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A review by smithmick14
Galápagos by Kurt Vonnegut
Perhaps thematically in line with this book, the Goodreads app crashed when I was a few paragraphs into a review. I think Vonnegut would’ve laughed pretty hard at that.
Anyway, this book was a good one. It felt full of really tightly coupled and intentional imagery surrounding some of Vonnegut’s favorite themes. The group of Kanka-bono women being progenitors of a new human race with the maternal aid and engineering of Mary Hepburn filling both the role of Gaia and possibly Eve. The intelligent translation device being as a good as a doorstop when faced with a language that would become humanity’s only one. Its pathetic attempts to add meaning through quotes. The impotence of a captain steering mankind without a faint clue how to do anything other than save himself from embarrassment. (Tangentially, wow, Triangle of Sadness really owes it all to this book lol).
Vonnegut, as always, blends the profane into the divine and makes both uncomfortably unpalatable at random times. It feels hard to gather a good unifying theory of this book because the book, in so many ways, is about the silly folly of man trying to do exactly that in the face of our genetic and genealogical influences.
Evolution as an unfeeling random number generator was likely an image that tickled Vonnegut’s cynical, nihilistic-leaning side. Perhaps Kilgore Trout is that side of him. I’ll talk in a bit about how he might’ve not liked that side of himself. Galápagos felt like a response to Vonnegut’s having read Charles Darwin’s Voyages on the H.M.S Beagle and in a way that only he could, deciding that it’s a pretty hilarious book.
But despite seeming so sour on humanity this book is clearly structured by a tension between Nihilism and Optimism. And throughout we can see which attitudes in our world Vonnegut associated with each. This was pretty clear in the spectral narrator’s description of his mother and father’s conflicting worldviews. Vonnegut seems to have built a character strung between a hatred of his paternal unfeeling negativity and his mother’s blind positivity. Perhaps Vonnegut himself ultimately reached some sort of compromise between a positive and negative view of humanity through his Postmodern way to describe the world. He seems to be pretty good at observing and describing it in all its random tragedy and comedy.
I think his having a laugh at humanity’s designs being imposed on unfeeling Darwinism is as fun of a ride as any of his other books to date.
Anyway, this book was a good one. It felt full of really tightly coupled and intentional imagery surrounding some of Vonnegut’s favorite themes. The group of Kanka-bono women being progenitors of a new human race with the maternal aid and engineering of Mary Hepburn filling both the role of Gaia and possibly Eve. The intelligent translation device being as a good as a doorstop when faced with a language that would become humanity’s only one. Its pathetic attempts to add meaning through quotes. The impotence of a captain steering mankind without a faint clue how to do anything other than save himself from embarrassment. (Tangentially, wow, Triangle of Sadness really owes it all to this book lol).
Vonnegut, as always, blends the profane into the divine and makes both uncomfortably unpalatable at random times. It feels hard to gather a good unifying theory of this book because the book, in so many ways, is about the silly folly of man trying to do exactly that in the face of our genetic and genealogical influences.
Evolution as an unfeeling random number generator was likely an image that tickled Vonnegut’s cynical, nihilistic-leaning side. Perhaps Kilgore Trout is that side of him. I’ll talk in a bit about how he might’ve not liked that side of himself. Galápagos felt like a response to Vonnegut’s having read Charles Darwin’s Voyages on the H.M.S Beagle and in a way that only he could, deciding that it’s a pretty hilarious book.
But despite seeming so sour on humanity this book is clearly structured by a tension between Nihilism and Optimism. And throughout we can see which attitudes in our world Vonnegut associated with each. This was pretty clear in the spectral narrator’s description of his mother and father’s conflicting worldviews. Vonnegut seems to have built a character strung between a hatred of his paternal unfeeling negativity and his mother’s blind positivity. Perhaps Vonnegut himself ultimately reached some sort of compromise between a positive and negative view of humanity through his Postmodern way to describe the world. He seems to be pretty good at observing and describing it in all its random tragedy and comedy.
I think his having a laugh at humanity’s designs being imposed on unfeeling Darwinism is as fun of a ride as any of his other books to date.