Breakfast of Champions
by Kurt Vonnegut
My Rating: ★★
"This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast."
My Review: This book reminds me of one of those paintings you see hanging in a museum. You wonder to yourself, or sometimes out loud, how the HELL that painting was chosen to be put on display for hundreds of thousands of people to see?! You know the one I'm talking about. It might just be a black canvas with a colorful dot in the middle. Art they call it. I call it crap. Not to say that this book is crap or that the painting I described is crap either. Beauty and art is truly in the eye of the beholder. I, unfortunately, found no beauty in this novel written by Kurt Vonnegut. There was plenty of art found in random places throughout the book, however. If you want to call his very simple sketches art (as many have been known to do).
But all kidding aside, the story was, for me, complete and utter nonsense. The more I tried to find the beauty of the story the more I realized it was probably his intent to confound me, the reader, all along. That has GOT to be what true genius is because the man's a legend in his own right. I mean, I did buy the book, read, and then finish the book. Lord only knows how many other millions like me did the same?
I'm sure you've heard of Kurt Vonnegut before and of his most popular, and probably most widely read novel, "Slaughter House Five"? In which case you'd be asking yourself why did I pick this book instead of that one? Well, I like to live outside the box from time to time. If at all possible I prefer to take an author who is considered a classic novelist and look at his or her entire body of work and then pick one that sounds mildly interesting while not picking the one read by millions. On a quick side note, I will be reading Slaughter House Five this year.
In many ways this story reminded me a lot of Samuel Beckett's play
"Waiting for Godot." I sure hope you've read this play at some point in your life? Or seen it performed on stage? If not, no bother, just click the link highlighted above and it will take you to the wiki page where you can get a brief understanding of it. At least enough for you to get why I make the comparison. In both instances the story is controlled by a narrator whom you could think of as "God" or portraying a God-like figure. In Kurt's novel, he is simply the writer who can make things happen or not happen at his own whim. In Beckett's play it's...well, no, I won't delve into Beckett's play. Instead I suggest you read it if you have not. I actually enjoyed having to read it in college so many years ago (oh God was my Freshman year truly 8 years ago already!).
In any event, Kurt tells a story of two men whom you wouldn't think could ever meet, let alone influence each others lives so dramatically. But they do meet and their lives are forever changed because of it. How do they meet? Well because the narrator/writer Kurt himself makes it happen. I don't think what I'm about to say is a spoiler but in case it is you should stop reading here. Kurt places himself in the story to watch his own creation of these two men unfold. Their names are irrelevant. You can say, and I think Kurt would agree with me, they could be any man really. And if not for the obvious moral implications and hidden political, economical and financial messages embedded throughout this book, it would be far too ordinary a book to have even been published.
I wonder if Kurt Vonnegut really feels about the world, being a place filled with machines whose only purpose in life is to destroy the planet, the way he wrote it in this book. Was he really as racially aware and inappropriate as he was many times in the book when it came to Black people or was he trying to paint a much bigger picture, send a much bigger message, that unfortunately could easily get lost in translation? I'd like to think the latter is true. He painted quite a masterpiece and I'm sure if I had the time I would spend some of it further analyzing his characters the way I did to those in Waiting for Godot.
Synopsis: In Breakfast of Champions, one of Kurt Vonnegut’s most beloved characters, the aging writer Kilgore Trout, finds to his horror that a Midwest car dealer is taking his fiction as truth. What follows is murderously funny satire, as Vonnegut looks at war, sex, racism, success, politics, and pollution in America and reminds us how to see the truth.
