This was Vonnegut's sort of homage to Darwin. It's his creative take on evolution.
Read this if you like slow-paced books, an exciting cast of characters, a witty writing style, non-linear narratives, the ending spoiled by the narrator, ghostly narrators with daddy issues, and weird fiction.

Absolutely adored the central conceit of this novel: In the midst of the death of the human species, a pocket of "humanity" manages to trundle on for at least another million years into the future, but the caveat being that these far-flung descendants are forever marooned on an ashy isle of the Galapagos where they have devolved into furry small-brained creatures with flippers--and the species and the planet couldn't be better off for it! The conceptual remove from its characters will probably trouble readers with conventional hearts, not to mention the very grim tone this novel takes toward the worth of the human race. But I loved the ruthlessly mordant satire that froths from every page of this novel. More gloomy and acerbic takedowns of the human species, please!

Kurt Vonnegut's Galápagos is narrated by the son of one of its author's inventions, Kilgore Trout. I am speaking of Leon Trotsky Trout who, though decapitated in Malmo, Sweden, manages to survive for over a million years without actually going down the "blue tunnel of death."

In this book, Vonnegut sees a global catastrophe occurring in the 1980s which leads to the sterility of the human race -- except on Santa Rosalia Island in the Galapagos, where the survivors of a nature cruise manage to carry on the race by giving birth to humans with fur who had flippers and can swim to catch fish, much as seals and sea lions do.

Vonnegut is being very droll here as he wipes out most of the human race, which failed ultimately because they had big brains which they didn't know how to use. The Galapagos continuation of the race has smaller brains and has, according to the author, a chance of being more successful.

This is one of Vonnegut's favorites among his novels, though I still prefer Cat's Cradle with its diabolical ice-nine.

This is either the best or the worst travel book ever written. I was traveling through central Europe while I read this book. And as I read, I kept thinking that perhaps I was on my own "Nature Cruise of the Century." I thought that perhaps my own version of James Wait was around every corner. Now, let my oversized brain ruin a simple book review, let me finish by saying that there were no currency crises, wars, drunken captains, or con artists (at least that I knew of) on my trip. I wasn't stranded anywhere and the book didn't become my mandarax. So, there's that. It was all a lot of fun, and the book was a great travel partner (as far as inanimate books can be).

It was a complicated relationship, with this book. I love Vonnegut, so I was more than enthusiastic to start yet another book by him. And as I started reading it, I got stuck right away... It took me a MONTH and a couple of days to finish it. Which is unusual for me, with Vonnegut.
My main problem with it - knowing from the start that all the characters were doomed and what sort of fate awaited them (and the whole humanity too, btw) wasn't good. There were no surprises, no "aha!" moments, no twists. The action was jumping in time and space, which I found not really confusing, but rather pointless.
Also, having way too many characters didn't help either. It didn't let me getting attached to any of them, or to know them better and I didn't actually care what was going to happen to them.
So what I got was another Vonnegut's rant on poor moral state of human kind and how nothing good could ever happen to us because we were/are/will be selfish egotistic bastards ready to kill everything and everyone because of our crazy or hungry reasons. Sounded familiar? Right.
It reminded me of Cat's Cradle, where we also had the extinction of human race.
I didn't love it. I liked it, because you just can't easily get over Vonnegut, he's brilliant with his sarcasm, his insight and writing, of course. But I don't think this one is going to be as memorable to me as his other books I've already read. I really tried, but it just didn't work this time for me.

Попри те, що роман вважається гумористичним, мені чесно було важко сміятися. Я бачила всі ці саркастичні жарти, правильно розставлені і прописані, але максимум могла всміхнутися. Можливо, я просто була не в тому настрої, але... У мене склалося враження, що оповідачу — вигаданому чи ж справжньому — просто хотілося кричати від відчаю, знаючи, що його ніхто не почує, тож він вирішив прикритися комічним. І хай він певен майже на 98%, що нічого не зміниться, але все ще десь жевріють ті 2%, які твердять, що надія є. Зрештою, навіщо було б кричати, якби ти не хотів, щоб тебе почули?
Це мій перший роман у Воннеґута, і якесь таке враження він на мене справив. "Бойня", до речі, в мене стоїть вже давненько, але через те, що мені набридла воєнна тематика, я вирішила її відкласти, щоб ось так зустрітися з іншою книжкою цього автора.
Я майже переконана, що Курт Воннеґут не увійд�� до переліку моїх улюблених письменників. Але читати я його ще обов'язково буду, бо пише він надзвичайно добре. Від структури і до сюжету — у нього все працює, як годинник. Немає жодної зайвої детальки, і водночас йому вдається застосовувати цікаві прийоми, як-от зірочки для тих персонажів, які мають померти.
Українське видання досить непогане. Переклад ще 90-х років, оформлення неочікувано з кольором, і титульна сторінка у формі ДНК — дуже оригінально. Єдине, що мені таки не сподобалося в перекладі, — це японці. Ну немає в японській мові "г", немає. Правильно прізвище має писатися ХіроҐУчі (або Хіроґуті, якщо вже псевдополіванівкою), але не Хірогуті, і аж ніяк не "Гокубі", коли він "Ґокубі". Я не розумію, куди взагалі літера "ґ" звідси поділася. Ооох. Принаймні поповнила свою колекцію "неправильних японців".

Kurt Vonnegut's great recurring subjects were depression and the fallibility of mankind as he saw it. But unlike many before and after him, he had a touch that was both caustic but endearing. Much like Hunter S. Thompson and Jonathan Swift his mordant incisions into the weaknesses of humanity were galvanized not just by disappointment but by a bruised idealism, an idealism that believed, at times beyond all logic and evidence, in the essential good and worthwhile nature of the marginally evolved human being.

Galapagos is a fantastic read. At first I thought Vonnegut's narrative voice a bit too acerbic, a bit too dismissive. But with the skill of a master Vonnegut weaves a story that ends (much like his earlier Breakfast of Champions) with an adroitly placed balancing between the real and the phantasmagoric, between the dead and the living, between father and son. It's something beautiful, and something heartbreaking.

I've said before that Vonnegut is the mordant uncle of American letters. The guy who'd cheer you on but call you a twerp if he knew you could do better. He was one of the few writers I'd also call a personal hero. Read this and you'll see the beauty in the grotesque that he made his, but only because it's all of ours, one of our few commonalities as a species.

This is Kurt Vonnegut at his best as he lets the ghost of Leon Trotsky Trout – son of famed (/s) science-fiction writer, Kilgore Trout – narrate this story about the evolution of mankind.

Leon Trout explains from a million years in the future that a million years ago humans had serious evolutionary defects: namely, grossly over-sized brains.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
– Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)

And why was the quiet desperation such a widespread malady back then, and especially among men? Yet again I trot onstage the only real villain in my story: the oversize human brain.

Nobody leads a life of quiet desperation nowadays. The mass of men was quietly desperate a million years ago because the infernal computers inside their skulls were incapable of restraint or idleness, were forever demanding more challenging problems which life could not provide.

I love this story and I especially love the way it is told – with heavy doses of irony and humor, all while promoting a lot of introspection and contemplation on the part of its readers.

Here is one passage that I especially enjoyed for its humor. The narrator, Leon Trout, is explaining a little bit about the evolutionary similarities and differences between humans in the year 1986 and the humans in the year 1,001,986 – when humans have become seafaring, seal-like creatures:

If anything, people hiccup more now than they did a million years ago. This has less to do with evolution, I think, than with the fact that so many of them gulp down raw fish without chewing them up sufficiently.

And people still laugh about as much as they ever did, despite their shrunken brains. If a bunch of them are lying around on a beach, and one of them farts, everybody else laughs and laughs, just as people would have done a million years ago.

"In this era of big brains, anything which can be done will be done -- so hunker down."
-- Kurt Vonnegut, Galápagos



Trying to stay a couple books ahead of my son as I re-read Vonnegut. I haven't read much since those years between 13 and 18 when I seemed to burn through Vonnegut books again and again. He was one of those few writers I ever read twice (Dickens, Shakespeare, and Hugo are a few others). So, now as an adult I am approaching these books again.

God I love this man. I love his hopeful, resigned cynicism about the modern era. He writes as an outsider, but also as a friend -- if that makes any sense. This novel is so brilliant in its simplicity. Kilgore Trout's son Leon Trotsky Trout narrates a tale that covers one million years. He is a ghost, destined to watch humanity crash and be reborn on the Island of Galápagos. That is the basic arc. The almost end of man, and his rebirth. Using evolution as a key, Vonnegut shows that like the Irish Elk, with its large, heavy, awkward, and almost unadaptive giant antlers, man is burdened with a giant brain that seems to cause endless trouble for our species.

“Given a choice between a brain like you and the antlers of an Irish elk,” she told her own central nervous system, “I'd take the antlers of the Irish elk.”.

So, the accidents of genetics and the isolation of some famous islands West of Ecuador allow for our species to be reborn.

“What was it going to do with a bigger brain? Compose Beethoven's Ninth Symphony?”.

Kurt Vonnegut explains that the greatest achievement of The Origin of Species is that it has done "more to stabilize people’s volatile opinions of how to identify success or failure than any other tome." The thinking is that so long as we continue to survive challenges, we will have improved over those that came before.

We often associate survival with success, merit and quality, and Vonnegut goes out of his way to undermine this notion in one of his less appreciated novels, Galapagos.

Leon Trotsky Trout is a ghost speaking from a million years in the future. Natural selection has continued throughout that time so humanity is better than ever. Perhaps surprisingly, the evolution of the human race reveals that the villain of history is the "oversize human brain." After all, the humans of the future don't have big brains anymore.

A million years from now, people will have evolved to be, more or less, seals. The skull of the average human will not be as big as it is now, which makes swimming for fish easier, which in turn makes survival a cakewalk. So who needs an oversize brain?

Certainly the world is a better place without those villainous brains. The rainforest, the atmosphere, and the icecaps of today would think so -- as would any human seal that thinks survival is a rubber stamp of success.

We spend a great deal of time holding 1984 and Brave New World as models for all dystopian writers. After a while, unfortunately, government and corporate control starts to feel all too familiar. Galapagos may be my favorite dystopian story simply because Vonnegut takes such an unconventional route to his dystopian future.

n  "When all was said and done, the creatures of the Galápagos Islands were a pretty listless bunch compared with rhinos and hippos and lions and elephants and so on."n

Leon Trotsky Trout is as dead as a dodo but is nevertheless the incorporeal narrator of a story told a million years into our future.
Trout recounts a sequence of evolutionary events that began in 1986 as a bunch of bipedal misfits gathered in Ecuador for 'The Nature Cruise of the Century.'
Looking back at humankind from a million-years-in-the-future perspective, we were a freakish bunch, possessing oversized brains that we didn't make the best use of, and even gave names to dogs.
Also, because our brains were the size of fat mangoes and not yet atrophied by evolution, a discussion between a husband and wife under stress could end up like a fight between two blindfolded people on roller skates.

Captain Adolf von Kleist, who doesn't know shit from Shinola, is somehow left in charge of this ill-fated, over-hyped maiden voyage to the Galápagos Islands.
(I can assure you that the story is better read than explained).

I was a latecomer to Vonnegut and fell in love with his writing quicker than you could say "woolly mammoth." He elucidates with the conviction of a mad prophet; his prose is cheerily unfussy and he is always wickedly provocative.
And, in keeping with the 'circle of life' theme, there are fish metaphors aplenty.
For no reason other than authorial whimsy, he anoints any character who is about to die with an asterisk (so we know in advance that they are going to pop their clogs) and mischievously over-explains things that are blindingly obvious to anyone bar our tiny-brained human descendants, one million years into the future.

Vonnegut had a droll sense of humour that I found immediately enjoyable, and Monty Python fans are sure to like his style. But there is a great deal of sagacity to be found in his eccentricity.
It should come as no surprise to anyone that we humans prove to be the architects of our own downfall. Despite our hefty brains, we are somehow ignorant of the perils of war, financial crashes, global viruses, world overpopulation, climate change and meteorites hitting our planet.
Ain't that the truth?

The only carp I have with Vonnegut is his scattergun approach to plot lines. The story staggers backwards and forwards like a drunken sailor in a hall of mirrors and I felt that the philosophical quotes interrupted - rather than enhanced- the narrative.

In truth, I didn't know what to expect from Vonnegut's Galápagos, but was pleasantly surprised, loving every daft, dizzy, witty moment of this prescient read!

Mr. Vonnegut puts to use a hyper imagination with Galapagos. This book is about big brains. Big brains, like big boobies, regularly get in peoples way. Fortunately, I have neither. They are in peoples way when riding a crowded bus, or crowded elevators or when actively engaged in a sport. And evolution. This book is about big brains, boobies and evolution. That's about all a person needs to know before reading Galapagos... after all, it's not likely you were going to write Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.