out long ago and is addressing an audience who knows nothing of it.
This book is hilarious and heart-breaking at the same time. It follows a sci-fi author (Trout) of Vonnegut's own creation who meets a Pontiac dealership owner (Hoover) in the 1970's. Their meeting puts Hoover over the edge of sanity through one of Trout's novels, making him believe he's the only person with free will in the universe, and that everyone else is a robot (a meat machine as Vonnegut puts it).
The highlight for me is one of Trout's novels about an alien race that communicates only by farting and tap-dancing. You have to read it to see what happens...

This was a popular seller back in the days of peace, love, and dope. I recently read a yellowed copy a few paragraphs at a time between sets at the home gym, so the lack of flow I ascribe to it may be due, in part, to that. Actually, with all his inserted drawings and the bullet-point structure, it seemed like Vonnegut was more interested in piecing together Dunkin’ Munchkin-like observations on American society than in any kind of narrative flow. The plot was very much beside the point.

Vonnegut, I know from other works, is a smart guy. He’s a clear writer, keen observer, and incisive social critic. With this one, though, all I kept thinking was what a funny little time capsule it was, filled with countercultural hip-think circa 1973. The Man, of course, was the heavy. And if only we could wake up to a more liberated, tolerant, free attitude, everything would be cool. It may be slightly ironic that those meant to be more enlightened were automatons, too, though at least they were programmed using the fresh, new algorithm of the day. I suppose it’s also unoriginal of me to point out how unoriginal certain trendy archetypes are when they stake their claim to individuality en masse.

Reading this is like listening to a George Carlin comedy sketch, but with fewer laughs and a little less insight. Kurt Vonnegut Jr. takes aim at everything—from art valuation, to Columbus Day, to inherited wealth and private land ownership—tying his comedic episodes together with a very loose and intentionally chaotic story (think aliens that communicate by farting and tap dancing) about three men (Kilgore Trout, Dwayne Hoover, and the author himself) whose paths eventually collide briefly and consequentially.

“His high school was named after a slave owner who was also one of the world’s greatest theoreticians on the subject of human liberty” (p. 34).

Kilgore Trout is a failed writer (his stories end up in porn magazines) who talks to his parakeet. Dwayne is a wealthy but crazy Pontiac dealer with a Labrador that must fight all the time, because he can’t wag his tail. The author (Kurt himself) is someone who shows up in his story, talks to his characters, and causes them to do whatever he wants. The author chaotically directs Kilgore, Kilgore haphazardly affects Dwayne, and Dwayne hurts people. The key takeaway is about the power of ideas and social influence:

“…it was possible for a human being to believe anything, and to behave passionately in keeping with that belief—any belief (p. 25).

“Kago [an alien] did not know that human beings could be as easily felled by a single idea as by cholera or the bubonic plaque. There was no immunity to cuckoo ideas on Earth … Ideas on Earth were 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 (p. 27).

Let me stop here and say that this latter quote is brilliant. It perfectly dovetails with Kahan et al.’s (2017) Identity-protective cognition thesis, which holds that beliefs are mostly symbols of group membership, and that people use their cognitive abilities to protect them, rather than to verify their truth: Motivated Numeracy Study

There are three problems with Breakfast of Champions: it is too chaotic, the story is too loose and tangential, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. has an overly simplistic understanding of some of the things he is writing about (e.g., drug use, communism). For example, his take on drug abuse is woefully uninformed, suggesting that it is a social problem that only afflicts poor people: “People took such awful chances with chemicals and their bodies because they wanted the quality of their lives to improve … They didn’t own doodley-squat, so they couldn’t improve their surroundings” (p. 72).

How funny is the book? Pretty funny. About as funny as torturing circles until they give “up [the] symbol of their secret lives: π” (p. 212). Here is a representative example:

“Like everybody else in the cocktail lounge, he was softening his brain with alcohol. This was a substance produced by a tiny creature called yeast. Yeast organisms ate sugar and excreted alcohol. They killed themselves by destroying their own environment with yeast shit. 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” (pp. 213-214).

Below are my three favorite quotes in the book:

“We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane” (p. 16).

“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” (p. 140).

“Mr. Secretary-General, it is the past which scares the bejesus out of me” (p. 192).

Where to start? First of all, Vonnegut has such a way with words. He can make the most mundane thing not only interesting, but the funniest thing you've ever read. Speaking of that, there's quite the exposition on beavers...and not the hairy varmint...well...

It's really hard to explain this book. The actual "story" that's told could probably be told in a single long-ish paragraph (which Wikipedia actually does quite nicely). The rest of the book is filled with anecdotes, allegories, drawings (I'm told, I listened to it), and any other type of random tangent. Really, and not unlike any other Vonnegut book I've read, the entire book is one long tangent. But with Kurt at the wheel, it's never a bad thing.

Breakfast of Champions is the story of Kilgore Trout - a science fiction writer - who is invited to an art festival in Midland City. Trout is a recurring character in Vonnegut's work, appearing in Slaughterhouse Five among others. He's not well known, at least personally, but his stories are well known by fans of smut magazines, which are the only places his works are published. Hence the beaver exposition I mentioned earlier.

We are also told in the beginning that it is because of one of Trout's novels, which become famous in Midland City, that Dwayne Hoover, a rich resident of Midland, believes he is the only being on earth with free will and that everyone else in the entire world is a robot.

While the plot in and of itself is hilarious, it's the tangents that really make this book a great one. Vonnegut even explains in the beginning, he needed a place to get all his ideas out, or "clear his head of all the junk."

Since Kilgore Trout is a science fiction writer, Vonnegut tells us idea after idea for science fiction novels that I'm sure he was just cracking up about, but could never actually write into a full novel or even short story.

Trout's main themes have to do with communication breakdowns - aliens who can only communicate in farting noises, aliens who are too small to communicate an important message, a planet of cars that has car babies and who end up on earth and can't communicate with humans. It is worth reading just for these gems.

Speaking of tangents, at one point, Vonnegut starts telling about average penis sizes and for the rest of the story explains what size penises each male character has. And let's be honest, if you're going to describe a character, this is one telling bit of information.

To summarize, Vonnegut's a genius, read Breakfast of Champions and be happy.

4 out of 5 Stars (Loved it)

I think Vonnegut would have made an interesting dinner guest.
I feel like chatting with him would have been extremely fascinating.
Looking forward to checking out more of his work.