Timequake

Rating:
Summary: Gutsy and Different: One of my favorite Vonnegut titles
Review: Timequake is... different. You won't find another story out there that is constructed like this one. Why do I give it 5 stars? Because that takes guts, but mostly because vonnegut pulls it off. It's a very difficult thing to change the underlying form of storytelling... most readers don't like it. They get caught up in the presentation of the story and forget to pay attention to what's happening.

Well, Timequake is non-linear and wild. It is chaotic, but not in the sense of being poorly written. It's chaotic in the same way that a handful of diamonds thrown into a salad mixer would be chaotic; fascinating, somewhat worrisome, and in an odd way brilliant.

I would recommend Timequake to Vonnegut fans, certainly, but also to any serious reader or writer of fiction. Use it as a lesson in thinking outside of the norm. There's a lot to be learned from Timequake.

Rating:
Summary: Entertaining but Forgettable
Review: TimeQuake seems like Kurt Vonnegut's farewell to his readers. It is not a proper novel at all, but a mish-mash of an idea for a novel, various short stories by his alter-ego, Kilgore Trout, and recollections of Vonnegut's extended family. I listened to the audio version of this book on a long car trip, which was perfect, because there was no long plot to get lost in, merely a series of amusing anecdotes.

Rating:
Summary: Vonnegut does Postmodernism
Review: Vonnegut complains in this novel about how television and movies have drawn away potential readers of novels. Maybe that explains why the book is filled with hackneyed phrases ("Get this...", "The thing is..") and unfunny R rated humor and why phrases like Kilgore Trout's "The squeaky wheel gets the oil" is treated as if it were a clever phrase that he invented. We readers are such dolts after all that we would not appreciate an attempt at anything literary.

In his deconstruction Vonnegut mixes biographical information with a novel within a novel about the timequake in the title, in which everyone is forced to relive the last ten years of their lives. In a monumenally lame attempt to make this interesting people experience the timequake on two levels. They get to do and feel everything that happened previously and they get to watch themselves doing it. For me this requires an impossible act of disbelief suspension. You cannot be a participant and a spectator at the same time.

What keeps this book from being a complete disaster is the biographical information it provides and the skill used in weaving back and forth between fiction and reality. I would recommend this book to diehard Vonnegut fans, but it is not one of his better works.

Rating:
Summary: Vonnegut is back!
Review: Vonnegut is back! Timequake reflects the wacky, whimsical improbabilities of Cat's Cradle and the temporal vertigo of Slaughterhouse Five. Put another way.....some of the mud sits up, and then it has to sit up again!! Jimmy Buffet sings,"...if we couldn't laugh, we'd all go insane." Mr. Vonnegut portrays the ludicrous aspects of our existence by randomly rambling through a series of personal recollections, old jokes, apocryphal vignettes, and trashed (literally) short stories from Kilgore Trout - all the while protecting our sanity with droll, incisive humor. The author states in the beginning of the book that "a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit." Mr. Vonnegut makes us appreciate being alive while his literary darts consistently hit the bullseye of life's incongruities? Why? Call it 'misery loves company'; we realize we're not alone in recognizing the lunacy, and this gives us hope. Read this book and live. Read it slowly and carefully. Then, when the real timequake hits, you'll have the unique pleasure of experiencing the whole thing a second time.