Kurt Vonnegut

Timequake

‘Timequake is sweet, wild and cock-eyed... Vonnegut has always had a true comic ear... A beautifully fastidious writer, utterly original’ - Guardian According to science-fiction writer Kilgore Trout, a global timequake will occur in New York City on 13th February 2001. It is the moment when the universe suffers a crisis of conscience. Should it expand or make a great big bang? It decides to wind the clock back a decade to 1991, making everyone in the world endure ten years of deja-vu and a total loss of free will – not to mention the torture of reliving every nanosecond of one of the tawdiest and most hollow decades. With his trademark wicked wit, Vonnegut addresses memory, suicide, the Great Depression, the loss of American eloquence, and the obsolescent thrill of reading books.

Edward Steel

Patrick Book

This reads less like a final novel and more like an elegy for his own talent, in the sense that he has realized that he can’t “bash” out his last novel properly. By stewing it with a biography (seems like a 30/70 mix) he’s created something that can’t totally satisfy either form. But the mixture is as intriguing as it is largely beguiling (from a plot standpoint at least), and he certainly still has a lot of interesting ideas and bon mots to deliver. I appreciate it on re-read more than I did the first time, especially as I’m reading my way chronologically through his entire works. 

3.5*!

Branden Harris

** spoiler alert **
           Not to be mistaken with Timequake 1.

On February 13th, 2001, according to Vonnegut, the universe will tire momentarily of expanding forever. What's the point? Maybe it would be more fun to shrink for a change, and have a reunion of all the stuff back where it began. Then it could make a great big BANG again. It will shrink back to February 17th, 1991, but will then decide that expansion is the way to go, after all. As time marches on once more to 2001, though, Vonnegut and Trout and everybody else and everything else will have to do exactly what they did the first time through the decade, for good or ill: marry the wrong person, bet on the wrong horse. Whatever! Ten years of deja vu all over again! At least deja vu doesn't cause physical injury and property damage.

Daryl Houston

Didn't really do it for me, though there are funny bits and good bits.

According to Vonnegut`s alter ego, science-fiction writer Kilgore Trout a global timequake will occur in New York City on 13 february 2001. It is the moment when the universe suffers a crisis of conscience. Should it expand or make a great big bang? It decides to back up a decade to 1991, making everyone in the world endure ten years of deja vu and a total loss of free will-not to mention reliving every nanosecond of one of the tawdiest and most hollow decades. In 1996, dead centre of the `re-run' Vonnegut is wrestling again with Time-quake 1, a book he couldn`t write the first time and won`t be able to now. As he struggles, he addresses, with his trademark wicked wit, the realationship between memory and deja vu, humanism, suicide, the Great Depression and World War 11 as the last generated character builders, the loss of American eloquence, the obsolescent thrill of reading books, and what `extended family' really means.

Brandon Lee

I actually gave up 70% of the way in because it stopped being enjoyable and Kilgore Trout is an awful name I don't have the time to indulge.

Timequake

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