Timequake

published	1998 by Vintage
binding	Paperback
isbn	0099267543 (isbn13: 9780099267546)
pages	288
description	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 ...more [close] 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. [close]
date added	12-13-06 edit book

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Robert rated it:

(review of isbn 0425164349)

04/19/08

bookshelves: favorites

Read in April, 2008

At first, I wasn't too enthralled by Timequake and thought it might end up the same way Galapagos had, which is that I wouldn't finish it, but I kept reading out of a sense of boredom, perhaps, or for something to occupy my mind other than my thoughts. As a result, I have found a true gem in the ever-shrinking library of Vonnegut titles I haven't read or don't want to.

A large part of Timequake deals with death because Vonnegut was nearly seventy-five when he wrote it, and because a lot of pe...more At first, I wasn't too enthralled by Timequake and thought it might end up the same way Galapagos had, which is that I wouldn't finish it, but I kept reading out of a sense of boredom, perhaps, or for something to occupy my mind other than my thoughts. As a result, I have found a true gem in the ever-shrinking library of Vonnegut titles I haven't read or don't want to.

A large part of Timequake deals with death because Vonnegut was nearly seventy-five when he wrote it, and because a lot of people close to him had died. That isn't to say the novel/memoir isn't funny. It is, and at the same time there were two or three times I wanted to cry at the way he phrased these passages, especially this one about the last conversation he had with his close friend and ex-wife:

"Our last conversation was intimate. Jane asked me, as though I knew, what would determine the exact moment of her death. She may have felt like a character in a book by me. In a sense she was. During our twenty-two years of marriage, I had decided where we were going next, to Chicago, to Schenectady, to Cape Cod. It was my work that determined what we did next. She never had a job. Raising six kids was enough for her.

I told her on the telephone that a sun-burned, raffish, bored but not unhappy ten-year old boy, whom we did not know, would be standing on the gravel slope of the boat-launch ramp at the foot of Scudder's Lane. He would gaze out at nothing in particular, birds, boats, or whatever, in the harbor of Barnstable, Cape Cod.

At the head of Scudder's Lane, on Route 6A, one-tenth of a mile from the boat-launching ramp, is the big old house where we cared for our son and two daughters and three sons of my sister's until they were grownups. Our daughter Edith and her builder husband, John Squibb, and their small sons, Will and Buck, live there now.

I told Jane that this boy, with nothing better to do, would pick up a stone, as boys will. He would arc it over the harbor. When the stone hit the water, she would die.

Jane could believe with all her heart anything that made being alive seem full of white magic. That was her strength. She was raised a Quaker, but stopped going to meetings of Friends after her four happy years at Swathmore. She became an Episcopalian after marrying Adam, who remained a Jew. She died believing in the Trinity and Heaven and Hell and all the rest of it. I'm so glad. Why? Because I love her."

The Vonnegut books I like the most, the ones that make me laugh out loud no matter how many times I've read them, like Cat's Cradle (six or seven times) or Breakfast of Champions (two times) are wonderful, but now I think I have to add Timequake to that list as well because...well, because it made me want to cry about how wonderful life can be even though it's sad. To quote Vonnegut again: "Isn't this nice?"...less

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