I've read a whole lot of Vonnegut. I can summate my general feeling toward his works as follows: it's an incredibly engaging and interesting read that you simply fly through, but over the course of a few days after finishing it the plot is all but totally forgotten, and the protagonist appears increasingly underdeveloped the more you think about it. So not expecting a Raskolnikov or Mersault from Vonnegut leads me to take his books at face value.

Galapogos, however, was different. The characters share the same affliction as all Vonnegut characters, but the story never left me, and I'd have to rank Galapogos as Vonnegut's best work. I'd say it's "The Time Machine" for a more modern era, minus the scathing social commentary.

Man, humans are a fascinating bunch of atoms. The narrator of Galápagos, a ghost who said no to the fuzzy blue tunnel that leads to the afterlife, is obsessed with his fellow humans, especially one group of disparate crazies who become the progenitors of the entire human race. Galápagos is Vonnegut's most obvious commentary on the mess that is human society. We have too many kids, we use too many resources, we invent more and more devious ways to kill each other. Financial crises are inevitable and avoidable.

So Vonnegut turns us all into seals after humanity almost goes extinct. And, you know, maybe life would be simpler and happier if we all flopped around and lost our humanity, our thoughts and desires and morality. But life would be boring, so I'll take impending nuclear and environmental disaster over seal life any day.

Vonnegut starts in media res, and you know the basic plot outline from the beginning. But Vonnegut is the engagement expert; the plot isn't that important because you're having such a raucously good time. His sense of progression is unparalleled. Even if you think his work is silly, it's so engrossing and its pace is so constant and smooth that you can't help but sink in to the insanity. To read Vonnegut is to read in chunks, to devour his hilarious aphorisms and snicker. When we all need to laugh at ourselves with irreverence, Vonnegut will always be there to give us a playful slap.

oh i loved this book!! it's so fucking clever and fascinating and funny and wise!

this is only my second vonnegut so far. i read cat's cradle in high school and enjoyed it, but wasn't sure if i really got it. i was happy to feel like i absorbed enough of galapagos, now that i'm a bit older and wiser. or maybe i've just learned not to take vonnegut's work too seriously.

but regardless of what he has to say about our big troublesome brains (and how much better off we'd be without such mental capacities), this book is a blast. the short chapters and sharp wit make it super readable. i love that the reader knows the ending from the start: future humans have evolved into fin-bearing seal-like creatures! but with this knowledge we cozy up to enjoy the ride and see how everything unfolds.

Once again Uncle Kurt has given us a story which has no respect for conventional narrative. All those things we’re told not to do as writers, he does, with absolute disregard for the accepted best practices of fiction writing. Bless him. He’s truly a one of a kind.

The opening to Galapagos reads like a blend of science fiction, Darwinian theory, brief moments of memoir and an Agatha Christie mystery, but one where you’re told who is going to die, how and when. But being Vonnegut, this blend isn’t quite sufficient for his fantastic tale of human annihilation and rebirth on the Galapagos islands. Vonnegut gives it to us from the perspective of the tortured son of his tortured alter ego, failed science fiction writer, Kilgore Trout. Oh, and said son, named Leon Trotsky Trout, is also a ghost relating this story from one million years in the future, where he has had the opportunity to witness human evolution to that point in time.

Has the world ever had a crazier, more brilliant satirist as Vonnegut? I would never describe him as politically correct or the opposite. He has his own view of the world and isn’t afraid to tell it how he sees it. As he notes, the only real villain in this book is our ‘big, big brains’ which are responsible for our downfall as much as the wonders they have allowed us to create. I think this is the genius of Vonnegut’s work, that he can give us a new perspective on what it is to be human, is all its beauty and ugliness.

HAH! Look at the list of characters:

Kilgore Trout, Leon Trotsky Trout, James Wait, Andrew MacIntosh

Walkies!

#77. TBR Busting 2013

3* Slaughterhouse V (want to re-read)
5* Mother Night
3* God Bless You, Mr Rosewater
3* Galápagos
TR A Man Without a Country
TR Blubeard
TR Deadeye Dick
4* God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian

Oh how I love this book. Parts of it do come off as a bit dated now, but the overall theme about all that we, the human race, and our oversized brains are doing to make ourselves extinct is still very resonant.

This is a tale of "The Nature Cruise of the Century" to Darwin's Galapagos islands in 1986 and how the small group of people beached on one of the islands ends up becoming the future all of humankind.

The detached narrator looks back on the pivotal moments leading up to and including that doomed cruise and how Natural Selection caused humans to survive and evolve - to a much simpler, survival based existence - with smaller brains leading to a future one million years strong and counting.

I absolutely hate spoilers. I don't even care to be reminded in the slightest about the plot before I read something. So it is very funny that I enjoy this book so much since throughout Vonnegut does nothing but spoil things and tell us what is going to happen point blank rather than via foreshadowing - that seems to be for sissies. As he himself said, "Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages."

Vonnegut pokes fun at society and the problems we create for ourselves. His wry humor weaves around his more serious statements about such things as the atrocities of war.

This book was devilishly fun. Read it if you want a satirical laugh about yourself and human nature. After all, in a million years you won't be able to read the book with just your flippers and your mouth.

Labai keista knyga. Ji nėra bloga, priešingai, kaip satyra tikrai gera, kaip sci-fi, na, gal šiek tiek prastesnė (iš tos pusės, kad sci-fi čia iš esmės neegzistuoja). O bet tačiau, jos trūkumas tas, kad joje praktiškai nieko nevyksta. 280 puslapių trypčiojimo vietoje ir dar pastoviai autoriaus mintims šokinėjant no vieno prie kito, tada vėl grįžtant atgal, tada peršokant kaži kiek į priekį, tada nusukant prie šalutinė minties, tada peršokant atgal, tada vėl prie šalutinės, tada pirmyn, atgal ir t.t. ir t.t. Mane tai šiek tiek vargino. Ne, vargino ne tas žodis, erzino būtų tikslesnis.

Kita vertus, viskas, kas išjuokta, išjuokta labai tiksliai, subtiliai, dailiai ir stilingai. O tai tikrai nėra taip lengva, kaip gali pasirodyti iš pirmo žvilgsnio. Apibendrinant - neblogai. Ne šedevras, bet tikrai neblogai.

Gal šiek tiek trūko kai kurių veikėjų išplėtojimo, na ir pasikartosiu, bet veiksmo tikrai galėjo būti daugiau. Bet tuo pačiu suprantu, kodėl Vonnegut'as laikomas kultiniu rašytoju - jis visiškai kitoks, visiškai išskirtinis, lyginant su kitais. Panašiai kaip visi Tarantino filmai turi tą svotišką braižą, savotiškus požymius, taip ir vonnegut'o knygos yra tiesiog kitokios. Ir tai labai žavu.

وای از این خلقت که نه مغز گنده ها پی به رازش بردن، نه خزداران درکش کردن و نه هیچ نظمی درمان آشفتگی ش شد، فقط قرن ها از ازل تا به ابد مخلوقات در هم تنیدند تا به هر قیمتی قبل از رسیدن به‌نقب آبی و جهش و کوچ به جهانی دیگر در حد توان ناخنک پر و پیمونی به همه ی باید ها و نباید ها زده باشن.
داستان گالاپاگوس با قلمی طنزگونه که البته همیشه هم پرکشش نیست، بدون هیچ خط سیر زمانی مشخصی، با پراکندگی و گرد هم آوردن چند نقش اصلی و چند فرعی ریز و درشت، به گونه ای همچین هم منتقدانه و هم داروین مآبانه به پیچیدگی تحولات آفرینش و جانداران از هر نوعی و روش های زندگی و خوب و بد کارهای انسان ها می پردازه، گرچه گاهی غیر مستقیم به مواردی کنایه میزنه که هوشمندانه س، اما گاهی زیاده روی هاش هم خسته کننده میشه، ... در کل متوسط بود.


لئون! لئون! هر چه این مردم‌را بیشتر بشناسی، بیشتر دلت به هم می خورد. خردمندترین آدم های این مملکت ظاهرا تو را به جنگی فرستاده اند که بی سرانجام و بی اجر و مزد و هولناک است و دست آخر  هم معلوم نیست دعوا سر چیست، و من به حساب خودم فکر می کردم در این نبرد تقریبا بی پایان به چنان شناخت عمیقی از طبیعت آدمیزاد می رسی که تا آخر  ابدیت تو را کفایت می کند!
...افسار  این جانوران هم پسر جان، درست مثل سرنشینان این کشتی نفرین شده در کف ناخداهایی است که نه نقشه ای دارند و نه قطب نمایی، در کف ناخداهایی است که دم به دم با مشکلات کلنجار می روند، اما کدام مشکلات ؟ این ناخداها همه فقط یک مشکل اساسی دارند و‌ آن هم حفظ حرمت و خودپرستی های خودشان است.

"The only true villain in my story: The oversized human brain."

So to me Galápagos (a series of islands off the coast of Ecuador) is a kind of environmental symbol. I’ve never been there, but it emerged for me (and many of us) decades ago as one of many pristine places where eco-diversity thrives. Very old tortoises! Iguanas! Finches galore! I know Charles Darwin was the guy that catapulted the place to international fame, and that it is still much written about and researched and visited. Since I own a copy of this book (that I had thought I had read decades ago; maybe I did!), and since I was going to visit another volcanic island, Kona, the Big Island, and have been trying to avoid reading a sort of similarly themed book I need to read, The Uninhabitable Earth, and because I love Vonnegut, I thought I would take along his 1985 speculative fiction about Galápagos and about man’s potential for survival in what was already then seen as our impending environmental disaster. (Spoiler alert: We don't survive, at least not most of us, in anything like our current configurations, at least according to the narrator, looking back from a million years forward).

“Just in the nick of time they realized that it was their own habitat they were wrecking—that they weren't merely visitors.”

Oh, how things have stayed the same and changed in the last 3o or so years. Vonnegut establishes in this book that man’s “Big Brain” has basically destroyed the planet, through greed and war and eco-trashing. From the author who personally survived the horrific bombing of Dresden and was never quite the same after (who could be?), he’s earned his dark vision of man and the planet. But he also did his science homework, too. Anyway, the “same” part is that recognition of impending doom, which he writes about then, and we have with us today; the difference from today is a kind of cock-eyed optimism he has his narrator, Leon Trotsky Trout, express in the end in spite of every bad thing he tells you about (for you Vonnegut fans, Leon is the son of Vonnegut's recurring character Kilgore Trout, himself based on an actual friend and once popular science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon). As to that optimism, Leon’s favorite quote is from Anne Frank: “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.” Trout quotes Frank in spite of the story he describes of ludicrous greed and destruction.

The basic story is that some people create a Ecotourist Event, “The Nature Cruise of the Century," to the Galápagos Islands, involving any number of rich celebrities such as Jackie Onassis and Rudolph Nureyev and several shady (and a couple good) fictional characters, in the building of a cruise ship, the Bahía de Darwin. Of course many people want to get rich on the occasion, including a guy who preys on rich widows and another guy who wants to develop billion-dollar corporations out of it. The cruise never comes off, as a worldwide recession affecting Ecuador (and thus, worldwide hunger, an the hint of global class revolution and war) makes it problematic for rich celebrities to travel to places of extreme poverty. We are already in 1986 always at war, of course:

“As long as they killed people with conventional rather than nuclear weapons, they were praised as humanitarian statesmen. As long as they did not use nuclear weapons, it appeared, nobody was going to give the right name to all the killing that had been going on since the end of the Second World War, which was surely World War Three.”

Anyway, some (poor) people in the process of the cruise event falling apart raid the cruise ship, and some others take it and get shipwrecked on one of the outer islands at the time a worldwide virus makes all humans infertile except the group on this particular island. One girl bears a child with seal-like fur, pointing to early shifts in evolution. In Trout’s (who is a ghost, and has been for a million years) speculative/science fictional account, humans evolve to survive as amphibians, living a simpler life, post-tech.

Notable things:

*The book is both a tribute to and a critique of Darwin. Evolution happens, but what if survival of the fittest just means the survival of the powerful and greedy? The book seems eerily prescient, and relevant to today in so many ways.

*Vonnegut’s humorous meta-fictional approach has him starring the names of characters who will soon die in his story.

*Black humor; this is a grim book, but also darkly satirical, often very funny. Vonnegut in this book is most clearly the twentieth century Twain.t

*The idea of chance—heart attacks, murders, diseases—suddenly changing one's personal fortunes is part of the serendipity of Vonnegut’s absurdist world view.

*Capitalism as the destruction of the world, no turning back: “The value of their money was imaginary. Like the nature of the universe itself, the desirability of their American dollars and yen was all in people’s heads.”

*Against all odds, hope: “So, the accidents of genetics and the isolation of some famous islands West of Ecuador allow for our species to be reborn.”

I think this is one of the very best Vonnegut novels, maybe second behind Slaughterhouse Five. Highly recommended!

Charles Darwin on Galápagos, which he first visited in 1835:

https://www.galapagosislands.com/info...

Darwin took, among other things, a few giant tortoises back with him when he left the islands, including Harriet, who died in 2006 at 176 (true story!) (and no, that wasn't the oldest tortoise on record!) (look it up for yourself! I did!). Here's a different, yet similarly giant tortoise on Galápagos:

https://www.newsflare.com/video/23213...

Re: The popularity of ecotourism in Galápagos, and the trashing of it, ironically:

https://therevelator.org/trash-galapa...

"Darwin did not change the islands, but only people's opinion of them. That was how important mere opinions used to be back in the era of great big brains. Mere opinions, in fact, were as likely to govern people's actions as hard evidence, and were subject to sudden reversals as hard evidence could never be. So the Galápagos islands could be hell in one moment and heaven in the next, and Julius Caesar could be a statesman in one moment and a butcher in the next, and Ecuadorian paper money could be traded for food, shelter, and clothing in one moment and line the bottom of a birdcage the next, and the universe could be created by God Almighty in one moment and by a big explosion in the next—and on and on." (16-17)

I'm nearing the end of Vonnegut's oevre—I'm not sure exactly how many of his works I haven't yet read, but they are certainty fewer than the ones I have read. Galápagos had attracted me for a long time, but each time I wanted to read Vonnegut, I ended up giving precedence to other works. No longer. I have now read Galápagos, which was a quick and deceptively humorous read. I say deceptively, because there were rather depressing moments and ideas scattered throughout. There was also a large amount of repetition and redundancy, which became quite tedious at times (e.g., the numerous references to 'big brains' and 'the nature cruise of the century', and the many quotations pulled from the Mandarax device, which were sometimes funny and illustrative, but almost as often distracting and detrimental to the flow of the story). Add to this the nature of the story itself, which I appreciated in theory more than in practice (there were—inevitably, given the tale—many plot holes and unanswered questions), and some parts of which I really liked while others I could surely have done without, and I have to conclude that, while worth reading, Galápagos isn't one of Vonnegut's greatest hits.

I've read a few of Vonnegut's novels now, and I can't get enough. I love his writing style, his dark humor, and his incredible imagination. He has this way of making his bizarre visions of the future seem perfectly plausible, and makes me worry for our future and laugh at the same time.

Galapagos is told from the point of view of a person a million years after 1986. He relates the story of events in 1986 that led to the remnants of all of humanity being situated on one tiny island a million years later. I won't tell you what life is like a million years from now, because it's more fun to be surprised as the storyteller slowly fills you in.

Something I love about Vonnegut's brand of storytelling is the way he bounces around among the story's different points. In Slaughterhouse Five, his speaker has become "unstuck in time", and so one moment he's an old man, the next he's a child, the next he's a soldier in WWII, etc. In Galapagos, the speaker has been around for a million years, and so we just follow his train of thought as he tells about one person in 1986, then another person twenty years later, then about life on the island one million years later, then about the atom bomb on Nagasaki, then back to 1986 about a different person, then about himself, etc. The story never moves in a straight line, so you learn the "ending" rather early on and take a great ride while he fills in the middle for you.

Vonnegut may not be everyone's cup of tea, but it's my opinion that he should be! Everyone should try reading his stories, because they are so full of commentary on human beings and what we're capable of. And it isn't all war and apocalypse; there are beautiful moments about love and human connection and wonder as well.

FINALLY. A Vonnegut book I didn’t like. I didn’t think it were possible!

Narrated by the million-year-old ghost of Kilgore Trout’s son (Trout being the obscure science fiction writer whom Vonnegut fans will undoubtedly recall from such books as Breakfast of Champions and Slaughterhouse-Five), Galápagos tells the story of the end of human civilization as we currently know it. Which is, incidentally, a million years before Trout’s telling of it. And by this description one might expect to be highly entertained—imagining Vonnegut’s satirical yet humoristic style, his fun but quirky characters, his interjected musings on all things life, the whole ordeal undercut by a certain familiar poignancy. But this book was missing all of that. None of its characters was very interesting, the end of “big-brained” human existence was not fleshed out in as much detail as one might otherwise expect from a book specifically about its demise (or, more accurately, about its transformation). There were a few genius quips about Charles Darwin and his theory of natural selection, but for the most part this book was a bit of a let down.