Breakfast of Champions: A Novel (Paperback)

by Kurt Vonnegut (Author) "THIS IS A TALE of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast..." (more)
Key Phrases: magic fingers, bad chemicals, automobile agency, Kilgore Trout, Midland City, Dwayne Hoover (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
"We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane." So reads the tombstone of downtrodden writer Kilgore Trout, but we have no doubt who's really talking: his alter ego Kurt Vonnegut. Health versus sickness, humanity versus inhumanity--both sets of ideas bounce through this challenging and funny book. As with the rest of Vonnegut's pure fantasy, it lacks the shimmering, fact-fueled rage that illuminates Slaughterhouse-Five. At the same time, that makes this book perhaps more enjoyable to read.

Breakfast of Champions is a slippery, lucid, bleakly humorous jaunt through (sick? inhumane?) America circa 1973, with Vonnegut acting as our Virgil-like companion. The book follows its main character, auto-dealing solid-citizen Dwayne Hoover, down into madness, a condition brought on by the work of the aforementioned Kilgore Trout. As Dwayne cracks, then crumbles, Breakfast of Champions coolly shows the effects his dementia has on the web of characters surrounding him. It's not much of a plot, but it's enough for Vonnegut to air unique opinions on America, sex, war, love, and all of his other pet topics--you know, the only ones that really count. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review
"It's marvelous...he wheels out all the complaints about America and makes them seem fresh, funny, outrageous, hateful and lovable."
--The New York Times

"Vonnegut is George Orwell, Dr. Caligari and Flash Gordon compounded into one writer....A zany but moral mad scientist."
--Time

"Free-wheeling, wild and great....Uniquely Vonnegut."
--Publishers Weekly -- Review

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Product Details

• Paperback: 303 pages
• Publisher: Dial Press Trade Paperback; First Edition edition (May 11, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385334206
• ISBN-13: 978-0385334204
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (257 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,946 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

74 of 80 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A "Fabulously Well-To-Do" Book!, April 16, 2004

By	Michael Crane (Orland Park, IL USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

You know that anything goes once you pick up a work by the zany and terrific Kurt Vonnegut. The man knows how to dish up satire like none other. He'll spew out his complaints about the government, the world, people, etc., and instead of making it sound like a bunch of inane ranting he uses all of that to create a crazy world filled with outrageous characters and situations. "Breakfast of Champions" is an off-the-wall novel that is about 300 pages of pure hilarity and comedic chaos. Some of the most outrageous characters lie within this masterpiece.

Listen: This story revolves mainly around two characters. There's Kilgore Trout who is an aging and bitter sci-fi writer that nobody has ever heard of (except for one person). His stories have only appeared in very adult magazines. So naturally, he has "doodley-squat" to show for it. The other person that this story is about is a car dealer by the name of Dwayne Hoover, a man that everyone in town considers a "fabulously well-to-do" person. Dwayne is losing his mind and is ever so gracefully slipping into the cozy and wonderful world of insanity. What pushes him over the edge will take place when the two meet and Hoover takes one of Trout's literary works as reality. The results are unforgettable and hilariously disturbing in this dark and offbeat tale of the flawed human beings who are destroying Mother Earth.

This amazingly written book is completely ADDICTING. I easily finished it within a week. Once you start you do not want to stop reading until you have finished. Very rarely does a book have the power to make me laugh aloud so frequently and carelessly. People must've thought I was on something when they saw me laugh so uncontrollably while reading this in public. Vonnegut's commentary as the overall storyteller provides us with such an enriching voice that really is the star of the story. He has also created some of the most memorable and certifiably insane characters ever to be witnessed by the world of fiction. Vonnegut cleverly attacks everything that is wrong in society and he does it in such a funny and witty way. His illustrations also add a lot to the story as well.

Reading a book like "Breakfast of Champions" reminds me why I want to be a writer. It also reminds me why we read in the first place. It is definitely a classic that stands on its own and will never EVER be duplicated. If you're looking for a "fabulously well-to-do" satirist that will never conform to the norm, Kurt Vonnegut is your man. If you have not read this book yet, I highly encourage you to check it out a.s.a.p.! It may not be your ordinary novel, but that's more the reason to read it, now isn't it? A definite new favorite that I will read again and again. -Michael Crane

41 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Weird and wonderful: pure Vonnegut, March 28, 2002

By	Michael J. Mazza (Pittsburgh, PA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)

Kurt Vonnegut's novel "Breakfast of Champions" follows the odyssey of oddball science fiction writer Kilgore Trout from his melancholy childhood in Bermuda, to the sleazy underside of New York City, and eventually to a fateful encounter with car dealer Wayne Hoover, a man "on the brink of going insane." Within this framework Vonnegut weaves an amazing satiric tapestry that looks at racism, mental illness, environmental crises, the nature and function of art, and many other issues. The book is filled with Vonnegut's own quirky illustrations.

"Breakfast" is harsh, even cruel, but also tender and compassionate; it's laugh-out-loud funny, yet haunting and tragic. It's also a reality-warping metaphysical triumph; Vonnegut breaks down the barriers between reality and fiction, and invites the reader into the very process of the novel's creation. He creates a more intimate bond between author, reader, and fictional character than any other writer I can think of.

Vonnegut presents some of American literature's most memorable characters in "Breakfast." But my favorite is undoubtedly Trout. Throughout the book we also get glimpses of Trout's own voluminous body of work, and meet some of his bizarre sci-fi characters. The book as a whole is also enriched by Vonnegut's unique style; he writes as if for an extraterrestrial audience to whom humanity is utterly alien.

"Breakfast" is a profane, naughty, yet profoundly spiritual book. Filled with strange and vivid details, it's an oddly comforting modern-day testament for our fractured world. Thanks, Kurt.

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Perfect reading for the trying times in life, April 12, 2007

By	K. Rickson "Music is Life!" (SF Bay Area/Barbary Coast, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I learned tonight of Kurt Vonnegut's passing, at age 84. I immediately thought of this book, Breakfast of Champions, as the quintessential Vonnegut novel -- not just for what is on the page, but moreso for what it meant to me, especially when I read it for the first time so many years ago.

It was 1979, just six years after he wrote Breakfast, and I was 15, a callow and precocious and dependable and rebellious lad, all at once in those crazy mid-adolescent years. And no one's words spoke quite as eloquently or directly to my fevered brain as did this aging, iconoclastic, sublimely inventive and imaginative author. He was only two years older than my father, and yet light years different in terms of his world view and humor. And to me, this out-of-left-field novel, about banal, blase and boring car salesman Dwayne Hooper and his sudden awakening and transformation into someone so much more complex, is brilliant absudist humor.

I think even the oft-derided cartoon drawings Vonnegut peppers his writings with -- and he uses them liberally throughout Breakfast -- work to perfection here. Vonnegut's drawings deftly set the tone and constantly remind the reader that this is not the overstuffed, pretentious stuff of Mailer or Vidal or any of Vonnegut's other contemporaries.

Re-reading Breakfast a few years ago, I couldn't help but think that an adolescent of today might consider the style almost quaint, considering how much snark and absurdist humor has permeated popular culture over the last 20 or 30 years. To some, I guess the discerning minority, it would be as powerful today as it was more than 30 years ago. There is humor that makes you laugh, and then there are works that also make you think and help expand your horizons to boot. To me, Breakfast of Champions is that kind of brilliance.

I found it deliciously ironic that it was my father's copy of Breakfast that I had swiped all those many years ago, a copy he never opened as far as I know, but a copy that still sits in my library to this day. I loved my father then as I do now, but at age 15 was discovering (as all boys do) that he was not the perfect hero I imagined when I was 6 or 7. Reading Vonnegut's brilliant, out-there work helped put in stark relief that there were so many different ideas and experiences and universes than the suburbia in which I'd grown up. And that was fine by me. Farewell, Kurt, and thanks for sharing your brilliance; I for one will miss it.