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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN num: 9780425164341
ISBN number: 0425164349
Label: Berkley Trade
Manufacturer: Berkley Trade
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 250
Printing Date: August 01, 1998
Publishing house: Berkley Trade
Sale Popularity Level: 40345
Studio: Berkley Trade
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Product Description:
There'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 very 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.
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.
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Rated by buyers 
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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.
Rated by buyers -
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 grey humour 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?"
Rated by buyers 
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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.
Rated by buyers -
This was only the second book by Vonnegut I have read. I bought this and Slaughterhouse 5 the day he died. Thinking, oh man that sucks he died, I never read anything by him. So maybe I did a dis-service to myself, reading one of his last works first.
About halfway through the book, I began to think maybe this book was "too smart" for me. Why was the author breaking the 4th wall like he was doing demolition work on an office building? Maybe there's something here I am not getting.
I think I was wrong. I think this book was Vonnegut's last chance to put into writing many of his own private musings, anecdotes, old jokes, family history, biographical info, not to mention his own private thoughts on a multitude of topics.
It was a great read and a wonderful insight into what seems to be a great man, a credit to writers everywhere and one hell of an American author!
Rated by buyers -
Don't be fooled by the "plot" descriptions of a "timequake" making everyone have to do the same things over again from the last ten years. That makes up possibly 1% of the this novel. Another 50% is dedicated to Vonnegut's memoirs with the balance being dedicated to the life and stories of the fictional Kilgore Trout.
What this book ends up being is one of those rambling yarns Abe Simpson might spin that starts, "Back in my day..." There's no cohesive narrative in the slightest and you know what, that's OK by me. I've never read any Vonnegut except a short story back in high school (I hated that story, BTW) so maybe this wasn't the place to start, or maybe it was a great place to get a little background--if you believe anything Vonnegut tells you. After reading I'm a little dubious about what is fact and what is fiction, but now I'm rambling.
The simple truth is that Vonnegut's writing is so smooth and so funny that the lack of cohesive narrative or characters or any of that jazz one excepts from a book in the "Fiction" section isn't all that disconcerting. There are some great insights into life, history, science, and writing that are worth reading even if they aren't "true" as in actually having happened they're true in spirit and that's what's important. More to the point, this book is so short that I breezed through it in about 5 hours.
So if you're going on a trip, why not take along something that will make you think instead of another crime story or romance novel or Hollywood gossip rag? You'll be better off for it.
On a side note, it was eerie reading this a few months after the author passed away. (I trust I don't need to include a spoiler warning for that.) Vonnegut makes several references to his death--and those of various relatives and acquaintances. Most disturbing was he predicted he would still be alive in 2010. He ended up a little short from that mark, but in the meantime he accomplished far more than most of us.
That is all.
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