Product Description

It is the year 2001, and Eugene Dabbs Hartke, suffering from TB, is recording his disastrous life on scraps of paper while awaiting trial for a crime he hasn't committed. This humorous novel is set in a Japanese-owned America, where everything is run for profit. By the author of "Slaughterhouse 5".

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #29107 in Books
• Published on: 1991-10-17
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 268 pages

Customer Reviews

very vonnegutian (vonnaygooshien?)
Hocus Pocus mines a familiar theme for a Vonnegut novel, the absurdity of war, Vietnam in this case, throwing in other prosaic tools of his, such as repetition, a first person narrative, a cynical, wry & often detached but wholly trustworthy narrator, and yet the first 20 pages or so are deleterious to the novel, weighing it down with sandbags of extraneous info (cigar making in the Wild West & other idiosyncratic knick knacks), but not slow enough to drag the novel down because it soon achieves a graceful afterburn & like most Vonnegut masterpieces, achieves a Camus like existential peace, no stones weeping, prisoners rioting, a White Noise cadence towards the end where the protagonist describes his meeting with his lost & estranged son, enough to impact you with a solar plexus hammer and leave reeling with another thundering moral statement.

American society as seen by Vonnegut
Vonnegut's incisive writing never ceases to amaze and entertain me.

Here he is as cynical, bitter and critical as always but one can't help enjoying his funny divergent perspective of reality.

Read this one and you will find yourself questioning a lot of what is happening in the society around you as you follow the life and worries of a Vietnam veteran. Excellent book.

A League of its own
This is my 3rd novel from this writer and I have come to the conclusion that Vonnegut's novels are a form onto themselves. Adjectives like good or bad don't apply. His novels simply are. You do not perceive any literary or stylistic attempt. There is only this voice, seamless (the highest possible praise to a craftsman I believe), telling you about sad stories which are also so extraordinarily funny. Funny because in Vonnegut's world, everything is meaningless and the human race's stupid persistence and naïve belief in its own rights and superiority is entertaining to watch. At least if you manage to avoid the bombs. He may be unduly pessimistic and has certainly been proved wrong many times (the USA has not so far been bought out by the Japanese), but who cares, it is his vision of life that matters and it would do good to everybody to have a dose of his light-hearted pessimism.

Incidentally, Hocus Pocus is about the Vietnam War and the decline of the USA's economic might in the 1980's and it is a great book.