Timequake [Hardcover]

Kurt Vonnegut (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 22, 1997

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.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Think of Timequake, Kurt Vonnegut's 19th and last novel (or so he says), as a victory lap. It's a confident final trot 'round the track by one of the greats of postwar American literature. After 40 years of practice, Vonnegut's got his schtick down cold, and it's a pleasure--if a slightly tame one--to watch him go through his paces one more time.

Timequake's a mongrel; it is half novel, half memoir, the project of a decade's worth of writer's block, a book "that didn't want to be written." The premise is standard-issue Vonnegut: "...a timequake, a sudden glitch in the space-time continuum, made everybody and everything do exactly what they'd done during past decades, for good or ill, a second time..." Simultaneously, the author's favorite tricks are on display--frequent visits with the shopworn science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, a Hitchcockian appearance by the author at the book's end, and frequent authorial opining on love, war, and society. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Delayed over a year, Vonnegut's latest finally arrives, with alter ego Kilgore Trout facing millennial catastrophe.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 1 pages
• Publisher: Putnam Adult; Limited edition (September 22, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0399138986
• ISBN-13: 978-0399138980
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (198 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,159,409 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922. He studied at the universities of Chicago and Tennessee and later began to write short stories for magazines. His first novel, Player Piano, was published in 1951 and since then he has written many novels, among them: The Sirens of Titan (1959), Mother Night (1961), Cat's Cradle (1963), God Bless You Mr Rosewater (1964), Welcome to the Monkey House; a collection of short stories (1968), Breakfast of Champions (1973), Slapstick, or Lonesome No More (1976), Jailbird (1979), Deadeye Dick (1982), Galapagos (1985), Bluebeard (1988) and Hocus Pocus (1990). During the Second World War he was held prisoner in Germany and was present at the bombing of Dresden, an experience which provided the setting for his most famous work to date, Slaughterhouse Five (1969). He has also published a volume of autobiography entitled Palm Sunday (1981) and a collection of essays and speeches, Fates Worse Than Death (1991).

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

82 of 83 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Novelist Emeritus, November 18, 2005

By 

My Uncle Stu (Atlanta) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Timequake (Mass Market Paperback)

Anyone who has had enough education has likely run into the phenomenon of the elderly professor, someone widely known to have been a genius, revolutionary in his time, who is no longer quite on their game. Usually, these people are fascinating and worth listening to because of what they've accomplished and been part of, but they aren't teaching anything new. You listen, but you listen more with polite deference than with interest. You laugh at the jokes but it is that respectful, polite laughter. You recognize that the delivery is a little soft.

I love Kurt Vonnegut. I have read almost everything he has written. Time Quake is worth reading, but is not the book to pick up if you aren't a huge fan already and if you haven't exhausted all his earlier works. He tells us in the introduction that he began to write a novel but it wasn't working out, so he jumbled it around and mixed it in with autobiographical details. This is not that much different from what he has always done, but at this point, as novelist emeritus, he can get away with doing this in a cruder fashion, lighter reading, low on nuance.

Just as Mozart wrote the same symphony 40 different times, Vonnegut has written the same semi-autobiographic, semi-sci-fi novel 19 times. This isn't a criticism. In both cases, Mozart and Vonnegut, you know what you are getting, it's great, well worth it, and you go back for more knowing it will be very much more of the same. The message is always there in Vonnegut: Free will is largely an illusion, life is a meaningless and often cruel series of stochastic events, but that everything connects through the chaos of chance. But once the cruelty and meaninglessness of the universe is accepted, one can also appreciate remarkable wonder and joy beneath the surface.

So buy and read this book if you are a big fan, but this is not the book to buy if you are just getting introduced to Vonnegut's writings. For starter Vonnegut, I know people would say Slaughterhouse-Five but I'm partial to Cat's Cradle, Deadeye Dick, and Slastick for novels, Palm Sunday for essays, and Welcome to the Monkey House for short stories.

30 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Misunderstood Classic, October 13, 2002

By 

Caesar - See all my reviews

This review is from: Timequake (Mass Market Paperback)

...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.

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Watching the master make his rounds, July 13, 2002

By 

Michael Battaglia - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Timequake (Paperback)

Vonnegut's novels were never tightly plotted or dizzlingly complex, and ever since The Sirens of Titans there's been less and less plot. But what we've gotten is more and more Vonnegut, which has turned out to be a good thing. His latest and (he says) his last novel turns out to be a hodgepodge of random musings, Vonnegut family history lessons, irrelevant asides and once in a while something that touches on a story. And somehow it works. The premise is that Vonnegut was trying to write a novel about everyone in the world being thrown back ten years and then being forced to relive those ten years. After it's over and time runs normally again, everyone is so used to not having free will that they don't know what to do. But that idea didn't take off and so we have this. Toeing the line between fact and fiction (among the best is the meeting between Vonnegut and longtime alter ego Kilgore Trout), this novel is more about Vonnegut than any other novel previously. He talks about life in general, speaks bluntly and warmly of his family, both living and dead, all in his easily read style, which makes pages fly past as you read but somehow they still manage to stick in your head. Yeah, it's not the innovation of Slaughterhouse-Five and the cutting cynicism of the earlier novels has been replaced by a sort of contented cynicism, as if his bitterness has settled on him like a comfortable old skin. There's nothing new here that you couldn't find in his other novels (all of which are highly recommended), even the structure is reminiscent of Breakfast of Champions, but the presentation is what counts here and everything comes across so effortlessly that it's a joy just to watch him put the novel together, even when chapters race past that are really only barely connected strings of random thoughts. More importantly it made me laugh outloud in more than a few spots, made me think in others and in some places was actually genuinely touching, something that's been missing in some of his latter day novels. Overall it's a fine extension of his work and while not his best, it's a great way to get acquainted or reacquainted with an author who's done some of the finest fiction of the last fifty years. If you're just getting to know Vonnegut, there's plenty more where this came from, and if you're coming from a long time back, you'll find plenty here that's familiar, but just as rewarding.