Not as sci-fi as I expected, but very fun satire nonetheless. I was on the verge of giving it 4 stars at some points during reading, but it deserved the full 5 at the end ✨

A major disappointment from the master of "Slapstick, or Lonesome No More", "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater", and "Slaughterhouse Five", all of them great books: very imaginative, very clever, very funny and tragic at the same time, masterful of composition and wording. But this one ... nah! There is no or hardly a story here, but an ongoing and repetitious churning-out of tidbits of twentieth-century American lore combined with fantasy and autobiographical notes. All of that larded with clever witticisms and turns of phrase ,at which Vonnegut admittedly excels - therefore I gave it two instead of one stars. But these too tend to get tedious as the book progresses. I read two hundred of its 260 odd pages, then had enough.

من کورت ونه گوت رو دوس دارم .
این کتابش یک ظرف آجیل بود که هم امروز رو به تصور میکشید هم فردا .
روزمرگی انسان ها رو در قالب دنده معکوس و عدم اختیار نشون میده و از جانب نویسنده مورد علاقه و خیالیش تراوت اون رو چاپ می کنه .
اما این کتاب شلوغ تر از اونه که بشه باهاش ارتباط عمیق برقرار کرد . لحن کتاب بسیار شتابزده است چون بنظرم خودش میخواسته این عجله و عدم اختیار بیشتر حس بشه . نمیشه بگم میشه ازش لذت برد ولی خوندش شما رو بیشتر با دیدگاه ونه گوت آشنا میکنه .

This is a highly entertaining example of Kurt Vonnegut‘s writing. Kilgore Trout has already become unforgettable and a legend to me.

Sometimes reminded me of the comic section of the newspaper. Seems fitting to finish a book on my birthday? No? What shall I read in my new fresh year? Hm

David Foster Wallace, in an interview with Larry McCaffery (an interview I truly can’t recommend enough) talks about experiencing a special sort of buzz in his favourite literature, a sense of internal resonance which he labels a “click”, a term borrowed from Yeats, who analogised this experience to “the click of a well-made box.”

There are dozens of authors who click for me: DeLillo, Pynchon, Helen DeWitt, DFW. They’re the experiences I’m constantly chasing in literature – they’re the quotes that knock around endlessly in my head as the anchors to my thoughts.

I can trace the lineage of my clicks through major figures all the way back to the beginning, to my personal Original Sin, to Kurt Vonnegut. He wasn’t the first writer that clicked for me (that goes to Joseph Heller), but he was my first literary hero – he got me hooked on his click.

Over the last year or two, I’ve realised that the reason I’m still alive is mostly out of a sense of debt, a personal awareness I can’t throw in the towel until I’ve created something which at least attempts to repay my immense debt to all the great artists that have carried me to where I am today, of whom Vonnegut was my proverbial snake.

There are a few obvious Vonnegut books better than this one but this one meant a lot to me back when I first read it in 2017 (and plus, before rereading this book I had just finished reading Nietzsche and with notions of eternal recurrence at the forefront, Timequake seemed most appropriate…).

Timequake is ostensibly about a ten-year period – starring, of course, the eternal Kilgore Trout – wherein the universe momentarily shrunk back 10 years forcing everyone to relive this period internally knowing this shrink had happened but not being able to act differently from how they had the first time. Much more so than this it’s an autobiography and an homage to what makes life worthwhile, a list which includes (but is not limited to): chewing the cud, being sure to notice the simple pleasure by remarking “if this isn’t nice, what is?”, and art (particularly literature because, well).

Vonnegut is probably the funniest writer I’ve read and possess a remarkably rare ability to spin horribly bleak remarks about the “crock of shit” that is life into sentences that I guarantee will make you laugh out loud.

Whenever someone who’s less familiar with literature wants a book recommendation, I immediately revert to Vonnegut because I know from personal experience that one Vonnegut book can doom someone forever to chasing the moments of ecstasy only found in art, all the while convincing them they’ve enjoyed what may ultimately be a life sentence.

This fan of Vennegut since a kid enjoys this typically well written perspective only he could provide 8 of 10 stars

So . . . huh.

I didn't know what this was, just that it was on sale for Kindle a couple of months ago and the only Vonnegut I've ever read is Slaughterhouse-Five (a favorite). So I got this, and I read it and it . . . is unusual. It's not so much a novel as a description of a story about a writer, Kilgore Trout, who is Vonnegut's alter ego and imaginary friend, along with descriptions of the stories Trout wrote and then threw away during the Timequake. It's . . . yeah, it's hard to describe. I didn't dislike it, but I wasn't expecting it. Vonnegut's ramble touches on everything: life, death, marriage, art, writing, education, anything and everything. And it's fascinating, and funny, and crass at times. I wouldn't recommend it as "gateway Vonnegut," but I would recommend it if you loved Slaughterhouse-Five and want to try something else.

Touching last novel lacking in plot. It read more like an excuse for Vonnegut to reminisce on his life. Funny moments scattered throughout. The ending was great but during certain parts of the book I thought "why include that?" and "who cares?". Anyways it was still worth a read and Kurt Vonnegut is still one of my favorite novelists.

I think this was the wrong choice to make for my first Kurt Vonnegut book. Reading the synopsis, I was excited about the story that waited for me. But I was thoroughly confused for the first hour of the audiobook with the inclusion of the author's autobiographical bits and talking about Timequake 1 (the story I thought I was going to be reading) and Timequake 2 (which I'm still not quite sure of). It was such an odd mix of the author talking about scenes from Timequake 1 and his real life that I thought I had checked out the wrong book.

Anyway, there was still plenty of quotable material here to make this worth my while, even though I was pretty confused by the mix of fiction and autiobiographical work.

“Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!”

What to say about this book? One part autobiography/memoir. One part sci-fi story. One part satire on society. Mashed together with "timequakes" interspersed through out. Timequakes could have various effects:
Throw random people into the past.
Cause random people to return to a point in their lives and have to relive it without change.
In one case, extend a life 10 years past the point when they were scheduled to die.

Sometimes they had free will. Other times they did not (they were stuck in the programming instilled in them by society and the people around them.)

The first half of this story was rollicking and fun. Robin Williams improve meets Monte Python.
The second half kind of deteriorated into your grandpa telling you stories of the olden days in a context that you couldn't understand with a little repetition in places.

I'm still glad I read it but it is not among his best works.

He Leaned it Against a Tree and Called it Modern Art
23 May 2021

tSo, basically there was a timequake in 2001, which basically meant that everybody went back to 1990 and had to live through the 90s again. That sounds like it was a pretty good thing to happen, namely because as a decade there were some pretty good things there. Like, I could have actually gone and seen Nirvana play live in a pub as opposed to going and watching Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey. Well, there is a bit of a catch, and that is that you don’t get to make any decisions – you pretty much go through life doing exactly the same thing that you did before. So, if you regretted voting for Bill Clinton the first time around, then unfortunately you are going to do exactly the same thing this time.

tYeah, you can’t expect a happy ending where Kurt Vonnegut is concerned, but you can expect a rather interesting, and easy to read, writing style while being incredibly deep throughout the entire book. You can also expect it to be a post-modernist piece of rubbish, except that it isn’t rubbish because Vonnegut wrote it. Instead, it is absoluelty hilarious, namely because Vonnegut just seems to have this style that is simple, deep, and particularly funny. For instance, he has an interest in ding dongs, birth canals, and sticking ding dongs into birth canals.

tDoes this book have a point? No, not really, but then again it is Vonnegut, and having a point doesn’t seem to be one of the tools that he utilises in his writings. In fact, the pointlessness of human existence, and the illusion of free will, seems to be one of those things that he constantly returns to, and Timequake certainly does have a lot to say about free will. I guess the idea is that if we actually give humans free will, then humans will end up trying to destroy themselves – though they seem to be doing a particularly good job at it currently.

tI watched a lecture given by Vonnegut at an American University, and it sort of sounded like a lecture that would be given by Jerry Seinfeld. Then again, I get the impression that when Jerry Seinfeld stands up in front of a group of people and talks, people don’t refer to it as a lecture, they refer to it as stand-up comedy. Yet, for some reason, when Vonnegut stands up in front of a group of people and cracks jokes, they don’t call it stand-up comedy, they call it a lecture. I guess it has something to do with Kurt Vonnegut being a literary titan whose books are studied in schools and universities, while Jerry Seinfeld starred in 172 episodes about basically nothing.

tThen again, when I mentioned to one of my bosses that I loved Waiting for Godot because it is a two-hour play in which nothing happens, his reply is that I should watch the entire series of Seinfeld, because that is fifty-seven hours (and a bit) of absolutely nothing happening. Mind you, I have watched something like 2 hours of Seinfeld, and yeah, nothing happens, and I got bored with it, so I decided to not bother with the other 55 hours.

tBut then this hasn’t anything to do with Timequake, but then again Timequake has nothing to do with Timequake. You could say that Timequake is basically the same thing happening over and over again, or at least it feels like it. Then again, I have been told that The Walking Dead is the same thing happening over and over again, but they still seem to produce more hours of the show. There are 102 hours of The Walking Dead, which is basically the same thing happening over and over again. I watched 15 hours of it until a friend of mine told me that madness lies in that direction.

tHe claims to be mad, so maybe he ended up watching 102 hours of The Walking Dead. And 57 hours of Seinfeld.

tIt is suggested that Timequake is an autobiography, and in part, it is, though it doesn’t have a linear structure. Then again linear structures aren’t something that Kurt Vonnegut keeps in his toolbox. In fact linear structures are something that he really doesn’t think has any use whatsoever. Instead he just jumps about all over the place, like how he says that whenever he comes up with a short story instead of writing it, he just gives it to Kilgore Trout and sticks an idea in one of his books. Like, the story about the planet where you can only get food through trade or commerce.

tI thought that planet was Earth, but Vonnegut begs to differ. I can’t say anything about Kilgore Trout because Kilgore Trout doesn’t exist – Kurt Vonnegut made him up as somebody who writes all the stories that Vonnegut can’t be bothered writing. He did write short stories once, back in the 30s. Apparently, somebody came up with the idea of releasing magazines that were full of short stories, and they became really popular. The problem was that they didn’t have enough short stories to fill them, so they got people like Isaac Asimov and Kurt Vonnegut to fill them up. Apparently, it was a pretty profitable gig. That is until TV was invented – when people had TV they no longer bothered reading books, but rather they watched television, like 57 hours of Seinfeld, and 102 hours of The Walking Dead. As such, there was no need to get people to write short stories anymore.

tThere is a method behind Vonnegut’s madness, and it all becomes clear at the end of the book. In fact it becomes clear in the last paragraph, but I won’t spoil it for you any more than I need to. Anyway, Vonnegut is up in heaven now, and you will have to read the book to understand what I mean by that statement.