Не те, щоб я не знала майже всього опусу Воннегута приблизно напам'ять, але в такі часи, як тепер, завжди підтримує нагадування, що хтось на цій планеті ставиться - власне, вже ставився - до людства так само скептично, як ти. Власне, за це й люблю, за це і знаю приблизно напам'ять, за це щороку й перечитую, і отепер також.

My first (but not last... I already own several that I just haven't got around to reading yet) Vonnegut book, and I can see why his writing has a cult following. He was an excellent writer.

Plot wise... surprisingly little actually happens. It was far from boring, it was just a little bit difficult for me to really get sucked into this book and this world. But I did enjoy reading it, and although we don't go too in depth into the characters and their thoughts and feelings, the characters were all interesting and likeable in their own ways.

Breakfast of Champions next, I think.

This riotously funny book is classic Vonnegut. It is satirical, cynical, yet somehow cautiously optimistic in the end, but maybe for a race of people that has evolved more in line with nature. On the Jon Stewart show, Kurt Vonnegut once remarked, “We are terrible animals and our planet’s immune system is trying to rid itself of us and probably should.” Within this novel, Vonnegut rids the world of the human race as we know it and is able to rapidly evolve humans in the Galapagos into creatures that are less terrible and better suited for their environment.

Narrating from 1 million years in the future is Leon Trout, son of Kilgore Trout. His ghost wanders the earth and is able to enter minds of the living. Leon trout takes us back to 1986 when the world is in the midst of economic collapse just as the over-hyped “Nature Cruise of the Century” is scheduled to depart Guayaquil. Additionally, war has broken out between Ecuador and Peru. There is an attempt to transport the few passengers back to the airport to get them safely out of the country, however, the only escape from the violence is via the Bahia de Darwin. This ransacked ship is the very one that was supposed to take them on the nature cruise of the century. The captain, four remaining scheduled passengers, and a handful of Kanka-bono girls embark on this journey. The Kanka-bono girls are natives from a tribe thought not to exist anymore. They had been living in the rain forest until recently. In addition to this group of people, a small computer called Mandarax, makes it’s way onto the ship and island with them. Mandarax speaks in quotes, riddles and peotry spewing information that is useless and often humiliating.

The bungling captain, Adolf von Kleist, who normally has nothing to do with managing the ship finds himself solely responsible for their voyage. After days lost at sea, he intentionally runs ashore on a lava shoal off the fictional island Santa Rosalia. The ships’ occupants find themselves marooned here, isolated from the rest of the world. Here they escape a virus that is destroying women’s ovaries and rendering women infertile throughout the rest of the world. The Captain is the only man on the Island. He never wanted children, knowing that he might be a carrier of Huntington’s Disease. Mary Hepburn, an American widow, shacks up with the bungling captain. Having taught sex education and warned her students on numerous occasions about how easy it is to become pregnant, she decides to put this to the test. Being past childbearing age herself, she uses her finger to transfer the Captain’s sperm to willing Kanka-bono teen-agers. “For some people getting pregnant is as easy as catching a cold.’ And there certainly was an analagy there: Colds and babies were both causes by germs which loved nothing so much as a mucous membrane.” Thus, the captain unwittingly becomes the Adam to a whole new generation of Galapagonian people residing on Santa Rosaria, that speak Kanka-bono. Over the next million years, these people will evolve to have smaller brains, fur, flippers and beaks.

Infused throughout this book, is a rich and detailed look at the Galapagos, it’s various species, history and geology. Having recently visited the Galapagos, I loved reading Vonnegut’s description of this area. I also loved the way his mind twisted this incredible location which is home to so many endemic species to do as he pleased with the human race. Kurt Vonnegut’s writing is full of wit, wisdom and warning. His observations and insights are anti-authoritarian, anti-war and anti-technology. He reiterates within this novel that the sorrows of mankind are due to “the only true villain in this story: the oversized human brain.” Through evolution and natural selection, he is able to eliminate this problem. I read so much Vonnegut in my late teen years and early twenties, that it was such a pleasure to read another novel of his and find just as much to love about his writing, cynicism and humor!

For discussion questions, please see: http://www.book-chatter.com/?p=3276.

This is a satire, apparently. What exactly is being satirised is not clear to me. And isn't satire supposed to be, you know, funny? One simple and not particularly exciting idea is stretched to over 250 pages via shameless padding and mind-numbing repetition. The irritatingly smug narrator keeps reminding us who's going to die and that everyone in the story is basically stupid and a waste of space.
An ugly, misanthropic and depressing book.

One million years in the future, a man recounts humanity's origins in the Galapagos islands.

This was the third Kurt Vonnegut book I've read and my third favorite. Actually, it reminds me of one of Grandpa Simpson's rambling stories that circles back on itself, only with novel-y bits like themes and messages and such.

Galapagos is part satire, part cautionary tale. There's a shipwreck on Galapagos and it turns out those people are the only ones who can reproduces. I'm pretty sure this is mentioned in the first two pages. Anyway, one million years in the future, humanity is a whole other species.

Galapagos deals in evolution, environmentalism, and anti-war. Also, humanity's "big brains" are blamed for most of their problems. The world of Galapagos is in a global economic crisis. Yeah, a lot has changed since 1986...

The book is actually pretty funny with Vonnegut's dark absurdist humor being the star of the show. I interrupted my girlfriend's Harry Potter reading with this, easily my favorite quote:
“I didn't know then what a sperm was, and so wouldn't understand his answer for several years. "My boy," he said, "you are descended from a long line of determined, resourceful, microscopic tadpoles-- champions every one.”

I enjoyed this fairly well and devoured it in three sittings. I didn't like it as much as Cat's Cradle or Slaughterhouse-Five, however. I think it was the circular nature of the narrative that got me. If Galapagos was a road trip, it would have been thousands of left turns in order to go fifty miles in a straight line. 3.5 out of 5 stars.

Wikipedia insists that Vonnegut is a humanist, but I've only ever detected contempt for humanity in his books. I found this book to be characteristic in that it describes a materialistic world view, which includes no room for sympathetic characters (almost as if people aren't worth bothering about) and seeks solace in a celebration of the absurdity of trying to apply meaning to meaningless material processes (thanks, but no thanks). Like all of his books, the narrative techniques are far too clever for their own good, and have the result of my not being able to retain any memory of the book whatsoever after only a few days. (I read "Breakfast of Champions" in college and today I literally couldn't describe to you a single moment of that book. I've read "Slaughterhouse Five" more than once, and I couldn't tell you three things about it. I'm guessing that "Galapagos" is going to end up going down the same mental garbage shoot, and sitting here with a few lingering images from the book still left in my mind, I can't say I care.)

Now, really... am I the only person who doesn't love Vonnegut?

Це була 128 сторінка.
Я відкриваю 30 розділ, глибоко видихаю. Приміряюсь, скіко там ще тексту лишилось - багатенько. Зазираю в кінець, щоб оцінити цифри.

-- Блядь. -- кажу я. -- Ще 100 сторінок цього безпросвєтного брєда.

Трохи пізніше Воннеґут опише мандри морських водоростей: спочатку їх їли ігуани, далі герої відловлювали скотину і пáтрали їй живіт, щоби добути напівперетравлену поживу. Ну то знайте, що шлях читача в Ґалапаґосі - то шлях морської водорості

It will be interesting to see what becomes of the legacy of Kurt Vonnegut now that he is dead. Many great authors don't receive the recognition they deserve until after they have taken the giant step to the other side, but Vonnegut's Slaughter House Five was being taught in high schools across
America while the author was still alive so I guess it can be said that he was a legend in his own time. Maybe his appeal will diminish with age, but I kind of doubt it. I consider him one of the most brilliant writers of our time and this book, along with Cat's Cradle and The Sirens of Titan, is one of my favorites.

Vonnegut eschews flowery prose and laborious description in favor of succinct passages that manage to relay a world of meaning in as few words as possible. In fact, this book can be read in one intense afternoon sitting but there is really no other author I am familiar with that can say so much with so little. At certain times in Galapagos, Vonnegut's ability to encapsulate profound humanist and spiritual messages in a single sentence is powerfully moving.

In many ways Galapagos is Vonnegut's answer to Darwin's theory of evolution laid out in Origin of Species. While not directly contradictory and by no means scientific, the story builds on Darwin's famous theory to explain Vonnegut's own theory of Devolution in which humans gradually turn their backs on the complexities of the universe in order to search further inside themselves to find the truth that lies within. In the process they devolve into creatures of such elemental simplicity that they are capable of connecting with the universe on a grander scale then was ever previously possible. I wish I had a copy, actually, because I could use a refresher and would read it right now.

A few years ago I told a friend that it was one of my great dreams in life to interview Kurt Vonnegut before he died. Unfortunately, partly due to laziness, but mostly due to the self-defeating belief that such a meeting would be an impossibility, I never acted upon this dream and he passed away this year. I will regret not making a greater effort to see this dream become a reality for a long time.

In this sci-fi apocalyptical novel, Vonnegut uses a ghost as a narrator to travel back and forth a million years and reveal what has become of humanity after a few humans got stranded on a island in Galápagos. A future with fins as hands and a much smaller brain. Witty and sarcastic but not devoid of melancholy, it proves Vonnegut was an imaginative and crafty storyteller.

Rewritten after rereading in July 2012.

This darkly humorous satire starts with a world financial crisis in 1986 (hopefully that’s where the similarity with current times ends), leading to WW3 – though it’s not really about either: it’s fundamentally about adaptation.

A million years in the future, the only “humans” left on Earth are the descendants of a small but diverse group of survivors of a Galapagos islands cruise, and they are more like seals than 20th century humans. Most of the story is set between the run up to the cruise and the passengers’ first few years on the island, but it is certainly not a Robinson Crusoe type story; it is far more provocative than that, raising issues of fate/independence, the meaning and importance of intelligence and ultimately, what makes us human.

Like all good dystopias (if that's not an oxymoron), the individual steps to it don't really stretch credulity (few of them are very original), but the final destination is more startling - and even somewhat positive.

NARRATIVE STYLE

The story arc is fundamentally chronological, but with an enormous number of tiny jumps ahead: right from the start, Vonnegut sprinkles the story with so many snippets about what will happen to everyone, why and how, that you don’t know if there will be anything left by the time the main narrative catches up. He even prefixes the names of those about to die with an asterisk, at which point I went with the flow and stopped worrying about "spoilers" (on rereading, this aspect became pure comedy). The final chapter, which I would have deleted, fills in a few random gaps that didn’t really need filling.

The narrator is Leon Trout, a long-dead man who helped build the cruise ship. He reminded me a little of Snowman in "Oryx and Crake" (http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...), so if you liked that, consider this. (Kilgore Trout, the father of Leon, is a recurring character in Vonnegut: a prolific but not very successful writer of sci fi. This book mentions his “The Era of Hopeful Monsters”, with a plot that echoes this.)

The book also has random quotes from Mandarax, a hand-held computer and translator that is a little like the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. They are either bizarrely obscure, like the Oracle at Delphi, or comically inappropriate.

THEMES

The main premise is that humans have evolved badly, though the reasons for this are never explained, which is odd, given how much weight is given to subsequent natural selection in the story.

Most significantly, our “big brains” are the cause of all our troubles: they lie (so we don’t trust them or other people), we can’t switch them off, they confuse us with too much information, distract us from the important matters of life and death (though often causing death, e.g. by fighting or suicide), and ultimately cause global financial collapse because the value of so many assets is only maintained by belief in virtual money whizzing around. Accepting the idea that our big brains are a handicap is a bit of a challenge, which Vonnegut backs up with typical bathos by suggesting alcohol is just a way to relax with a (temporarily) smaller brain.

Our long, protected childhoods accustom us to the idea of an omniscient carer and hence account for belief in god, whilst wealth makes us blasé about our doom.

Full stomachs are part of the problem, too: a full belly puts people off-guard and all the powerful people are well-fed, so don’t worry about impending disaster.

Outsourcing our skills and knowledge by developing machines to take over many brain tasks reduces the need for big brains, and indeed, for people.

No wonder humans, in their twenty-first century form, are doomed – even at a comical level: a million years hence, “evolution hasn’t made teeth more durable. It has simply cut the average human lifespan down to about thirty years”!

By contrast, animals are happy to survive, feed and reproduce, and once stranded on an island, natural selection leads to humanity being reduced and enhanced to such basics, “everybody is exactly what he or she seems to be” and “everyone is so innocent and relaxed now". No more lies or deceit, and no hands to use for evil – it sounds positively Utopian.

In addition to the above, it also touches on the nature of intelligence, eugenics (voluntary and not), consent, disability, incest, contraception, mate selection, truth, marriage and alternatives to it, and all sorts of other things. You could make a whole PSHE curriculum from this!

HUMAN-NESS

Amongst all the big issues and ideas the book explicitly raises, there is one that is always assumed, but never questioned or defended: in what sense are the "humans" on Santa Rosalia in a million years’ time actually human (and by extension, what does it mean to BE human)? And if they are human, then surely we should call ourselves apes, or even fish.

And fish and fishing, literal and metaphorical, are recurring themes: many of the characters are "fishers of men", albeit not in a good way, and we’re reminded that “so much depends on fish”; even the narrator’s surname is Trout.

I would hesitate to impose a New Testament analogy on a secular novel by a secular writer, but there are many Biblical allusions: creation, flood, an ark, Adam and Eve, the danger of knowledge, the power of belief, the existence of God, David and Goliath, souls, redemption, and… fish.

Vonnegut toys with why we are as we are and clearly doesn't think it's brain size or capacity that makes us human (which is surely good, as otherwise, what would be the implication for those with learning difficulties and brain damage etc?), but he leaves the reader to decide what “human” means.

FATE AND PURPOSE

Throughout the book, Vonnegut keeps reminding us of the significance of random and apparently trivial events, whilst at the same time implying the apparent opposite: the inevitability of the outcome for humanity (the butterfly effect versus fate). There is a clear message that most people are irrelevant; we can't know who the few important ones are, but they're probably the ones we least expect. Trout admits his prolonged observation was pointless: he was addicted to the soap opera qualities of the story, but accumulated knowledge rather than understanding.

MAIN MESSAGE?

The world ends up a happier place, because of the power of natural selection, echoing the very upbeat quote from Anne Frank on the title page, “In spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at heart.”

Yet, given his ideas about fate, is Vonnegut suggesting the book is pointless too (not that I would agree with that), is he actually trying to make a point (if so, what?) or just entertaining us? Mostly the latter, I think

If Leon Trout is reading this, or any other discussion of the book, he is doubtless chuckling at how seriously people are taking it. Mind you, as a pretentious late teen/early twentysomething, I would have had a field day of profundity!

Overall, not a long book, but one to savour, ponder, chuckle over and reread.

OTHER QUOTATIONS

•t“Mere opinions… were as likely to govern people’s actions as hard evidence, and were subject to sudden reversals as hard evidence could never be.”
•t“It was all in people’s heads. People had simply changed their opinion of paper wealth.”
•tBig brains make marriage hard because “That cumbersome computer could hold so many contradictory opinions” and switch between them so quickly “that a discussion between a husband and wife under stress could end up light a fight between blindfolded people wearing roller skates”.
•t“Typical of the management of so many organisations one million years ago, with the nominal leader specialising in social balderdash, and with the supposed second in command burdened with the responsibility of understanding how things really worked.”

I can imagine Kurt Vonnegut Jr. had a really good time writing this—humans evolving into seal-like creatures with flippers and beaks and small brains. And of course, with small brains they are no longer capable of carrying out the elaborate and monstrous and extremely wicked acts of their big-brained warmongering ancestors. Even if their pea brains could muster up the idea of building weapons of mass destruction, or even your basic shiv, could you imagine trying to do this with slippery flippers and a beak? We might be dealing with the Galápagos Islands and lizards and Charles Darwin and catching fish and cannibal girls and a former male prostitute and an old women who likes playing around with sperm and whatnot, but it's clear he is still pointing the finger at the human race—rebuking it for all the wrongs like greed and excessive technology and financial catastrophe and war. On the surface we have a band of misfits assembled to take the 'the nature cruise of the century' before everything starts to go belly up, but Vonnegut Jr. adds important and deeper subtext to the story and it's this that impressed me the most. It's a really clever novel narrated by a ghost from a point a million years in the future—who also happens to be a Vietnam veteran—and I actually preferred this to his classic anti-war novel Slaughterhouse-Five.