What is life we live from day to day? What do we eat at breakfast? How do we cope with our problems and what are we doing for fun? What dreams do we dream and what ideas do we have in our heads?

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.

Under the close scrutiny of Kurt Vonnegut our quotidian life turns into the most preposterous occupation in the world.

He spoke of his wife and son again, acknowledged that white robots were just like black robots, essentially, in that they were programmed to be whatever they were, to do whatever they did.

Some obey God, some obey government, some obey voices in their heads and some obey no one.

I don’t even know how to put into words what I just listened to (except that it was most excellently read by John Malkovich).

I hate that a satire of American culture written 50 years ago is still so relevant today.

There was a lot of bathroom humor to get around but I loved the epilogue so much I’m giving it five stars. Can’t wait to check out some of his other work.

Daily Vonnegut – Day 3.

Kilgore Trout and Rabo Karabekian are a couple of characters in here that team up to make the book palatable. To me, this was mildly entertaining at best. I must once again feel a little sad that I did not come to Vonnegut properly until well after puberty, when merely knowing what a polymer is would no longer be reason enough to rate a book 5 stars, because it showed that you have some secret cult of knowledge that not many other 13-year-olds do.

You know, typing that out just now, I thought to myself that I am being too harsh. But I don’t mean to be a dick - I just think that Vonnegut didn’t necessarily write for me. That’s okay. I absolutely adore him as a man, and anything I see with him or hear of him makes me want to jump back in time and give him a hug. And share a cigarette with him. We keep ploughing on.

The 4th wall was broken and remained broken for the last 100 or so pages. The most interesting part of Vonnegut inserting himself into the book as a character was when he admitted that he had a chode: “My penis was three inches long and five inches in diameter.”

Allen’s commentary was fun to read afterwards, as he thought that the book had some serious problems. One of these was the apparent “lack of a sufficiently dramatic centre to hold together all the disparate events of the novel”. Well, Vonnegut agrees! He calls it “a sidewalk strewn with junk”. Whereas Slaughterhouse has the bombing of Dresden as its main central dramatic moment, this moment is painfully absent in Breakfast of Champions.

Other comments from Allen are also useful to read. “The real interest in the novel is not so much the literal action as it is the way Vonnegut comments on that action so as to reveal his concerns about the nature of writing, the strained social fabric of American society, and the tenuous state of his own psyche.”

Here is a small chunk that I liked:

“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.”