Timequake

Rating:
Summary: Once again Vonnegut presents unique thoughts on the universe
Review: No other American author has so continuously introduced new ideas on how one should view the crazy happenings on this planet Earth or the planet Booboo for that matter. In a new form of "novel" incorporating direct autobiography, indirect personal observations through his alter ego, Kilgore Trout, and a series of storylines scattered with typical Vonnegut characters, the author looks at life from angles most of us have never reposed. The underlying tale of a ten-year repeat of the universe's history via a timequake forces the readers to think about all the little timequakes in our lives and the moments we would like to relive. A timequake requires one to relive it all with no changes. The author's reflections on his own family in small timequakes present a very human and appealing side of this important contibutor to our understanding of what life is all about. This was a very satisfying read for Vonnegut regulars. This should not be the first Vonnegut book for a new reader. Let us hope this is not Kurt Vonnegut's last novel as he proclaims. What a writer. Ting-a-ling!

Rating:
Summary: A Misunderstood Classic
Review: ...Upon it's release, "Timequake" was hailed as Vonnegut's final novel (and it may very well be). He had been writing it on and off for ten years, and after a series of rewrites and revisions, he admitted that the book ultimately failed. Therefore, the original sci-fi premise--the events surrounding a 'glitch' in time that causes people to relive episodes of their lives over and over again--becomes merely a sidelining plot, whereas Vonnegut's often pessimistic reflections on his life, career, family, and existence in general, becomes the main focus of this semi-autobiographical book.

So in addition to revisiting Vonnegut's fictional alter-ego, Kilgore Trout, we witness Vonnegut in his everyday life and his struggle to write a novel doomed to fail. The result is a classic collection of Vonnegut's combination of humor with heartbreak that has defined his written career of the past half-century.

For Vonnegut's many devoted readers, including myself, "Timequake" is a difficult book to read. We know it is a farewell to his fans. It is also an emotional read, since our hero is often critical of himself, and not in the lighthearted sense of his earlier novels. He is old, he is ill, he is bitter. When so many people consider him to be one of the greatest novelists America has produced, he seems to view himself as a failure...instead of ending his career with a crowning achievement, he chooses to quietly wave and step out the back door.

Nonetheless, Vonnegut's incomparable talent makes this an excellent book. However, one should not rate this book without first becoming familiar with his earlier work. Only then can it be appreciated as the ingenious conclusion to an illustrious career.

Rating:
Summary: Timequake: a great way to say goodbye
Review: Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut is a book placed in the years 2001 to 19991 and back to 2001 again, this will become clearer later on in the review. The world is about to suffer a timequake, the universe has not decided whether or not it wants to keep on expanding or shrivel up and die. The universe is zapped back ten years and then it decides to continue expanding, however it must go over the ten years that it zapped itself back from all over again. During the rerun as it is called in the book, everyone is forced to do everything all over again exactly as the did it before the rerun. The story follows Kurt Vonnegut's alter ego, author Kilgore Trout through his journey through the timequake.
Timequake is filled with the sarcastic humor that Kurt Vonnegut is known and loved for. Almost every chapter contains some sort of analogy or joke that will make you chuckle as you read across the page. Vonnegut's unconventional style of writing keeps you immensely interested in the book. He skips from subject to subject in every chapter, also every chapter seems to have its own moral and lesson as opposed to there being only one or two morals in the entire novel. His style of writing could even be described as him telling the reader of some of his and his characters past experiences, with no sort of chronological order, most of his thoughts are completely random, yet incredibly funny. One funny thing in the novel is how Vonnegut refers to World War One and World War Two as "humanities unsuccessful attempt to commit suicide." The rest of the book is packed with things as funny and even funnier from page one.
This novel is much more than the simple fiction story, as Vonnegut fans have learned to expect, but more of a journey through which you grow more and more thoughtful with every turn of the page. He sways your opinions and makes you consider sides of the story you never knew existed on subjects such as society, war, poverty, life, and love. He truly bedazzles readers time and time again. He introduces crazy theories, as he has done in many of his other novels, and thus keeps you thinking and interested. You can always discover something new or go into an idea even further every time you read the novel.
This novel is a gift to everyone who reads, it packs everything that you want from a book, humor, an deep thesis, drama, and is even more. It truly is a book that gets you thinking about things you never even thought you would think about and leaves you pondering his theories even after you have finished the text. This unfortunately is Kurt Vonnegut's final book, however even if this is true he has certainly gone out with a bang. I highly recommend this novel.

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.

Rating:
Summary: a wonderful farewell gift
Review: I first became a fan of Vonnegut in high school when a friend let me borrow Cat's Cradle. After completion, I voraciously read the entire Vonnegut catalog within the span of about 15 months. Thus when I saw on Amazon that his new and final book was soon to be released, I became ecstatic. The basic plot of TIMEQUAKE is irrelevant and takes a back seat to Kurt's desire and need to reminisce and give us advice based upon his 74 years on a planet filled with people destined for suicide. The aging Vonnegut's pessimism about the human condition is not ground-breaking material, yet the novel has an enjoyable and comfortable sense of familiarity to it. Kurt is similar to the stereotypical grandfather: "I remember back in the day...before TV, before WWII, before computers, before art and literature lost importance, etc... when life was so much simpler and better." At times Vonnegut's complaints seem like the petty ramblings of a bitter, cynical old man; but for the most part his common sense advice, no matter how simple, rings truthful and just might be the ideas needed to save the species. TIMEQUAKE is a pure pleasure to read, a truly wonderful farewell gift from an author who has meant so much to my literary and personal development.

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: 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: Declining powers
Review: Timequake is not one of Kurt Vonnegut's better books.

For serious fans of Mr. Vonnegut's work, the book's publication in 1997 felt like discovering a bit more of a great meal left in the kitchen after you thought it was all gone, a final taste of something wonderful. But upon a recent re-reading Timequake, I have realized that, objectively speaking, this is the product of a great writer in possession of declining powers, a volume that is predictable while puzzlingly swinging between memoir and fiction.

On the surface, the storyline is classic Vonnegut: there's a "time quake" that means that everyone in the world is forced to relive every second of every day between 1991 and 2001, but they are unable to change a moment of that unfortunate decade. Of course, he introduces himself and his alter ego Kilgore Trout into the story, and unusual situations abound.

There is nothing necessarily wrong with that, but it doesn't come off nearly as cleanly as similarly unusual storylines in Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse Five, and The Sirens of Titan do. In the end, when Timequake doesn't feel forced -- not a word I would use for any of Mr. Vonnegut's other novels -- it feels like the author is simply going through the motions.

There are bits and pieces of the story that revive the nostalgia that readers of Mr. Vonnegut's better books may be looking for. But for the uninitiated, there are better places to start.

Rating:
Summary: Not so Hot
Review: It has been my experience that when you are reading Vonnegut lit, you have either picked up a hit or a miss. In the case ofr Timequake, you've picked up one of his misses, I am a true fan of this zany author, but this time his self "heoroizing" and annoying jargon got to my last nerve. I finished the book for the purpose of not wanting to finish it later, but it wasn't the best time i ever spent. All reading is good reading and this had it laughs and abstrack story lines, but all in all it was the worste book of Vonnegut's I've read. For the record i have read nearly ten, so i have so opinion on this.

Rating:
Summary: Ting-a-ling!
Review: Ever since I picked up Slaughterhouse Five and Cat's Cradle last spring, I have been a fan of Vonnegut. I love his way of meandering through a text. Timequake, more than any other book I have read of his, seems to wander all over the place. As with his other novels, this book is founded upon a bizarre plot, but this time the plot seems to be present only to allow Vonnegut a platform for reminiscing.

I was kind of confused at the beginning of the book; I couldn't quite make out what was going on. When I stopped trying to analyze things and listen to what he was saying, though, I began to enjoy myself. I've found that most of his books start out absurdly funny, but then become quite touching. This book apparently will be his last, and it is fitting that the subject of the text touch on death. His epilogue made me smile sadly ...

Like other reviewers, I would not recommend that this be the first Vonnegut book you read. I've really enjoyed Slaughterhouse Five, Cat's Cradle, and Hocus Pocus (to name a few). If you are a Vonnegut fan, though, this is a fantastic book! His style is unlike any other. Just sit back and enjoy the ride!