Product Description

In a frolic of cartoon and comic outbursts against rule and reason, a miraculous weaving of science fiction, memoir, parable, fairy tale and farce, Kurt Vonnegut attacks the whole spectrum of American society, releasing some of his best-loved literary creations on the scene.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6622 in Books
• Published on: 1992-05-21
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

About the Author
Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922 and studied biochemistry at Cornell University. During the Second World War he served in Europe and, as a prisoner of was in Germany, witnessed the destruction of Dresden by Allied bombers, an experience which inspired his classic novel Slaughterhouse-Five. He is the author of thirteen other novels, three collections of stories and five non-fiction books. Kurt Vonnegut died in 2007.

Customer Reviews

Listen:
Sordid, repellant, charming, witting, full of interesting insight and eminently readable. And so on.

It does make you wonder if this ever happened to Kurt.

Funny and thought-provoking
It's hard to know how to sum this up but it's definitely one of the most interesting and funny books I've read in a long time. It plays with conventions - hand-drawn images interspersed in the text, repeated breaking of the fourth wall (including making the author a protagonist), frequent non-sequiturs and so on - and yet it doesn't come across as fussy or pretentious. It's a genuinely funny exploration of the author's mind and a satire on America and, despite containing an interesting passage that describes how traditional storytelling is a bad thing, I still always wanted to know what happened next.

This is a book full of interesting ideas and memorable characters and I'd recommend this to anyone open-minded enough not to freak out when confronted by the first hand-drawn sketch.

Not Utter Claptrap but Dazzling Brilliance
'A Reader' clearly hasn't a clue. He just doesn't get it. 'Breakfast of Champions' is obviously one of the best satirical novels ever written (better in my opinion than the long-winded Catch 22). As I said, 'A Reader' hasn't a clue and here's why:

In 'Breakfast of Champions', Kurt Vonnegut has created a book resembling a children's encyclopedia. Is is written in simple language, short paragraphs and short sentences. It is acompanied by crude pictures drawn by the author himself. Vonnegut's principal strategy is to contrive the voice of a naif, which in his case is the voice of a fifty-year-old naif. The use of this voice has two risks: 1) It will pall and weary the reader with its limitations of tone. 2) The naive observations will finally seem to represent the mind of the author, which is to say that the book is apt to make Vonnegut himself appear simple-minded.

But on the other hand, the possibilities of the naive voice are considerable, and Vonnegut exploits them all: being naive, the narrator has no sense of structure or priority and thus can include anything, as indeed he does, moving in a few pages through matters of eschatology and teleology, cornball manners of the Midwest, irrelevant statistics, perverse sexuality, washroom graffiti, and automobile sales techniques. The satiric possibilities of the naive voice, moreover, are classic, and Vonnegut directs his innocent voice at American guile and idiocy with considerable effect. He explains, for example, with the same dull ingeniousness that he uses to explain the bucket of fried chicken, the function of the body bag in gathering together the fragments of a soldier killed in action...

Need I say more?