Timequake
Reviews
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*!
** spoiler alert ** Not to be mistaken with Timequake 1.
Didn't really do it for me, though there are funny bits and good bits.
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.
Highlights
What a language.
It is the source of all true art and science.”
Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different!
Many people fail because their brains, their three-and-a-half-pound blood-soaked sponges, their dogs’ breakfasts, don’t work well enough. The cause of a failure can be as simple as that. Some people, try as they may, can’t cut the mustard! That’s that!
I am eternally grateful to him, and indirectly to what Harvard used to be, I suppose, for my knack of finding in great books, some of them very funny books, reason enough to feel honored to be alive, no matter what else may be going on.
Uncle Alex Vonnegut, who said we should exclaim out loud whenever we were accidentally happy, was considered a fool by his wife, Aunt Raye.
“Pictures are famous for their humanness, and not for their pictureness.”
‘I can’t fix my country or my state or my city, or even my marriage. But by golly, I can make this square of canvas, or this eight-and-a-half-by-eleven piece of paper, or this lump of clay, or these twelve bars of music, exactly what they ought to be!’”
“While there is a lower class I am in it, while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
the Vietnam War, the only war we ever lost,
The Bible may be the Greatest Story Ever Told, but the most popular story you can ever tell is about a good-looking couple having a really swell time copulating outside wedlock, and having to quit for one reason or another while doing it is still a novelty.”
I see no need up in the sky for more torture chambers and Bingo games.