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.
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