Galapagos: A Novel

by Kurt Jr Vonnegut

“A madcap genealogical adventure . . . Vonnegut is a postmodern Mark Twain.”—The New York Times Book Review

Galápagos takes the reader back one million years, to A.D. 1986. A simple vacation cruise suddenly becomes an evolutionary journey. Thanks to an apocalypse, a small group of survivors stranded on the Galápagos Islands are about to become the progenitors of a brave, new, and totally different human race. In this inimitable novel, America’ s master satirist looks at our world and shows us all that is sadly, madly awry–and all that is worth saving.

Praise for Galápagos

“The best Vonnegut novel yet!”—John Irving

“Beautiful . . . provocative, arresting reading.”—USA Today

“A satire in the classic tradition . . . a dark vision, a heartfelt warning.”—The Detroit Free Press
 
“Interesting, engaging, sad and yet very funny . . . Vonnegut is still in top form. If he has no prescription for alleviating the pain of the human condition, at least he is a first-rate diagnostician.”—Susan Isaacs, Newsday
 
“Dark . . . original and funny.”—People
 
“A triumph of style, originality and warped yet consistent logic . . . a condensation, an evolution of Vonnegut’s entire career, including all the issues and questions he has pursued relentlessly for four decades.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer
 
“Wild details, wry humor, outrageous characters . . . Galápagos is a comic lament, a sadly ironic vison.”—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
 
“A work of high comedy, sadness and imagination.”—The Denver Post
 
“Wacky wit and irreverent imagination .  . . and the full range of technical innovations have made [Vonnegut] America’s preeminent experimental novelist.”—The Minneapolis Star and Tribune

• ISBN10: 0385333870
• ISBN13: 9780385333870
• Publish Date: 12 January 1999
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: Random House USA Inc
• Imprint: Delta (imprint of Dell Publishing)
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 336
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780385333870

Reviews

[clementine]

Not my favourite Vonnegut book, but somehow I don't think anything will usurp Slaughterhouse-Five. Regardless, I enjoyed this one - I don't think it's possible for me not to enjoy Vonnegut. I just love his style. This one in particular appealed to me given that I study archaeology/human evolution - I love the way Vonnegut brought his background in Anthropology to life in the literary world.

In almost every instance characterization trumps all else for me, but Vonnegut always maintains such a distance from his characters that you can never really empathize with them - yet I always love his books. He's just something else, man.

[jamiereadthis]

Several years ago, there was the person who laughed at me when I said I had never read Vonnegut. That’s so necessary, I think— the people who will ridicule you when you have bad ideas, or some egregious blind spot. It’s important. It’s changed my life more times than I can count.

I hadn’t read Kurt Vonnegut when he died in 2007, but I remember the day. I was working in Maryland at a company that was falling to shit, and the programmers, the guys going down with the ship, spent most of their days goofing around on bets and dares. That morning, they were assembled in front of the whiteboard, an eraser-swiped hole through the Perl command-line arguments. “RIP, V” someone had scrawled. I joked, “who died?” and it thudded across the room. They raised paper cups of whiskey and read a line that must have been from Slaughterhouse-Five, one of the lines that ends in “So it goes.” That was the day one of the guys laughed at me in the breakroom, when I said I had never read a word Kurt Vonnegut wrote.

Never again. And so it goes.

In Galápagos, when the world has ended a million years ago and our tour guide is a ghost, Vonnegut ties in all the strings to our biological lifeboat with his scathing intellect and dark black absurdities. “Lest anyone be moved to tears,” goes the chapter of the dog’s untimely death at the hands of six Kanka-bono girls, “Oh well— she wasn’t going to write Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony anyway.”

“I asked him if the black joke was original, and he said no, that he had heard it from his German grandfather, who had been an officer in charge of burying the dead on the Western Front during World War One. It was common for soldiers new to that sort of work to wax philosophical over this corpse or that one, into whose face he was about to shovel dirt, speculating about what he might have done if he hadn’t died so young. There were many cynical things a veteran might say to such a thoughtful recruit, and one of those was: ‘Don’t worry about it. He wasn’t going to write Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony anyway.’”

It’s something I like to think about, how the world won’t end when we end. More or less this small blue rock will go on spinning around the sun, outlasting us for at least a few million years. It’s kind of lovely picture, really. One of the few things it will be the poorer for, we can say with almost certainty, is not having Kurt Vonnegut there to say, “The thing was.”