An elaborately packaged foreword (know what you pay for)
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I bought this book because it was a hilarious premise, while it lay on the shelve, waiting for me to get time to start it, I started wondering how on earth Kurt could have delivered a story based on this premise. AS I began reading, I found out that he didn't: Basically, the whole story in the first chunk of the book reads like an extended foreword. This disappointment has led me to put it down again; but be aware of this before you start (& buy) and the book is actually a pleasant read. I'm now busy reading Asimov's Foundation. Don't get me wrong: Vonnegut is still one of my favourite authors, it's just a shame that not all of his works live up to my (admittedly quite high) expectations.
I gave only 3 stars because I expected a story in a book, and I didn't find one in here. (What I DID find was quite nice, so more than 1 star.)
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Great reflection on free will, but not a novel
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A timequake is one of those ideas of genius that cannot be turned into a novel. What good is a story which main thread is to repeat what happened 10 years ago? This is why Timequake is not a novel but, half autobiography half essay, a reflection on free will: how we use it and, mostly, how we don't.
Vonnegut throws at us many funny anecdotes and serious, thought-provoking and iconoclast reflections in his falsely casual style. For fans of Vonnegut, Timequake will be extremely funny and interesting but this is not the right book to discover this great writer. Try Slaughterhouse 5 instead.
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Timequake None
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When I first heard about this book, I have to say I was excited. I knew vaguely of Vonnegut as does everyone involved in literature and yet I'd read very little so when I finally came to stopping off at a bookshop this novel was definitely on my list.
This was in many ways a very good novel and I don't want to start by rubbishing its bad points so instead I'd like to say that it is very well executed, written in nice poignant prose, has some very important things to say on the nature of discovery and mankind and gives you a good insight into a man who has had an impressive body of work over the years. By the end of the book I couldn't help liking the old coot, his switching between playful silliness and frank talk of serious issues convincing me that this was a man I would have liked had I met him soon enough. The details of Vonnegut's life do give depth to a novel essentially devoid of any protagonists or real characters even.
Despite all of this I can't help feeling a little cheated by this novel. As an excercise in post-modernism and cultural discussion, it's delightful. However this isn't the book I bought, isn't even close to what the blurb describes. Perhaps if it was better labelled I may have come out of the other end feeling less disappointed.
Fundamentally, Timequake is such as solid concept for a novel and automatically suggests so many ideas for a good realist narrative that what we have here really feels like a shadow of something bigger. Although Vonnegut tells us that he wasn't happy with Timequake One and that this is his redraft, there is very little evidence of the original story in the finished work. The Timequake itself is almost entirely brushed over, being covered almost solely in a 30 page section about how Kilgore Trout behaves after free will resumes. Given the fact that the novel is constantly struggling with the ideas of the modern age and destiny vs. free will, couldn't we have just a little more colour in these sections?
I was expecting from all I'd heard about this novel that I'd get a post-modern sci-fi novel placed firmly in a realist narrative and yet I got nothing of the sort. The fictional characters of the text were far less rounded than those that were real, an example being Vonnegut's alter-ego Trout, who seemed to be a rough stab toward an eccentric that doesn't really deserve the limelight in such a story. His fictional novels were all good concepts but Kilgore himself expresses no more personality than any of the novel's other fictional characters. On the whole, the 'story' was a little too easy.
As I have already said, Vonnegut's voice is insightful and intelligent and yet I feel somewhere a trick was missed in this novel. I'd have preferred to read it as two seperate pieces, one composed of the small and random 'real life' stories that Vonnegut tells and the other a narrative based piece of postmodernism that sticks to its guns. In addition, I wonder if Trout really needed one last outing.
For such a beautifully modern idea, arriving in a time when so much of our lives are relived material, this novel falls a little short. It's a good read and worth a look if you want to see how to break the rules and do it well but it wasn't the book I had wanted. Maybe a little more timequake'd do it good.
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Ting-a-Ling
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It's hard to give this book a star rating. I enjoyed it, it was funny at times, poignant at others. It had a melancholy edge to it, yet had Vonnegut's trademark bizareness. A few chapters in, you realise that there isn't going to be much of a narrative. There is a story of sorts that is a central point around which the book hangs, but for the most part the premise is a way for Vonnegut to write about his life and the world as he knows it. Perhaps this is his way of writing a kind of autobiography. It reminded me of Douglas Coupland's Life After God, but good and less angsty. It's a very meditative book, it ambles around without much of a direction, but that's ok, because it's filled with brilliant pieces of wisdom. "Listen: we are here on earth to fart around, and don't let anyone tell you different". This is not a good book for Vonnegut newcomers. While I enjoyed it, it made me want to immediately go and re-read Breakfast of Champions, which I then realised was a much better book. I recommend readers start there and come to this one later. This is a good book and by most other author's standards might be approaching a masterpiece, but for Vonnegut it's more like a quiet coda to his more accomplished works.
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Brings back memories
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I remember the first Vonnegut I ever read: Cat's Cradle, read in 8 hours on a flight from London to Dallas when I was 14. It was unlike anything I had ever read before or have read since, Vonnegut's other novels included. But this book brought back the excitement of that first discovery. Timequake is, as far as I am concerned, his best novel. Touching, funny, surreal, quizzical, elegiac, dismissive, pointless, asinine, glorious, weird, wonderful. I've run out of adjectives. Let's hope he can think of some more before he snuffs it. Incidentally, if you're worried Kurt will pop his clogs and you'll have nothing to read, may I highly recommend Bo Fowler who seems to be making a brave stab at taking over his mantle.
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