Product Description

here's been a timequake. And everyone--even you--must live the decade between February 17, 1991 and February 17, 2001 over again. The trick is that we all have to do exactly the same things as we did the first time--minute by minute, hour by hour, year by year, betting on the wrong horse again, marrying the wrong person again. Why? You'll have to ask the old science fiction writer, Kilgore Trout. This was all his idea.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1723177 in Books
• Published on: 1997
• Binding: Paperback
• 219 pages

Customer Reviews

Coda
With "Timequake", Vonnegut's final novel, he is clearly looking backward. When the universe stops expanding, everyone on the planet is forced to relive the last ten years of their life exactly as it had been before. Although this clearly ties in with Vonnegut's common theme of fate and predestination, the loose plot of the novel is mostly an excuse for Vonnegut to reminiscence.

You could almost call "Timequake" a memoir, albeit a highly unconventional one. Vonnegut includes both himself, aging famous author and family man, and his literary doppelganger Kilgore Trout, aging obscure author and vagabond, in this book. Together, perhaps, they both form the yin and yang to his psyche.

Vonnegut has a lot to say about a lot of things. And instead of hiding his opinions behind satire or science fiction, he mostly just comes out with it. He talks about family, politics, the sexes, art, fatherhood, work, money, class and all of life's other big topics in a clever, straightforward and thoughtful way. He tries hard to remain humble and resist the urge to preach. But he can't help exposing himself as a sensitive, moral humanist.

A master's hand
TIMEQUAKE is Vonnegut's most explicitly autobiographical novel. More precisely, for fifty years he has blurred the line between his own life, that of his alter-ego Kilgore Trout, and his fiction: in TIMEQUAKE he finally steps out of our world and into another of his own device. He may well have "said it all before," but he has never said it more eloquently. This is anti-fiction at its best. Plot? The Universe experiences a loss of personal esteem on February 13, 2001 and decides to quit explanding. Everything shrinks back to February 17, 1991, when the Universe decides expansion was more interesting and reverses once again. Therefore everyone re-lives the decade, completely aware that it is real-life deja vu, and completely helpless to change anything. The fun begins when the re-run ends and people suddenly confront free will again after ten years on autopilot. Whoopingly funny black humor leads us once more through Vonneguts very dark view of human life -- his certainty that everything will end badly -- and yet, as ever, I emerged from his work feeling hopeful. Nothing can possibly be worse than the Garden of Eden, the World Wars, or painful terminal diseases which strike at meaningless random. I find I am "beneficially excited by minimal stimuli, such as idiosyncratic arrangements in horizontal lines of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numbers, and eight or so punctuation marks." Thus he describes his life's labor and Mr. Vonnegut once more convinces me he is a worker worth his pay. "If this isn't nice, what is?"

Cosmic Author Rip-Off
Readers may be interested to learn that in chapter 63 of "Timequake" a speech given to the character Kilgore Trout (Vonnegut's parody version of Theodore Sturgeon) was clearly borrowed from Chapter 29 of Sturgeon's 1958 novella "To Marry Medusa" - a meditation on how the human eye and mind can travel from star to star faster than light.