Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"I still like what O'Hare and I said to German soldiers right after we were liberated: That America was going to become more socialist, was going to try harder to give everybody work to do, and to ensure that our children, at least weren't hungry or cold or illiterate or scared to death.
Lotsa luck!"

Kurt Vonnegut's Timequake (1997), the ninth book by the author that I have reviewed on Goodreads is a major disappointment. I hesitate to offer a sad diagnosis but it seems that Mr. Vonnegut just ran out of things to say. It does not augur well that he himself confesses on the beginning pages that the novel is a rewrite of Timequake 1, the previous version, which, in his words, "stunk." Vonnegut's last novel - he published only collections of essays and various other writings after 1997 - is to me a mess devoid of a central, organizing theme, and close to incoherent rambling. It is painful to say this about a work by the author of one of the best books ever written, Slaughterhouse-Five .

The plot revolves around the concept of a timequake, "a sudden glitch in the time-space continuum" that makes "everybody and everything do exactly what they'd done" before. In Vonnegut's novel this occurred on February 13, 2001, when the time was zapped back to February 17, 1991, and all events repeated themselves. With the end of the repeat period the "free will kicked in again", which caused a lot of trouble but provided opportunities for the story.

I do not like the science fiction aspect of the novel, personified in Vonnegut's favorite fictional character, Kilgore Trout: I do not think it connects in even the slightest way with the realistic passages that portray events from the author's and his family's life. Another reason for the sci-fi aspect leaving me cold is hinted at by the author himself:

"Trout might have said, and it can be said of me as well, that he creates caricatures rather than characters. His animus against so-called mainstream literature, moreover, wasn't peculiar to him. It was generic among writers of science fiction."

There are a few redeeming passages that lift my rating from the cellar. Probably the best of them is the definition of a "humanist" (the author considered himself one):

"Humanists try to behave decently and honorably without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. The creator of the Universe has been to us unknowable so far. We serve as well as we can the highest abstraction of which we have some understanding, which is our community."

The message, if there is any, about free will vs. predetermination is muddled. Unless Mr. Vonnegut just wants to say that we should be more active in our lives rather than somnolently follow the fake life shown to us on TV (or on Internet these days). If only there were more of the social critique in the book instead of Kilgore Trout and timequake stuff... As it is, I find the novel a major failure.

One and a half stars.

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