Helpful Score: 5
At my psychiatrist's office one afternoon, his dog (who stayed with him all day) found my copy of this book on the floor beside my purse, and chewed it up. This dog was wise beyond her six months.
The disjointed writing and choppy style Vonnegut takes with this book is one that requires a lot of patience. Don't expect a flowing, typical book.
That being said, if you can get past the style, you might enjoy the story, itself, as it is unusual and quite funny in places. Still, I wouldn't recommend this one.
The disjointed writing and choppy style Vonnegut takes with this book is one that requires a lot of patience. Don't expect a flowing, typical book.
That being said, if you can get past the style, you might enjoy the story, itself, as it is unusual and quite funny in places. Still, I wouldn't recommend this one.
Helpful Score: 4
Fantastic and funny, this Vonnegut book is the story of one of Vonnegut's favorite characters: Midwestern fiction writer, Kilgore Trout. Trout's zany adventures take him across country in search of the car dealer who is taking his fiction very, very seriously. Along the way, he meets up with some equally intersting people and more than a few wacky situations. All this adds up to a novel that is a very pointed satire on American life.
Helpful Score: 1
Rating: 5/5
This is a great book in its own right, but it helps to have read various other Vonnegut books to recognize characters from them. The book has the usual easy-to-read zaniness of a Vonnegut novel, including crazies, witty dialogue, weird events and breaking the fourth wall.
This is a great book in its own right, but it helps to have read various other Vonnegut books to recognize characters from them. The book has the usual easy-to-read zaniness of a Vonnegut novel, including crazies, witty dialogue, weird events and breaking the fourth wall.
Helpful Score: 1
Breakfast of Champions is extremely funny! I especially like Vonnegut's illustrations; It is a very unconventional novel. Funnier than Slaughter-House Five. Highly recommended!
Helpful Score: 1
I was not impressed. This was a best seller and still is very popular, but I find it disjoint, without interesting plot, and full of social commentary that doesn't mean much of anything.
Helpful Score: 1
Breakfast of Champions was the first book by Kurt Vonnegut that I read, and I was hooked. It takes a while to get used to his writing style, especially since he starts off very light while jumping around in the different characters' lives. I like Vonnegut's unconventional writing, but sometimes I feel his message may get lost in what is purely honest writing.
If you look past Vonnegut's social introductory commentary in BOF you will find meaningful stories about the type of people that are so often ignored, and he teaches you not only compassion for their lifestyles & thoughts, but also gives you a new perspective and comedy.
Specifically, there is a moment in the book where Vonnegut has his characters talk about an abstract painting. Being an artist who has often disliked abstract art I found the dialogue life changing because the artist in the book taught me as a reader to see something more.
If you look past Vonnegut's social introductory commentary in BOF you will find meaningful stories about the type of people that are so often ignored, and he teaches you not only compassion for their lifestyles & thoughts, but also gives you a new perspective and comedy.
Specifically, there is a moment in the book where Vonnegut has his characters talk about an abstract painting. Being an artist who has often disliked abstract art I found the dialogue life changing because the artist in the book taught me as a reader to see something more.
My favorite GR review of this profound work of whimsy and farce: "A novel is a dead tree with words on it. Breakfast of Champions is a great dead tree with words on it."
Amen. It certainly ain't a waste of dead trees.
The immortal Kurt Vonnegut's seventh novel was a fiftieth-birthday-present-to-self, which is useful to know, as it's written in a style which he himself would like to see, I think, as opposed to his audience, and, I have no doubt, his publishers, as it's also full of his pop-art-style doodles, including the famous " * " one. I'll leave out the translation of that one.
The story herein, replete with the usual Kurt fodder of life, death, sex, war, poverty, industry, and, here, more overtly than in his other novels, racism, chronicles the lives and times of two eccentricities, Dwayne Hoover, a loony Pontiac dealer from Ohio, and the beloved fictional science fiction author, Kilgore Trout, a loony obscure writer who perplexingly achieves the fame which has long eluded him, despite his Isaac-Asimov-like body of work (the latter of which reportedly wrote some 500 novels). Suffice to say, however, the former was certainly NOT based on the latter.
As farcical and fantastical as this novel was, it admittedly wasn't one of my favorite Vonnegut novels. It's an amusing romp through Kurt's head, but it just didn't hit home as some of his other novels have. Perhaps that's due to the general lack of a central theme (other than insanity, it seems), particularity the overarching sense of tragedy and futility which we twisted souls have come to love about Kurt's usual novels. Don't get me wrong: it's definitely worth the read, but it's a bit more lighthearted than the norm, more a crazy-quilt, Jackson-Pollock-esque painting of a novel that meanders all over the place, often into the irreverent, but it's appealing in that it remains ever colorful and full of mystique.
It's also one of the first instances I can recall of Kurt engaging directly with his characters, specifically, the aforementioned Kilgore Trout, who has a Nobel Prize in medicine coming, I'm informed. Maybe the crazy is the point: it is, after all, the story of two thoroughly nutty men whose insanity is compounded by their encounters with each other and the inexplicable circumstances confronting them. That's also something both Kurt and his zany characters have in common.
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"And here, according to Trout, was the reason humans beings could not reject ideas because they were bad: 'Ideas on Earth were badges of friendship or enmity. Their content did not matter. Friends agreed with friends, in order to express friendliness. Enemies disagreed with enemies, in order to express enmity.'"
"I can't tell if you're serious or not," said the driver.
"I won't know myself until I find out whether life is serious or not," said Trout. "it's dangerous, I know, and it can hurt a lot. That doesn't necessarily mean it's serious, too."
And this book is being written by a meat machine in cooperation with a machine made of metal and plastic, incidentally,is a close relative of the gunk in Sugar Creek.
And at the core of the writing meat machine is something sacred, which is an unwavering band of light.
As three unwavering bands of light, we were simple and separate and beautiful. As machines, we were flabby bags of ancient plumbing and wiring, of rusty hinges and feeble springs. And our interrelationships were Byzantine.
Amen. It certainly ain't a waste of dead trees.
The immortal Kurt Vonnegut's seventh novel was a fiftieth-birthday-present-to-self, which is useful to know, as it's written in a style which he himself would like to see, I think, as opposed to his audience, and, I have no doubt, his publishers, as it's also full of his pop-art-style doodles, including the famous " * " one. I'll leave out the translation of that one.
The story herein, replete with the usual Kurt fodder of life, death, sex, war, poverty, industry, and, here, more overtly than in his other novels, racism, chronicles the lives and times of two eccentricities, Dwayne Hoover, a loony Pontiac dealer from Ohio, and the beloved fictional science fiction author, Kilgore Trout, a loony obscure writer who perplexingly achieves the fame which has long eluded him, despite his Isaac-Asimov-like body of work (the latter of which reportedly wrote some 500 novels). Suffice to say, however, the former was certainly NOT based on the latter.
As farcical and fantastical as this novel was, it admittedly wasn't one of my favorite Vonnegut novels. It's an amusing romp through Kurt's head, but it just didn't hit home as some of his other novels have. Perhaps that's due to the general lack of a central theme (other than insanity, it seems), particularity the overarching sense of tragedy and futility which we twisted souls have come to love about Kurt's usual novels. Don't get me wrong: it's definitely worth the read, but it's a bit more lighthearted than the norm, more a crazy-quilt, Jackson-Pollock-esque painting of a novel that meanders all over the place, often into the irreverent, but it's appealing in that it remains ever colorful and full of mystique.
It's also one of the first instances I can recall of Kurt engaging directly with his characters, specifically, the aforementioned Kilgore Trout, who has a Nobel Prize in medicine coming, I'm informed. Maybe the crazy is the point: it is, after all, the story of two thoroughly nutty men whose insanity is compounded by their encounters with each other and the inexplicable circumstances confronting them. That's also something both Kurt and his zany characters have in common.
----------------------------------
"And here, according to Trout, was the reason humans beings could not reject ideas because they were bad: 'Ideas on Earth were badges of friendship or enmity. Their content did not matter. Friends agreed with friends, in order to express friendliness. Enemies disagreed with enemies, in order to express enmity.'"
"I can't tell if you're serious or not," said the driver.
"I won't know myself until I find out whether life is serious or not," said Trout. "it's dangerous, I know, and it can hurt a lot. That doesn't necessarily mean it's serious, too."
And this book is being written by a meat machine in cooperation with a machine made of metal and plastic, incidentally,is a close relative of the gunk in Sugar Creek.
And at the core of the writing meat machine is something sacred, which is an unwavering band of light.
As three unwavering bands of light, we were simple and separate and beautiful. As machines, we were flabby bags of ancient plumbing and wiring, of rusty hinges and feeble springs. And our interrelationships were Byzantine.
The story of an absurd confluence of events in a Midwest town is simply an excuse for the author to comment on America circa 1973. The story is dark and at times shocking, but overall it is a good read. The sketches sprinkled throughout the book add a unique twist and the irony can sometimes hit you in the face. Good book, although it is not for everyone. Very dark themes and some graphic material.
A classic!
"We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane." So reads the tombstone of downtrodden writer Kilgore Trout, but we have no doubt who's really talking: his alter ego Kurt Vonnegut. Health versus sickness, humanity versus inhumanity--both sets of ideas bounce through this challenging and funny book. As with the rest of Vonnegut's pure fantasy, it lacks the shimmering, fact-fueled rage that illuminates Slaughterhouse-Five. At the same time, that makes this book perhaps more enjoyable to read.
Breakfast of Champions is a slippery, lucid, bleakly humorous jaunt through (sick? inhumane?) America circa 1973, with Vonnegut acting as our Virgil-like companion. The book follows its main character, auto-dealing solid-citizen Dwayne Hoover, down into madness, a condition brought on by the work of the aforementioned Kilgore Trout. As Dwayne cracks, then crumbles, Breakfast of Champions coolly shows the effects his dementia has on the web of characters surrounding him. It's not much of a plot, but it's enough for Vonnegut to air unique opinions on America, sex, war, love, and all of his other pet topics--you know, the only ones that really count.
I had a really hard time reading this, and ultimately didn't finish it.
Breakfast of Champions is a slippery, lucid, bleakly humorous jaunt through (sick? inhumane?) America circa 1973, with Vonnegut acting as our Virgil-like companion. The book follows its main character, auto-dealing solid-citizen Dwayne Hoover, down into madness, a condition brought on by the work of the aforementioned Kilgore Trout. As Dwayne cracks, then crumbles, Breakfast of Champions coolly shows the effects his dementia has on the web of characters surrounding him. It's not much of a plot, but it's enough for Vonnegut to air unique opinions on America, sex, war, love, and all of his other pet topics--you know, the only ones that really count.
I had a really hard time reading this, and ultimately didn't finish it.
If you're a Kurt Vonnegut fan, this is a must read! If you're not, then you should be -- but read "cat's Cradle" first.
This was recommended by a friend, but I'm not a fan of Vonngut.
