I love exercising my mind and sense of humor by reading Vonnegut. This novel spawned an interest in the age of the Vietnam War I most definitely didn't possess prior to reading this. While you definitely have to be cognizant of Vonnegut's flagrant satirical tone in order to fully appreciate his work, it's definitely worth the effort.

2ND TIME READING: Vonnegut is just amazing. What we have here is an inciting incident, an incident around which everything else in this book pivots, and instead of focusing on that, we examine the two dozen satellites that are trapped in it’s orbit. In doing that, this book explores and satirizes and subverts so many disparate yet somehow related things (the prison system, higher education, neo-McCarthyism, family, Vietnam, etc) that it’s hard to know which direction is up. But Vonnegut tells stories like a shotgun fires bullets. Although this author’s most famous works are all clumped together in the early part of his career, this late-era novel (published in 1990, I believe) shows us a writer who has finally perfected a style and tone that are distinctively, and inseparably, his own. As such, I enjoyed this reread more than I did when I read it the first time.

what a fuggin masterpiece

My favorite Kurt Vonnegut read thus far. I can relate to Eugene Debbs totally. I love the way the story hops around. It echoes my mind. One of the few reads that has prompted me to laugh out loud. Kurt Vonnegut's voice bites and amuses. Brilliant. Thankfully I have more of his books to savor.

Vonnegut's writing seemed to grow more overtly autobiographical as he neared the end of his life. Maybe that's not accurate, since he was inserting himself into his own narratives as early as Slaughterhouse-Five. Maybe I just notice it more easily now. At any rate, this time he's literally present as the editor of this, an alleged work of found literature, and figuratively present in the character of Eugene Debs (no relation), a veteran who worked at a college and has strong opinions about the human species and where it's headed.

Compared to his early works, Hocus Pocus comes across as clumsy. Perhaps he did not have the energy or patience to revise in the same way. But clumsy Vonnegut writing is still head and shoulders above most. There is a strong vein of bleakness throughout this book, which combines elements of Mother Night (a main character, imprisoned, awaits trial for a crime he may or may not have committed) with the brief, episodic snippets of Breakfast of Champions. It carries a sense of tragic fatalism, of hopelessness, of tired resignation. It seems to me his most cynical book, which is saying a lot. There is little room for subtlety, I suppose, when you're a writer with a conscience who has lived through decade after decade and seen next to no improvement in society. New technology, new gizmos and gadgets and ever-compounding distractions, but the same essential errors in judgment and the same flaws in humankind's collective character. It must have been frustrating.

3.5 stars out of 5. It may not be his best, it may feel at times overlong, slow-moving, underdeveloped, and certainly repetitive. But in spite of its negative tone, overall it is quite charming, very witty, undoubtedly poignant, and eminently quotable.

This is not, not, not a book to be read if you haven't read Kurt Vonnegut in your life. It is also something that needs to be handled with a certain care and consideration for satire and the hilarity that can come with it. Kurt Vonnegut is a master of cynicism and being able to open one's eyes to the often times ridiculous world around us.

This story is an intricate weaving of sections that are as variable in length as they are in subject matter. And yet, with the expertise of a skilled writer, Vonnegut easily melts the subjects into a fantastic collaboration of stories that becomes literally seamless if read in a short amount of time. This is not a book that you'll want to put down. Your curiosity about the narrator, Eugene Debs Hartke, will soar upon first meeting him. We receive a scope of his life with such airy disregard that it makes us want to hug Eugene, laugh with him, be frustrated with him, be angry with him, and want to go out and have a drink with him (possibly only if you are male or a female who is still rather young or over 30)! It is an interesting thing that so much can come from the narrator who is writing upon scraps of paper in a devastated 'war zone', so to speak, locked up in a library. The claustrophobic hovering of doom over his arrest looms closer and closer to our precious narrator and yet we receive a broad spectrum of events that escapes the confines of the reality that is facing him and us. Which is what satire is, often, all about!

His style is similar to his other novels, where repetition of catchy sayings draws you in, hook, line, and sinker. The narration has to be what it is because of the witty satire that is spewed out at every turn of the page. Literally, in every chopped up section of the novel, there is satire to be had. At times, it's overwhelming, as it should be! There is so much to point at and question and then make something interestingly cynical about it. Some find the style irritating, but it is a truth that cannot be ignored on a frequent basis.
If you're well schooled in Vonnegutology, I hope you'll find this book and devour it as ravenously as I did. If not, I still hope you'll give him a shot. He's an eye-opener, if nothing else!

not clear until near the end that the whole Event at scipio/tarkington is a continuation of vonnegut's take on vietnam--for most of the book the narrative felt propelled just by vibes and a handful of things going on in the 80s vonnegut had some opinions on. some of them were fairly prescient, particularly the conservative pundit on the board's insistence that curriculum critical of the us was not acceptable. some of it though...the sub-through-line about race in america was mostly a mess. no idea what point was trying to be made there. also i don't think this is the first book of his i've read where he employs the hard-r n word multiple times. like???? bud. you published this in 1990--not the 60s--and no one said "hey kurt, consider something else"? bud!

anyway by the time i finally figured out the overarching vietnam metaphor i wished i'd just reread american war by omar el-akkad instead

I liked this less than his other books but it lot of quirks and absurdities consistent with his writing that were entertaining

"The truth can be very funny in an awful way, especially as it relates to greed and hypocrisy."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus



Having read Timequake prior to reading Hocus Pocus (these are his last two novels), I was glad I reveresed the order. While I wasn't blown away by 'Hocus Pocus', it was moderately better than 'Timequake'. Hocus Pocus was a bit wide at the hips. Vonnegut was covering a lot of ground with this novel. He was looking at issues of race, war, economics, politicis, education, money, culure, prison reform, ptsd, marriage, death, intimacy, and more. There were a lot of little punches by Vonnegut, but none were knockouts.

Two of the idiocycracies in this book: 1) no swearing. Vonnegut's narrator, aka the 'Preacher' is an teacher, warden, and former Vietnam War officer, who is known as the "Preacher" because he doesn't ever swear, so Vonnegut mutes his language. 2) No numbers written as numbers. So, instead of writing "one friend", Vonnegut's narrator writes "1 friend". It all seems a bit forced and contorted for Vonnegut. I prefer my KV unplugged a bit more.

A couple of my favorite Vonnegut quotes from this novel:

--"The truth can be very funny in an awful way, especially as it relates to greed and hypocrisy."

--"Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance."

--"[M]an was the weather now. Man was the tornadoes, man was the hailstones, man was the floods."

--"I think any form of government, not just Capitalism, is whatever the people who have all our money, drunk or sober, sane or insane, decide to do today."

--"Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn’t mean we deserve to conquer the Universe."

There's something utterly terrible in finishing a book that made you feel like your whole being (as never before) was acknowledged as beautiful while you read it. Tears...a lot of tears. A ache in your heart...a yearning for the love affair that you've just had with this author (reaching for him in your quiet times and not being rejected but Validated) is over. Done. Kaput. But to know that you are for now and for ever in love with him. That a simple little word strategically placed within its pages made your heart almost burst out of your chest. Remembering a randomly placed sentence that ripped your soul from your body and made you gasp, "That's exactly what I feel, what I knew all along." I just want to sit beside him and say thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you...a million times...and each time have it make him feel at least part of the joy he's given to me. God, what an amazing man.

I don't know if its more horrible to have finished it or to recommend it. To give people a chance to say that everything you feel is rediculus or guffaw it away. But how can you deny anyone such a feeling that you've just had?

Depressingly Hilarious. The most fun I've had with such serious satire in a while.

Big fan of the formatting of this book too. The random page breaks make it super digestible for someone like me with chronic brainrot. Also fun imagining which paragraphs were written on proper paper and which ones were written on napkins/business cards.

In most cases this should be at most 4 stars, but I think I read this at the perfect time of my life where I really needed something like this. He does an amazing job with putting things into perspective. Will be reading more Kurt Vonnegut thanks to this one.

There were a few moments in this brutally satirical, over the top, wackadoodle slapdash that felt real, and lived. Eugene Debs Hartke, Vietnam War veteran, is a professor at Tarkington College, where every student is learning disabled or possibly just stupid. He's teaching a Music Appreciation class and asks the students to pick a piece of music to go with a major event in their lives, the way Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture was about Napoleon's defeat in Russia. A boy named Bruce Bergeron picks the time he was six and got stuck with his Haitian nanny in an elevator at Bloomingdale's. The nanny hadn't gotten permission from Bruce's parents to go to Bloomingdale's, where she wanted to pick up some bargain sheets for her relatives back in Haiti. They were supposed to be at the American Museum of Natural History. The elevator sticks for maybe 20 minutes, but it feels like forever to Bruce. A voice tells them not to climb on the top of the elevator through the trapdoor. It all seems very momentous to Bruce, who thinks that everyone in America must know about it by now. Finally they are rescued, and Bruce is surprised not to be greeted by bands and cheering spectators. The people waiting outside don't even know the elevator was stuck, they're just waiting there for the next one and they board immediately. The nanny tells Bruce he mustn't speak about it ever, or she will get in trouble. He never speaks about it until this moment in Music Appreciation class. Eugene Hartke asks him, "You know what you have described to perfection?"

"No," he said.

I said, "What it was like to come home from the Vietnam War."

Unfortunately there were no other moments in the novel that matched this, amid all the quirky adultery and quirky murder and quirky obesity and quirky hereditary insanity and the prison breakout and the college president crucified on a cross. I'm not really sure where Vonnegut's place is in the American canon, and I like the idea of reading him because I'm fond of his biography (his master's thesis being rejected unanimously at the University of Chicago, and Cat's Cradle being accepted in its place many years later, is so poignant), but now I don't see a reason to read more.