Book Review: 'Timequake'

For all the Vonnegut fans out there, 'Timequake' is a must read! Fresh, original and satiric! More Vonnegut than 'Breakfast of Champions.' It's his most autobiographical pieces of literature, infusing fiction with non-fiction.

The premise is simple enough: the universe has experienced a colossal loss of self esteem and can't see any reason to continually expand at an exponential rate. The result? A 10 year hiccup in the space-time continuum called a Timequake. Everybody must relive the last 10 years of their life knowing exactly how things will end, and never exercise free will.

So every character faces this dilemma, and as bizarre as their predicament is, it's not nearly as bizarre as the characters themselves. My favorite, Kilgore Trout. KILGORE TROUT! What a fantastical name! Trout is Vonnegut's alter-ego: he's a homeless writer who is often mistaken as a bag-lady because he shaves, and is never seen without the baby blanket he sports as a shawl. Then Vonnegut does what only Vonnegut can do, he infuses reality with fantasy, and meets Kilgore Trout at a clambake on the beach in 2001.

Much of the story is told through Trout's perspective and the tales he's written. Trout explains people have lived through timequakes before the universe halted.

'Trout called them "artificial timequakes." He said, "Before Earthlings knew there were such things as timequakes in Nature, they invented them." And it's true. Actors know everything they are going to say and do, and how everything is going to come out in the end, for good or ill, when the curtain goes up on Act One, Scene One. Yet they have no choice but to behave as though the future were a mystery.'

Vonnegut writes about a family zapped into the timequake, who's forced to see their father come back to life, only to inevitably commit suicide once again, but he balances tragedy by reminding us of the small pleasures of life, the idiosyncrasies we easily overlook. For example, this passage about his uncle, Alex Vonnegut:

'He never had a kid, and never owned a gun. He owned a lot of books, though, and kept buying new ones, and giving me those he thought were particularly well done. It was an ordeal for him to find this book or that one, so he could read some particularly magical passage aloud to me. Here's why: His wife, Aunt Raye, who was said to be artistic, arranged his library according to the size and color of the volumes, and sairstep style.

So he might say of a colection of essays by his hero H. L. Mencken, "I think it was green, and about this high.'' '

This book is unlike any I've ever read. I can't say for sure if there's a villain in the story, perhaps it's the timequake itself, and the plot is difficult to spot, but there is the familiar character development and an arch of learning/understanding. Some of the tales are wrenching, some reaffirming, and throughout it all is Vonnegut's witty and inane observations. Like my review of 'The Brothers K,' I've decided to highlight some that don't give away much of the plot:

'Nothing wrecks any kind of love more effectively than the discovery that your previously acceptable behavior has become ridiculous.'

'In public lectures, I myself often say, "If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don't have nerve enough to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts." '

'About all I know for certain is that devout Muslims do not believe in Santa Claus.'

'To him, plagiarism was what Trout would have called a mopery, "indecent exposure in the presence of a blind person of the same sex." '

'Some assertions by writers, however, are simply too preposterous to be believed... Who, for example, could believe Kilgore Trout when he wrote... "There is a planet in the Solar System where the people are so stupid they didn't catch on for a million years that there was another half to their planet. They didn't figure that out until five hundred years ago! Only five hundred years ago! And yet they are now calling themselves Homo sapiens. Dumb? You want to talk about dumb? The people in one of the halves were so dumb, they didn't have an alphabet! They hadn't invented the wheel yet!" Give us a break, Mr. Trout.'

'All male writers, incidentally, no matter how broke or otherwise objectionable, have pretty wives. Somebody should look into this.'

'Tellers of stories with ink on paper, not that they matter anymore, have been either swoopers or bashers. Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn't work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they're done, they're done.

I'm a basher. Most men are bashers, and most women are swoopers. Again: Somebody should look into this.

...Bashers, while ostensibly making sentence after sentence as efficient as possible, may actually be breaking down seeming doors and fences, cutting their ways through seeming barbed-wire entanglements, under fire and in an atmosphere of mustard gas, in search of answers to these eternal questions: "What the heck should we be doing? What in heck is really going on?" '

'My hero George Bernard Shaw, socialist, and shrewd and funny playwright... said that, having lived as long as he had, he was at last sufficiently wise to serve as a reasonably competent office boy. That's how I feel.

When the City of London wanted to give Shaw its Order of Merit, he thanked them for it, but said he had already given it to himself.'

'I always had trouble ending short stories in ways that would satisfy a general public. In real life... people don't change, don't learn anything from their mistakes, and don't apologize. In a short story they have to do at least two out of three of those things...'

'I define a saint as a person who behaves decently in an indecent society.'

'I am too lazy to chase down the exact quotation, but the British astronomer Fred Hoyle said something to this effect: That believing in Darwin's theoretical mechanisms of evolution was like believe tat a hurrican could blow through a junkyard and build a Boeing 747.

No mater what is doing the creating, I have to say that the giraffe and the rhinoceros are ridiculous.'

'Should the nation's wealth be redistributed? It has been and continues to be redistributed to a few people in a manner strikingly unhelpful.'

'Let me note that Kilgore Trout and I have never used semicolons. They don't do anything, don't suggest anything. They are transvestite hermaphrodites.'

'... Here are two more [amendments] little enough to expect from life, one would think, like the Bill of Rights:

Article XXX: Every person, upon reaching a statutory age of puberty, shall be declared an adult in a solemn public ritual, during which he or she must welcome his or her new responsibilities in the community, and their attendant dignities.

Article XXXI: Every effort shall be made to make every person feel that he or she will be sorely missed when he or she is gone.

Such essential elements in an ideal diet for a human spirit, of course, can be provided convincingly only by extended families.'

'Timequake' was a terrific read! It reminds readers to look at life at all angles and pay extra special attention to the more ludicrous moments that ordinarily go by unremarked. This book has changed my life in one very real and quantifiable way, I will never again use a semi-colon as long as I live! And so, I tip my hat to you Mr. Kurt Vonnegut. With that, I'll leave with my favorite quote from this book:

'... we shouldn't be seeking harrowing challenges, but rather tasks we find natural and interesting, tasks we were apparently born to perform.'

**If this book was rated, it would be rated R for strong language and adult content.