Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2969 in Books
• Published on: 1992-05-21
• Binding: Paperback
• 295 pages

Synopsis
The author of "Slaughterhouse 5" and "Hocus Pocus" satirizes the horrors of plastic, disposable America with a mixture of cartoons and comic outbursts against rules and reason.

Customer Reviews

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?

Claptrap
I’m not entirely sure why I persisted in reading this book, I guess I kept thinking “any minute now it’ll get funny, any minute now it’ll get clever”.

It didn’t.

I thought that this story was lazy; there is an underlying suggestion that Kurt Vonnegut can write well (I’m hoping so as I have Slaughterhouse Five in my ‘to read’ pile) but couldn’t be bothered, probably because there is barely a story to talk of.

I read in reviews of ‘pure hilarity and comedic chaos’; ‘knows how to dish up satire like none other’ and even ‘this has to be the most hilarious piece of fiction I have ever read’. Are you serious? For all our sakes read more books , I’ve read textbooks funnier than this. The comedy in this book borders on schoolboy slapstick, occasionally Vonnegut tries to be clever but fails miserably and resorts to pointless cartoons and tediously analogous mishaps for his one-dimensional characters.
I considered whilst reading this book that perhaps I wasn’t opening my mind to an intellectual humour, but frankly Vonneguts grasp on satire is comparable with Alanis Morrisette’s grasp on irony. In my experience satire is at it’s best when delivered intelligently with subtle reference to our every day lives, cleverly picking out the nuances of society and it’s structure and emphasizing their effect on the human condition. Not in stating the obvious every which way but Tuesday until the joke is so thoroughly beaten it may never draw breath again.

The comment - ‘Will leave you thinking about the structure of the earth we live on, and the kind of people we are’….Really?? I don’t think you’re going to learn much from this book as it doesn’t pose any new questions, it doesn’t delve into any psychology; it just loosely traverses the outlines of a few shallow characters without direction or conclusion.
A reviewer said it is a work of ‘deceptively simple fiction’…Please! The only deception in this book is the unfulfilled promise of hilarity. This book didn’t look at anything more than the fact that some people have money while others don’t. The oft-voiced idea that an unseen author is writing our lives and dictating the fates that befall us was handled clumsily. Vonnegut reminded us too frequently of his control over the characters and that he was shaping lives and outcomes with his own experiences, this didn’t add any humour or depth to the story.

I’m going away now to mourn the hours spent reading this drivel that I will never get back. In fact I’ll go and read Catch-22 and appreciate actual literary brilliance as opposed to lacklustre detritus. Perhaps I’m not cool enough to appreciate this book…well thank heavens, that means I’ll never have to read it again.

Buy it now.
I'm not entirely sure how or why I came across this delightful book, but I am thankful that I did. The illustrations really do help to elevate this book into utter hillarity, as do the insane characters, which upon first impression don't seem central to the plot at all. Eventually though, everything comes together in what has to be one of the most bizarre endings I have ever read. Things that happen in this book just dont occur in other books. One of these things for example, is Vonneguts actual omnipotent presence in the book, he places himself in the story (with all the characters he has created at his mercy) to describe it like this in an amzon review does not do it justice.

Alltogether a briliant read, Happy 50th Kurt.

And so on.