First Lines of Kurt Vonnegut's "Breakfast of Champions"

 "This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast.

One of them was a science-fiction write named Kilgore Trout. He was a nobody at the time, and he supposed his life was over. He was mistaken. As a consequence of the meeting, he became one of the most beloved and respected human beings in history.

The man he met was an automobile dealer, a Pontiac dealer named Dwayne Hoover. Dwayne Hoover was on the brink of going insane."

- Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

This odd book one stands out from the rest of Vonnegut's oeuvre for a few reasons:

• Depressing. Not that Vonnegut's writing contains a lot of positive feelings, but BoC feels particularly grim. Part of it is his meta-commentary about the state of his own life, including his pessimism about writing: "Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling. ... I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done. ... It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: it can be done. "
• Drawings. There are a LOT of Vonnegut's drawings in this novel. Too many, in fact. A few make sense but I found so many of them distracting. 
  
• Racism. I don't think Vonnegut is a racist; quite the opposite in fact. Regardless, it's extremely difficult to read his continued use of the N-word - every time it appears it completely took me out of the story.

See Also:  

• Book Review: Kurt Vonnegut's "Bluebeard"
• First Lines of Kurt Vonnegut's "Bluebeard"
  

Book Review: Kurt Vonnegut's "Bluebeard: The Autobiography of Rabo Karabekian (1916-1988)"

What an interesting book. Vonnegut's 1987 novel is about many things, but it's essentially the diary of Rabo Karabekian, a one-eyed failed Abstract Expressionist painter and how he learns to accept his weaknesses and creativity towards the end of his life. The story skips back and forth between the present narration and the past – his growing up with his Armenian immigrant parents, struggling through an art apprenticeship, his rise and fall in the serious art world. Vonnegut, as always, entertains while pulling off something deep – his glib prose belies the depth behind the thoughts and experience it details. What I found most interesting about the book was the conflict between its generally cynical tone and, in the end, its generally positive message. In this respect, it’s an old persons novel. I'm not really sure how to express it, so let me include some examples. The cynicism:

“A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily communication with nothing but world’s champions.
The entire planet can get along nicely now with maybe a dozen champion performers in each area of human giftedness. A moderately gifted person has to keep his or her gifts all bottled up until, in a manner of speaking, he or she gets drunk at a wedding and tap-dances on the coffee table like Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers. We have a name or him or her. We call him or her an “exhibitionist.”
How do we reward such an exhibitionist? We say to him or her the next morning, “Wow! Were you ever drunk last night!”

And the humanity:

"I think--it is somehow very useful, and maybe even essential, for a fine artist to have to somehow make his peace on the canvas with all the things he cannot do. That is what attracts us to serious paintings, I think: that shortfall, which we might call "personality," or maybe even "pain." "
(More quotes here.) 

Other than Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut’s other books haven’t always spoken to me. But this little gem of a novel blew me away.

Cross-posted on Reading, Running and Red Sox

See also: First Lines of Kurt Vonnegut's "Bluebeard"

First Lines of Kurt Vonnegut's "Bluebeard"

"Having written "The End" to this story of my life, I find it prudent to scamper back here to before the beginning, to my front door, so to speak, and to make this apology to arriving guests: 'I promised you an autobiography, but something went wrong in the kitchen. It turns out to be a diary of this past troubled summer, too! We can always send out for pizzas if necessary. Come in, come in.'

I am the erstwhile American painter Rabo Karabekian, a one-eyed man."

- from Kurt Vonnegut's Bluebeard. Fantastic book so far.