Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut

 

This cannot be a true book review, because I didn't bother to finish reading the book.  However, perhaps knowing why I didn't finish the book may help you decide whether or not you want to try to read it - and if so, whether you want to spend money buying it or just borrow it from the library.

 

In the prologue, Vonnegut states that he had written a manuscript for a book to be called Timequake, about a cosmic event rolling back time from 2001 to 1991 and every person having to relive those 10 years exactly as they had the first time.  Vonnegut says he concluded the book was no good and rewrote it into this book published as "Timequake".  The remainder of the 20% or so of the book I read was a jumble of short chapters jumping between reminiscences of episodes in Vonnegut's life, supposed snippets of SF by Kilgore Trout, general comments on the absurdity of our lives, references to the supposed first manuscript, etc.  Sort of like a random collection of very short fiction and non-fiction pieces.

 

To my way of thinking, the result was like a splatter-pattern painting.  To some people, Jackson Pollack's paintings are worthy because they are carefully planned and expertly executed splatter patterns.  To me, they are splatter patterns, period.  The same is how I responded to Timequake.  Perhaps, if you can better appreciate crafted splatter patterns, you would get more out of this than I did.

 

Focusing on the book on a smaller scale, the individual short chapters did not appeal to me that much.  Partly, this may be that I had read it with the expectation it had more of an SF element than it did.  Since it wasn't what I'd anticipated, there was disappointment for reasons other than quality.  And although there are some older works by Vonnegut I liked; generally, Vonnegut is not my cup of tea.  If you've enjoyed later Vonnegut, this might be worth trying.

 

In the prologue, Vonnegut also spends some time building a case for the fact he was in his 70s when he wrote this and that is just too old to expect an artist to keep putting out new material.  What I read of this did not convince me otherwise.