Kurt Vonnegut's "explosive meditation" of a novel Breakfast of Champions (1973) is subtitled Goodbye Blue Monday!. It is peppered with simple, childlike illustrations drawn by the author, and it tells a crazy-quilt story that eventually defies the constraints of the novel format itself. All of this seems to constitute an act of self-liberation, and it is: Vonnegut overhauling his creative world, breathing deeply and toying with the very nature of the novel.The title echoes the claims of a well-known American breakfast cereal, and it crystallizes the irony of the author's vision. Breakfast of Champions is one of his greatest successes, a freewheeling and hugely entertaining meditation on modern American life that draws in some definitive figures from the author's imagination, such as the hapless sci-fi writer Kilgore Trout and the wealthy Elliot Rosewater, and finally the author himself. With a magic that contrasts the white-hot spell of his previous novel, …
Kurt Vonnegut's "explosive meditation" of a novel Breakfast of Champions (1973) is subtitled Goodbye Blue Monday!. It is peppered with simple, childlike illustrations drawn by the author, and it tells a crazy-quilt story that eventually defies the constraints of the novel format itself. All of this seems to constitute an act of self-liberation, and it is: Vonnegut overhauling his creative world, breathing deeply and toying with the very nature of the novel.The title echoes the claims of a well-known American breakfast cereal, and it crystallizes the irony of the author's vision. Breakfast of Champions is one of his greatest successes, a freewheeling and hugely entertaining meditation on modern American life that draws in some definitive figures from the author's imagination, such as the hapless sci-fi writer Kilgore Trout and the wealthy Elliot Rosewater, and finally the author himself. With a magic that contrasts the white-hot spell of his previous novel, Slaughterhouse Five -- and virtually deconstructs the novel itself -- Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions trips through American mindset of the early 1970s, its deadpan irony satirizing the party line on just about everything, from sex and racism to the Vietnam War and the meaning of the American dream.One of Vonnegut's most enduring creations, Kilgore Trout is a science fiction writer who has not known much success as Breakfast of Champions begins. To his amazement, he is invited to the Midwest, to participate in the Festival of the Arts in Midland City, at the insistence of the crazy but wealthy Eliot Rosewater. Trout is on a collision course with one of Midland City's more successful businessmen, a Pontiac dealer named Dwayne Hoover, who happens to be slipping into insanity (too many bad chemicals in his system). Reading a Trout story sends Hoover completely around the bend. The novel itself then follows him, as Vonnegut's inquisitive imagination divines the freaky chaos beneath the careful surface of American life. Writing in The New York Times Book Review, Nora Sayre noted that "in this novel Vonnegut is treating himself to a giant brain-flush, clearing his head by throwing out acquired ideas, and also liberating some of the characters from his previous books ... This explosive meditation ranks with Vonnegut's best."
Listen, here is what I got out of Breakfast of Champions.
Every person has their own story. The nicest people you know could be ugly and hateful on the inside. We destroy not only what we love most, but also what we should actually love the most. We are all scared and damaged people who turn to self-destruction to cope with the horrors of the every day and the knowledge of our ever approaching mortality. If we were aware that this is what we were doing then it would horrify us. So we either ignore it and choose the bliss of ignorance, or we nihilistically and cynically accept the status quo, and so on.
Does Vonnegut have an answer to all that? I don't know, but I enjoyed Breakfast of Champions, and I'm doubly glad I read it now in these dark times.
The last 20-30 pages were an incredible (short) book and admittedly brought the slog through the preceding~270 into focus. I'm amenable toward both the project of "total life through art" and the critique of narrative reality.
But, man, this book was tedious. And while it's clear that Vonnegut was depicting racism, sexism, and homophobia in order to condemn them, he just wasn't landing the tricks.
Kurt Vonnegut's Iconic Satire: Absurdity, Capitalism, and Human Life in 'Breakfast of Champions'
No rating
Kurt Vonnegut is known for his absurd, simplistic, unconventional, and often satirical writing style. Within the pages of Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut confronts the issues of race, poverty, and the distribution of wealth in America. He criticizes the capitalist system and consumerism, exposing the hypocrisy of a society that marginalizes and mistreats its own members. Another significant theme in the book is the environmental destruction caused by overpopulation and industrial pollution. Vonnegut paints a grim picture of a planet damaged by human activities, forcing readers to confront the consequences of our actions.
Listen, this is a fifty year old book written as a self-indulgent solipsistic meta-narrative birthday gift. It is nonsense. Sounds terrible, but it's not. It's a slender simple story with a lot of monotonous rhythms, kind of like the hums and oscillations of a Suicide song. That simplicity is the delivery method, but once the stories enter you fully they ricochet and even impossibly collide. Those collisions produce mirrors/leaks that are held up for you and the writer, not to reflect together, but rather to meet one another in that other universe. Plus we get another of Vonnegut's Bartleby's "I would prefer not to" with "And so on."
mahdi stune, bez energie doplazit se do mistni knihovny ... toz vylosujeme neco z lokalnich zasob :)
Urcite se nejedna ani o nejvtipnejsi ani nejkvalitnejsi Vonnegutovu knizku; k cajicku s medem ideal! Nevim pokolikaty to ctu, vzdycky me dostane prehrsel napadu v epizodnich pribezich, wau. Rad sem si pripomnel.
Reading perhaps 3rd or 4th time, still love it. Easy reading, lot of ideas in short stories inside main story.
I had such a love/hate relationship with this book, and yet I found I could not put it down. It's a bona-fide train wreck, full of gimmicks like the drawings that seem to have little import, and breaching of taboos largely for shock value, but buried beneath all that is a compelling message, delivered in a truly original way, and I am still processing it. Vonnegut has some interesting things to say about free will, but I think he let himself get carried away in the process.
As a "gift to himself on his 50th birthday" it seemed that he ran out of steam rather than take time to finish properly. But perhaps that was part of the gift; just let it happen how it did and not worry about it.
Parts of it I enjoyed, parts of it which were a bit hard to gel with. Like usual I think you really need to be in the right mood to read some Vonnegut books.
For one of Vonnegut's most beloved novels, I found much of Breakfast of Champions lacking. I realize that the narrator intended the story to unfold like a list of seemingly random, and often inconsequential, events; however, there's tact to such storytelling that I believe Vonnegut ignored. I found myself skipping over the unimportant, and dare I say obnoxious, need to list each woman's measurements and each man's penis size. This niggle is only one of the numerous times I shook my head or caught my mind drifting from the text because it simply wasn't stimulating.
As a Vonnegut fan, I'd love to praise this book. Unfortunately, I was left underwhelmed. If this had been my first Vonnegut work, I may very well have written him off after this read. Nevertheless, I still consider myself a fan, though this is by far my least favorite.
I'm having a hard time deciding whether I liked this book less than the rest of Vonnegut's, or such time has passed since my Vonnegut phase that I wouldn't like others either anymore. Regardless, it didn't click: the ratio of insight to connecting narrative seemed off, such that the book felt like a disjointed series of one-liners.
Four stars because it kinda got boring a few pages past the middle. The beginning was very strong and funny. The ending was ok.
Kilgore Trout is an interesting character. I liked the description of his novels, especially their ideas and how the author, who is the narrator, integrates it into the story.
The framing of the story is the first time I've encountered. The story is narrated by the author who is also a character in the novel. The problem is that the narrator is omniscient and omnipotent, so he can do whatever he wants to the characters. Does this detract from the 'reality' of the characters?
It is a short novel, and the drawings provide an additional source of humor. The language is plain. The book is very quotable.
Some quotes from the novel:
"The things other people have put into my head, at any rate, do not …
Four stars because it kinda got boring a few pages past the middle. The beginning was very strong and funny. The ending was ok.
Kilgore Trout is an interesting character. I liked the description of his novels, especially their ideas and how the author, who is the narrator, integrates it into the story.
The framing of the story is the first time I've encountered. The story is narrated by the author who is also a character in the novel. The problem is that the narrator is omniscient and omnipotent, so he can do whatever he wants to the characters. Does this detract from the 'reality' of the characters?
It is a short novel, and the drawings provide an additional source of humor. The language is plain. The book is very quotable.
Some quotes from the novel:
"The things other people have put into my head, at any rate, do not fit together nicely, are often useless and ugly, are out of proportion with one another, are out of proportion with life as it really is outside my head. I have no culture, no humane harmony in my brains. I can’t live without a culture anymore."
“Bill, Bill—” he said, “listen, I’m leaving the cage, but I’m coming back. I’m going out there to show them what nobody has ever seen at an arts festival before: a representative of all the thousands of artists who devoted their entire lives to a search for truth and beauty—and didn’t find doodley-squat!”
"Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would also be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done."
3.5 stars. I enjoyed it, especially the crack about Jefferson being a giant hypocrite, but it rambled a bit and seemed to lose focus. I recommend it highly, though.
Peculiar book. A recommendation in the San Francisco City Lights bookshop, I read this without knowing quite what to expect.
Written in an odd style, with bizarre illustrations, it was quite an enjoyable read, though a little confusing in places. Childlike in tone, yet not in others. Quite unlike any other book I've read: part satire, part surreal.
Not a very satisfying read, but an interesting book I'd not have picked up otherwise.
Chaos, irony, dark humor, satire: everything you want from Vonnegut. So far this in my favorite one. Couldn't put it down. Looking forward to more Kilgore Trout.
