Word: vonnegutisms
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...GALAPAGOS, Vonnegut...
Player Piano, Kurt Vonnegut's 1952 satire about automation and the working stiff, was premature. Cat's Cradle (1963), an end-of-the-world scenario, fared better in the wake of Khrushchev's shoe banging and the Cuban missile crisis. Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) was, in the expression of the day, right on. The novel was based on the author's experience as an American POW in Dresden when Allied bombers killed 135,000 civilians. This reminder of total war coincided with the mayhem of Viet Nam, and Vonnegut the cult writer became a popular voice of generalized disenchantment. His refrain...
Galapagos puts Vonnegut one more safe step beyond the complexities of good and evil. The narrator is an amiable phantom named Leon Trout, son of Kilgore Trout of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and Breakfast of Champions. Leon speaks to us from the future, 1 million years after humanity is supposed to have $ extinguished itself. Among the survivors are a handful of tourists and Ecuadorian Indians on Santa Rosalia, an island in the Galapagos. It was there, in 1835, that Charles Darwin observed the variety of species that inspired his theories of natural selection. But according to Vonnegut, nature goofed...
...told. Vonnegut's retrograde evolution is a cute idea but a literary dead end. Leon allows only a misty glimpse of the sweet by-and-by. The future is not dramatized because the elements of drama no longer exist. Instead, the narrator tells us about 1986, the year humanity took its first step down the evolutionary ladder. The tale is a burlesque that mixes natural history, sitcom humor and the Old Testament. For the Flood there is conflict, economic disaster and pollution; the part of Noah's Ark is played by the Bahia de Darwin, a cruise ship that shuttles...
...nobody's business but mine and the committee's what books we select," said a testy Kurt Vonnegut Jr., who headed the selection committee. John Macrae III, chairman of the IFP, noted that "the important thing here is the principle of the government trying to have a hand in the choosing of books for exhibition, not what books are selected." The books were supposed to reflect the diversity of opinion in America. That goal has been duly accomplished -- if not by the list, at least by the debate about...