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96th out of 2,944 books
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12,416 voters
Galápagos
Galápagos takes the reader back one million years, to A.D. 1986. A simple vacation cruise suddenly becomes an evolutionary journey. Thanks to an apocalypse, a small group of survivors stranded on the Galápagos Islands are about to become the progenitors of a brave, new, and totally different human race. In this inimitable novel, America’s master satirist looks at our world...more
Paperback, 324 pages
Published
January 12th 1999
by Dial Press Trade Paperback
(first published 1985)
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Rewritten after rereading in July 2012.
This darkly humorous satire starts with a world financial crisis in 1986 (hopefully that’s where the similarity with current times ends), leading to WW3 – though it’s not really about either: it’s fundamentally about adaptation.
A million years in the future, the only “humans” left on Earth are the descendants of a small but diverse group of survivors of a Galapagos islands cruise, and they are more like seals than 20th century humans. Most of the story is...more
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Galápagos takes the long view of humanity and combines heady ideas with small human absurdities in every scene. In anyone else's hands the somewhat distant POV and seemingly blatant arbitrary asides could be a mistake, but Vonnegut pulls you through a slightly skewed modern world with both courage and ease. A small band of humans is destined to be stranded on the smallest island in the Galápagos chain and therefore sire the future of humankind, a species heretofore beleaguered by its "big brain,...more
Kurt Vonnegut explains that the greatest achievement of The Origin of Species is that it has done "more to stabilize people’s volatile opinions of how to identify success or failure than any other tome." The thinking is that so long as we continue to survive challenges, we will have improved over those that came before.
We often associate survival with success, merit and quality, and Vonnegut goes out of his way to undermine this notion in one of his less appreciated novels, Galapagos.
Leon Trotsk...more
We often associate survival with success, merit and quality, and Vonnegut goes out of his way to undermine this notion in one of his less appreciated novels, Galapagos.
Leon Trotsk...more
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It will be interesting to see what becomes of the legacy of Kurt Vonnegut now that he is dead. Many great authors don't receive the recognition they deserve until after they have taken the giant step to the other side, but Vonnegut's Slaughter House Five was being taught in high schools across
America while the author was still alive so I guess it can be said that he was a legend in his own time. Maybe his appeal will diminish with age, but I kind of doubt it. I consider him one of the most bril...more
America while the author was still alive so I guess it can be said that he was a legend in his own time. Maybe his appeal will diminish with age, but I kind of doubt it. I consider him one of the most bril...more
14 likes · like · see review
Now, really... am I the only person who doesn't love Vonnegut?
7 likes · like · see review
HAH! Look at the list of characters:
Kilgore Trout, Leon Trotsky Trout, James Wait, Andrew MacIntosh
Walkies!
#77. TBR Busting 2013
3* Slaughterhouse V (want to re-read)
5* Mother Night
3* God Bless You, Mr Rosewater
3* Galápagos
TR A Man Without a Country
TR Blubeard
TR Deadeye Dick
4* God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian
Kilgore Trout, Leon Trotsky Trout, James Wait, Andrew MacIntosh
Walkies!#77. TBR Busting 2013
3* Slaughterhouse V (want to re-read)
5* Mother Night
3* God Bless You, Mr Rosewater
3* Galápagos
TR A Man Without a Country
TR Blubeard
TR Deadeye Dick
4* God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian
6 likes · like · see review
I've read a few of Vonnegut's novels now, and I can't get enough. I love his writing style, his dark humor, and his incredible imagination. He has this way of making his bizarre visions of the future seem perfectly plausible, and makes me worry for our future and laugh at the same time.
Galapagos is told from the point of view of a person a million years after 1986. He relates the story of events in 1986 that led to the remnants of all of humanity being situated on one tiny island a million years...more
Galapagos is told from the point of view of a person a million years after 1986. He relates the story of events in 1986 that led to the remnants of all of humanity being situated on one tiny island a million years...more
I've read a whole lot of Vonnegut. I can summate my general feeling toward his works as follows: it's an incredibly engaging and interesting read that you simply fly through, but over the course of a few days after finishing it the plot is all but totally forgotten, and the protagonist appears increasingly underdeveloped the more you think about it. So not expecting a Raskolnikov or Mersault from Vonnegut leads me to take his books at face value.
Galapogos, however, was different. The characters...more
Galapogos, however, was different. The characters...more
Have you ever wondered about the role of mankind one million years from now? Most of this remarkable story takes place in 1986, yet is narrated by the ghost of a shipbuilder one million years later. He tells the story of evolution at its finest. Using the Adam and Eve template, Vonnegut shares one of his ideas on what can happen to Earth before and after a devastating WWIII. The story is humorous, scary and severely ironic all at the same time. Only Mr. Vonnegut could put this idea into such a w...more
En Galápagos el mundo ha colapsado tras una crisis mundial donde la teoría darwiniana en los ojos de Vonnegut nos conducen a una historia hilarante y reflexiva.
Las propuestas del autor son excelentes, como cuando uno de sus personajes va a morir, le añade a su nombre un *, dejando en vilo al lector sobre cuándo y cómo ocurrirá esa muerte.
kurt carga su pluma sobre la estupidez humana, incapaz de resolver sus absurdos y el fin de la sociedad como la conocemos. La conducción de la historia nos lle...more
Las propuestas del autor son excelentes, como cuando uno de sus personajes va a morir, le añade a su nombre un *, dejando en vilo al lector sobre cuándo y cómo ocurrirá esa muerte.
kurt carga su pluma sobre la estupidez humana, incapaz de resolver sus absurdos y el fin de la sociedad como la conocemos. La conducción de la historia nos lle...more
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naive youthful enthusiasm + Vonnegut's humanistic pessimism = anarchic and entertaining fuck-yeah!ishness.
Self-consciously jaded mid-twenties ennui + Vonnegut's humanistic pessimism = cliche city, like Fucking Tom Robbins re-writing Cat's Cradle.
Sorry guys, it's just my baggage bringing us down here.
Anyways, slaughterhouse 5 is great, and I liked God Bless You Mr Rosewater a lot too. Read those first.
The two stars are partly just a reactionary move to pull the ratings down. If I hadn't read Cat...more
Self-consciously jaded mid-twenties ennui + Vonnegut's humanistic pessimism = cliche city, like Fucking Tom Robbins re-writing Cat's Cradle.
Sorry guys, it's just my baggage bringing us down here.
Anyways, slaughterhouse 5 is great, and I liked God Bless You Mr Rosewater a lot too. Read those first.
The two stars are partly just a reactionary move to pull the ratings down. If I hadn't read Cat...more
4 likes · like · see review
Oh how I love this book. Parts of it do come off as a bit dated now, but the overall theme about all that we, the human race, and our oversized brains are doing to make ourselves extinct is still very resonant.
This is a tale of "The Nature Cruise of the Century" to Darwin's Galapagos islands in 1986 and how the small group of people beached on one of the islands ends up becoming the future all of humankind.
The detached narrator looks back on the pivotal moments leading up to and including that d...more
This is a tale of "The Nature Cruise of the Century" to Darwin's Galapagos islands in 1986 and how the small group of people beached on one of the islands ends up becoming the future all of humankind.
The detached narrator looks back on the pivotal moments leading up to and including that d...more
6 likes · like · see review
For many people, this is a lesser of the Vonnegut books. The giants 'Slaughterhouse Five' and 'Cat's Cradle' eclipse it. Perhaps because those are required reading, they charm me less. They go in the same category as The Great Gatsby and Catcher in the Rye -- brilliant as they go, but ubiquitous.
This is more of a forgotten gem, and so I cherish it more. It's very Vonnegut in that it's unabashedly cynical, yet somehow hopeful. I love the bizarre meaning in his frank storytelling, and the amused...more
This is more of a forgotten gem, and so I cherish it more. It's very Vonnegut in that it's unabashedly cynical, yet somehow hopeful. I love the bizarre meaning in his frank storytelling, and the amused...more
Not quite as good as Slaughterhouse Five, but written with the same great imaginative verve, from the perspective of a ghost remembering the events of one milion years ago -- the 1980s -- when a financial crisis and a global epidemic combine to wipe out the world's human population, except for a small group of unlikely survivors who are stranded on Santa Rosalia and subsequently evolve into fish-like creatures with much smaller (and less troublesome) brains and speak only Kanka-bono, a language...more
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As with most Vonnegut I've read, there's a mysterious disease that precludes me from remembering anything I've read. His literature is so disjointed and insane that there is no magnetism between its content and my brain. Nevetheless, I really liked this book -- possibly even more than Slaughterhouse Five and Cat's Cradle.
It's in an interesting tense: told as a story set in the present day, but from the viewpoint of a million years from now. Basically, a bunch of minor and seemingly unconnected...more
It's in an interesting tense: told as a story set in the present day, but from the viewpoint of a million years from now. Basically, a bunch of minor and seemingly unconnected...more
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I've read most all of the Vonnegut's at this point, and this is undoubtedly one of the best. An ironic look at evolution based on a twist to the Gilligan's island premise. Basically, a group travelers stranded on the islands are forced to breed to repopulate after some (i forget, honestly) travesty has befallen humanity.
The concept follows a familiar Vonnegut theme - that humans are too clever and emotional to be humane - hence evolution moves these island dwellers away from intellectual greatn...more
The concept follows a familiar Vonnegut theme - that humans are too clever and emotional to be humane - hence evolution moves these island dwellers away from intellectual greatn...more
"Galapagos" is, as far as I can tell, when Kurt Vonnegut decided to become "Kurt Vonnegut." This book feels like an imperfect parody of Vonnegut's style. It's not _bad_, per se, it's just not very good. Narrated from 1 million years in the future, by Kilgore Trout's son, this book has flashes of real resonance, like when Leon Trout speaks of his time in Vietnam. All in all, however, the entire thing feels misanthropic in a way that definitely would have appealed to me back in junior high, but fe...more
Vonnegut takes on evolution and global apocalypse with his typical black humor.
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it,
click here.
"End of the world" is to to Kurt Vonnegut as fiction is to funny.
What is it that gives Kurt Vonnegut's books such a sense of total doom and hilarity at the same time? I am not sure but I am sensing a pattern here!
If there s someone who can tell a serious story in a tongue in cheek manner better than Mr. Vonnegut, I have yet to discover him/her. Although perhaps The Hitch Hiker's guide to the Galaxy is equally placed.
To begin with, this is a wonderful homage to Charles Darwin and the theory of Ev...more
What is it that gives Kurt Vonnegut's books such a sense of total doom and hilarity at the same time? I am not sure but I am sensing a pattern here!
If there s someone who can tell a serious story in a tongue in cheek manner better than Mr. Vonnegut, I have yet to discover him/her. Although perhaps The Hitch Hiker's guide to the Galaxy is equally placed.
To begin with, this is a wonderful homage to Charles Darwin and the theory of Ev...more
Kurt Vonnegut's "Galápagos" is less about the Galápagos Islands and more about a futuristic look at the world in one million years through the eyes of a ghostly figure. The ghost is Leon Trout died while he was working on a luxury ship that was going to travel between Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands. Rather than "going into the blue tunnel" which is presumably the afterlife, he chose to stay with the ship and observe human beings.
As the narration begins one million years have passed since a c...more
As the narration begins one million years have passed since a c...more
Wow, Vonnegut is really something. What starts off conspicuously as a story about different characters of a cruise and their various motivations, because a much grander story about what humans are, what they were, and what they could be. All of this marinated in Vonnegut's dressing - imaginative, satirical, funny and profound.
Vonnegut reminds us of how conflict prone and vicious the human race is, all because of our big oversized heads. One of the great omissions of the book is how the human co...more
Vonnegut creates his own ridiculous Adam-and-Eve story involving suburban American contest winners, washed-up German captains, a furry human baby and the last remanents of a cannibal tribe. Having the entire thing narrated by someone outside the story, and has lived to see the outcome of this unlikely experiment a million years henceforth, was a great touch. Like his other books, Vonnegut manages to criticize the flaws of modern society (i.e. war, inequality, corruption) with his sly, comedic, I...more
Anyone who knows me well has heard me complain that English teachers seem to always select Slaughterhouse 5 when they teach Vonnegut. This ahs always bothered me, not because I do not like Slaughterhouse 5, but because he wrote so many other things that were better. Galapagos is one of my favorites. I term it science fiction although to most readers it would not look like it. The science involved in this case is simply evolution, set ever so appropriately in the Galapagos Islands. (view spoiler)...more
Originally published on my blog here in August 2001.
It would, I think, be fair to describe just about all of Vonnegut's writing as cynical about human achievement and particularly about twentieth century Western civilization. Galapagos is his most misanthropic novel, with nothing positive to say about "big brained" humanity.
The narrator of Galapagos is a ghost, of a son of Vonnegut's fictional alter ego Kilgore Trout. He tells the story of a calamity which strikes humanity in 1986, which eventua...more
It would, I think, be fair to describe just about all of Vonnegut's writing as cynical about human achievement and particularly about twentieth century Western civilization. Galapagos is his most misanthropic novel, with nothing positive to say about "big brained" humanity.
The narrator of Galapagos is a ghost, of a son of Vonnegut's fictional alter ego Kilgore Trout. He tells the story of a calamity which strikes humanity in 1986, which eventua...more
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it,
click here.
Aug 10, 2012
pinknantucket
rated it
4 of 5 stars
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
ms-readathon-2012
I chose this book to read after "The Sportswriter", a book I'd struggled with, to clear the palate, so to speak—to recalibrate my brain patterns. Vonnegut didn't disappoint. How does he do it? His books are short, by modern standards, his prose brief. But he manages to pack a lot in, nonetheless. In Galapagos, he writes of the near-destruction of the human race, and the series of accidental events that allowed us to survive as a species—to evolve into seal-like creatures with much smaller brains...more
Quotes:
Back when childhoods were often so protracted, it is unsurprising that so many people got into the lifelong habit of believing, even after their parents were gone, that somebody was always watching over them – God or a saint or a guardian angel or the stars or whatever.
But I have yet to see an octopus, or any sort of animal, for that matter, which wasn’t entirely content to pass its time on earth as a food gatherer, to shun the experiments with unlimited greed and ambition performed by hu...more
Vonnegut has taken an interesting approach in Galapagos. It’s been some time since I’ve read him, but in my foggy memory, I do not believe he’s written a book in which he tells you what happens ahead of time like this. You know who dies and when, he tells you nearly everything ahead of time. Except – and don’t peek!!!!! – the ending.
Personally, I was disappointed in one way. He seemed to show less linguistic brilliance than I remember. There is one sentence that grabbed me. He is explaining how...more
Personally, I was disappointed in one way. He seemed to show less linguistic brilliance than I remember. There is one sentence that grabbed me. He is explaining how...more
In this cautionary tale, Kurt Vonnegut tries to point out that a lot of mankind's problems would be solved if we didn't have such excessively large brains. Apparently, animals have the right idea, just eating and screwing and surviving their way through life. I disagree with this premise, because my large brain is essentially what allows me to read books by Kurt Vonnegut.
In order to hammer home his theory, Vonnegut has the ghost of Kilgore Trout's son Leon tell us about "The Nature Cruise of the...more
In order to hammer home his theory, Vonnegut has the ghost of Kilgore Trout's son Leon tell us about "The Nature Cruise of the...more
| topics | posts | views | last activity | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| the meaning of the end-spoiler alert | 1 | 88 | Apr 30, 2009 09:15pm |
Kurt Vonnegut, Junior was an American novelist, satirist, and most recently, graphic artist. He was recognized as New York State Author for 2001-2003.
He was born in Indianapolis, later the setting for many of his novels. He attended Cornell University from 1941 to 1943, where he wrote a column for the student newspaper, the Cornell Daily Sun. Vonnegut trained as a chemist and worked as a journali...more
More about Kurt Vonnegut...
He was born in Indianapolis, later the setting for many of his novels. He attended Cornell University from 1941 to 1943, where he wrote a column for the student newspaper, the Cornell Daily Sun. Vonnegut trained as a chemist and worked as a journali...more
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“Some automatic device clicked in her big brain, and her knees felt weak, and there was a chilly feeling in her stomach. She was in love with this man.
They don't make memories like that anymore”
—
18 people liked it
They don't make memories like that anymore”
“For some people, getting pregnant is as easy as catching cold." And there certainly was an analogy there: Colds and babies were both caused by germs which loved nothing so much as a mucous membrane.”
—
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