Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut

Timequake

by Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut has often pointed out the ridiculous ways our society has conducted itself. Now, as both a character in and a chronicler of a bizarre event at the millennium, Vonnegut manages to make some sense of life as he's lived it - and observed it - for more than seventy years. According to Vonnegut's alter ego, science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, a global timequake will occur in New York City on February 13, 2001. It is the moment when the universe suffers a crisis of conscience. Should it expand or make a great big bang? It decides to back up a decade to 1991, making everyone in the world endure ten years of deja-vu and a total loss of free will - not to mention reliving every nanosecond of one of the tawdriest and most hollow decades. In 1996, dead centre of the 'rerun', Vonnegut is wrestling again with Timequake I, a book he couldn't write the first time and won't be able to now.
As he struggles, he addrresses, with his trademark wicked wit, the relationship between memory and deja-vu, humanism, suicide, the Great Depression and World War Two as the last generational character builders, the loss of American eloquence, the obsolescent thrill of reading books, and what 'extended family' really means.

Reviewed by mary on

3 of 5 stars

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As a novel, Kurt Vonnegut's Timequake registers pretty low on the incredible Vonnegut scale. But then, it's not really a novel. It's the pieces of a novel that neverwas. As he explains in a prologue, Vonnegut found himself in early 1996 ''the creator of a novel which did not work, which had no point.... Let us think of it as Timequake One. And let us think of this one, a stew made from its best parts mixed with thoughts and experiences during the past seven months or so, as Timequake Two.''

.At its best, Timequake is still vintage Vonnegut, tough and unsparing in its rough humor

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  • Started reading
  • 1 June, 2014: Finished reading
  • 1 June, 2014: Reviewed