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Timequake

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About this listen

From the beloved author of Slaughterhouse-Five an Cat's Cradle comes Kurt Vonnegut's Timequake--“Wry and trenchant...highly entertaining.”—The New York Times Book Review

According to Kurt Vonnegut's alter ego, the old science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, a global timequake will occur on February 13, 2001, at 2:27 p.m. It will be the moment when the universe suffers a crisis of conscience: Should it go on expanding indefinitely, or collapse and make another great big BANG? For its own cosmic reasons, it decides to back up a decade to 1991, giving the world a 10-year case of deja vu, making everybody and everything do exactly what they'd done during the past decade, for good or ill, a second time.

As a character in, and a brilliant chronicler of, this bizarre event, Kurt Vonnegut casts his wicked wit and his unique perspective on life as he lived it and observed it, for more than seventy years.

 Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Literature & Fiction Satire Science Fiction Comedy
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As a teenager, Vonnegut helped shaped my view of the world. Coming back to him nearly 50 years later was interesting. At first the style is even crazier than I remember, but once I got going it chimed with so much I feel about the world - maybe too close for comfort. It’s an auto-biography written as only he can. I ended up fighting back the tears (of sadness not laughter) - but that’s not what he meant.

As crazily true to life as ever

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Rereading reassures the ageing curiosity of the perpetual awareness of the longevity of understanding and observation, that lifelong learning about one's own and humanities sentient existence and the beauty in all creativity.
Tom O'Rourke 1953...? ...love always

Beautiful

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Timequake is vonneguts last novel I think. Compared to his main works, it felt undercooked and less of a dazzling ride. Still has the familiar themes, intelligence and wit but narratively thin. Well performed on Audible. Interesting to vonnegut completists like me, but not the best introduction to his work.

Interesting but not his best

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Numerous mispronunciations and a bored, drawling narrator. Book could be described as semi-fictitious, semi-autobiographical, but lacks direction

Not Vonnegut's best; terrible audiobook

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