Timequake

by Kurt Vonnegut Narrated by Arthur Bishop

Overview

From the beloved author of Slaughterhouse-Five an Cat's Cradle comes Kurt Vonnegut's Timequake--“Wry and trenchant...highly entertaining.”-The New York Times Book Review

According to Kurt Vonnegut's alter ego, the old science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, a global timequake will occur on February 13, 2001, at 2:27 p.m. It will be the moment when the universe suffers a crisis of conscience: Should it go on expanding indefinitely, or collapse and make another great big BANG? For its own cosmic reasons, it decides to back up a decade to 1991, giving the world a 10-year case of deja vu, making everybody and everything do exactly what they'd done during the past decade, for good or ill, a second time.

As a character in, and a brilliant chronicler of, this bizarre event, Kurt Vonnegut casts his wicked wit and his unique perspective on life as he lived it and observed it, for more than seventy years.

Editorial Reviews

Valerie Sayers

Highly entertaining. -- NY Times Book Review

New York Times Book Review

Wry and trenchant. . .highly entertaining.

Newsweek

His funniest book since Breakfast of Champions

Chicago Sun-Times

Irresistible reading.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Vonnegut is at his best.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Its publisher calls this Vonnegut's "first full-length work of fiction in seven years" (since the novel 'Hocus Pocus'), which seems like a polite way to avoid claiming it as a novel. It's certainly not that, nor is it, strictly speaking, a collection of stories. It is, rather, a good-natured and delightful ramble around the problem of not being able to get a book to work. Using his science-fictional alter ego Kilgore Trout, Vonnegut talks about a recalcitrant book of Trout's whose premise would have been that "a sudden glitch in the space-time continuum'' occurs, creating a 10-year hitch in time in which everyone is forced to live that period of their lives over again, every word and action exactly repeated, from 1991 until 2001, at which point their lives move forward once more. It is a nice conceit, and Vonnegut and Trout have some fun with it, all interwoven with anecdotes about the Vonnegut family, how it feels to be an aging author and suchlike. There are plenty of Vonnegut gems for the taking (he and William Styron agree at one point that only 17% of people in the world have lives worth living), but the effect of the book is more like a relaxed, jokey conversation than anything else. Call it a patchwork of brief, semi-fictional essays; no matter, Vonnegut is always good company.

Library Journal

Delayed over a year, Vonnegut's latest finally arrives, with alter ego Kilgore Trout facing millennial catastrophe.

Kirkus Reviews

Vonnegut's first "novel" in seven years (and 14th overall) might by an extremely generous extension of the term be labeled an unassuming metafiction.

Actually, it's unequal parts commonplace book, fragmentary autobiography, dystopian romance, and bemused meditation on our planet's presumable determination to destroy itself. The premise goes as follows: In the year 2001, "a sudden glitch in the space-time continuum, made everybody and everything do exactly what they'd been doing during the past decade . . . a second time": i.e., 2001 reverted to 1991, and "free will kicked in again" only after said decade had torturously re-run itself. One yearns to know what Thomas Berger might have made of this idea. Vonnegut, essentially, settles for employing it as an excuse to rummage through his own past and that of his alter-ego, the fictional science fiction writer Kilgore Trout. Accordingly, the novel about this "timequake" becomes a free-form farrago in which the author tenderly salutes and mourns his living and dead siblings, wives, and children; pays tribute to favorite books and writers; retells old jokes; reminisces about his experiences in WW II, and about his experiences also as a later respected public figure (visiting Nigeria after the Biafran War; giving a speech on the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima); and woolgathers—often cloyingly—about the fate of "humanism" in an age dominated by technology. The book severely tests a reader's patience when it's padded with random bits of semi-relevant information and needless explanations (the plot of 'The Scarlet Letter'; the full text of the 23rd Psalm). And yet, Vonnegut's fitful summaries of the life and writings of the Hunter Thompsonlike Kilgore Trout are often very funny (the story "The Sisters B-36," set on "the matriarchal planet Booboo," really ought to have been written).

So, as he himself might say, it goes. "We are here on earth to fart around" runs one of Vonnegut's more endearing pronouncements. Nobody does it better.

From the Publisher

Praise for Timequake

“[A] quirky mix of fiction and biography...This is the indispensable Vonnegut.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“Wry and trenchant...highly entertaining.”—The New York Times Book Review

“His funniest book since Breakfast of Champions...There are nuggets of Vonnegutian wisdom throughout.”—Newsweek

“Timequake is a novel by, and starring, Kurt Vonnegut...What Vonnegut does, which no one can do better, is give a big postmodern shrug...You've got to love him.”—The Washington Post Book World

“Humorous, sardonic...Timequake makes for irresistible reading that's loaded with more important truths than it lets on...Moralizing has never been funnier.”—Chicago Sun-Times

“Part autobiography, part meditation, part satire...Vonnegut is at his best.”—Atlanta Journal & Constitution

MAY 98 - AudioFile

A timequake is a rare phenomenon, a kind of decade-long déjà vu. In this fantasy-memoir-harangue, Vonnegut pens two versions of a novel about timequakes; in one he writes a long scene between himself and his fictional alter ego, Kilgore Trout. Paradoxes abound as the author speaks out on just about everything on his mind. Norman Dietz perfectly captures the codgerly, sardonic grouchiness that pervades the narrative. Further, his intelligence makes him able to play the underlying ideas and to embue them with unity; whereas a less mature narrator would falter and flail. His seasoned voice and flawless understanding of his text convey the impression that the author himself is speaking. This is a perfect coupling of writer and actor. Y.R. Winner of AUDIOFILE Earphones Award ©AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940172183126
Publisher:	Macmillan Audio
Publication date:	04/28/2015
Edition description:	Unabridged

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