Kurt Vonnegut, Galapagos

I think I told you my Kurt Vonnegut story last season when I reviewed his early work of science fiction “The Sirens of Titan”.

Unfortunately for you I must dust off my ‘Vonnegut story’, and present it to you again, as I have just finished reading his eleventh novel, “Galapagos”.

So, here is that story.

It was the early 1980’s.  We all wore suits and ties and carried around fake leather brief cases that you could drop on your desk and open dramatically.

Dramatically in a ridiculous business sense.

It was a silly, self-important time.  I had a new job at a new location and every day I would go to the cubicle they assigned me.

And I had nothing to do.

So I made up things to do, to stay busy.  And one of the things I made up was reading Kurt Vonnegut novels.

I read Slaughterhouse 5 and God Bless you Mr. Rosewater and Breakfast of Champions as I waited for them to find me something to do.

This would have been before or just about as Galapagos was written.

In 1985.

The thing about Mr. Vonnegut was, that just because I read my way through his existing cannon, he had the hubris to keep writing novels until he passed through the blue tunnel at 84 years old in 2007.

Here, in my mind, I had mentally checked off Kurt Vonnegut as a journey completed and digested and he has the temerity to keep living and writing.

Hi-ho!

He continued to churn out novels as I was living my life.  Satirical novels, commentaries on the human condition, winking knowingly at our hubris and the trouble our big brains get us into.

He was as prolific a writer as the estimable Kilgore Trout.

I was recently reading something about something and whatever the something was referenced the Vonnegut novel Galapagos.  I thought, “Hold on.  Here is another work that the crafty Vonnegut has tried to sneak past me in his profligate writing.”

So I went and bought it, second hand of course, slightly bent of cover, with some half-hearted pencil scratching in the margins.  No doubt some poor community college student being forced to read it by some shaggy ne’er-do-well English Lit professor – God love ‘em.

Many of Vonnegut’s novels were classified as science fiction.  I think that was only because the reviewers didn’t know what to do with them.  Like “What the hell do we do with this? Well…it’s got an alien in it, so hey, science fiction it is!”

The truth is Vonnegut was a category of his own.  Humanist satire might be a better description.  I would even go so far as to say most if his work is vaguely apocalyptic.

Anyway – that’s a long way around saying that Galapagos as a novel does not disappoint.  It has the classic wry-commentary and satire of all Vonnegut works.  Like he’s looking at the f-ed up human world and shaking his head at the absurdity of it.

Maybe ‘Absurdist’ would be a fitting category.

The novel is playful.

Vonnegut loves the craft of writing.  He invents mechanisms to tell the story and plays with them.  It’s nonsensical in a way that highlights how nonsensical life is in general.

It’s about humans.

It’s about evolution and de-evolution.

It’s about life and death.

It’s also making a case about the randomness of evolution.  How innocuous events have lasting impacts.  The butterfly’s wingbeat taken as an absurdity.  Maybe more appropriate would be the butterfly passing gas.

It’s classic Vonnegut.

I’m a better writer and a better human for having read it.