Breakfast Of Champions is vintage Vonnegut. One of his favorite characters, aging writer Kilgore Trout, finds to his horror that a Midwest car dealer is taking his fiction as truth. The result is murderously funny satire as Vonnegut looks at war, sex, racism, success, politics, and pollution in America and reminds us how to see the truth.From the Trade Paperback edition.
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.
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."
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.
Breakfast of Champions: or Goodbye Blue Monday by Kurt Vonnegut is a dark comedy on racism, war, consumerism and greed in America during the 70’s. The book follows two loners, an unknown Sci-Fi writer named Kilgore Trout and a car dealer owner Dwayne Hoover. Both their lives are intertwined by one of the books written by Trout and read by the already plagued with “bad chemicals”, Dwayne Hoover. The book, which Hoover believed was factual, sent him into a violent rampage. Vonnegut is a master satirist and always manages to write some unusual stories, though comparing this to Slaughterhouse Five, Breakfast of Champions comes up short. It was enjoyable to read, weird in a lot of parts (I really didn’t need to know everyone characters penis size), but overall worth the read.
