"Timequake" by Kurt Vonnegut

We borrowed this from our local library after looking at "1001 books you must read.... etc" for inspiration of who/what to read.

This book starts off very unfocussed. It took me a while to work out where it was going. Fortunately, it was amusing and interesting enough to keep going. It jumps around between several threads - that of a writers clambake at Cape Cod, a timequake (I'll get to this later), and bits and pieces of what seems to be autobiographical material about Vonnegut's extended family and friends. I wasn't sure whether or not to believe some bits that appeared to be autobiograpical - did a quick wiki search on Kurt Vonnegut and it seems quite a lot of his life has been written about in this book (presuming whomever wrote the article was correct).

A Timequake is a wacky idea where time jumps back a number of years (in the book, it jumps back 10 years from 2001 to 1991), and everyone is forced to relive that parcel of time again, knowing what will happen next, but not being able to do a thing about it. People say the same things they said the first time, and do the same things they did first time around. Then, at the end "free will kicks in again" and people basically fall in heaps as they aren't accustomed to free will (and there are lots of accidents!). The author refers to the the first time he went from 1991-2001, when he was writing the first draft of the book. I can't help but think that the timequake is a creative metaphor for what it is like to re-write a book, because you or your publisher isn't satisfied - trawling through the plot... remembering why you wrote what you did... possibly arriving at the same point of view you did first time.

The whole novel is like sitting down and chatting to your eccentric great uncle or grandpa... and it's written from the viewpoint of an old man who wants to impart a few important messages in his book, about humanism, things that don't make sense, and what to celebrate in life. The author has lived an interesting and at times difficult life - his mother's suicide, 2 wives, fighting in WW2 and being held prisoner in Dresden (the topic of another of his novels, "Slaughterhouse 5"), a tragedy in his sister's family which leads to him adopting her 3 children on top of his 3 kids, being forced by his father to study science at college, but gradually trying to make a career out of writing, and moving away from his home state. I'd never heard of Vonnegut before, but suspect I'll read at least one more of his soon (especially if J lends one to me when she has finished it... :) .