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64 of 65 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Novelist Emeritus, November 18, 2005
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.
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27 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Misunderstood Classic, October 13, 2002
...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.
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17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
If you are a fan of Vonnegut's ideas, you'll enjoy this., January 26, 1998
If you are looking for a plot, rising action or deep characters, don't read this. For those of us who have been Vonnegut fans, it reads like a Bible of his ideas. The best parts of a good number of his novels are the prologues. This book is a 195 page prologue, with about 10 pages of fiction. I had the opportunity to read Timequake back in July, (about three months before its offical release date) and I was thrilled when I reached the final page. Many of his devoted readers find his humanistic ideas to be the best stuff he writes. This book holds more of that than any other he has written. His ideas on his own age and demise as a writer add a ton to this beautiful farewell to the philosophy of Kurt Vonnegut. If you are unfamilar with him, and looking for a great book to start on, go back to Slaughterhouse-Five, Sirens of Titan or Cat's Cradle. If you are familiar with his stuff, this book simply serves as a great companion piece to his other books.
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