Breakfast of Champions
March 26th 2007 02:28
'Breakfast of Champions' was the second Kurt Vonnegut book I ever read (after 'The Sirens of Titan'). It was also the book that really opened me up to this whole other world of literature. It made me into a huge Vonnegut fan and a bigger appreciator of fiction in general. Prior to this I didn't care much for books that weren't TV tie-in fiction for science fiction shows. So I guess this book is, in a roundabout way, to blame for this blog and my interest in books altogether.
Typically of Vonnegut's work, there isn't really a linnear plot to follow. The book is more about the characters and life itself. Vonnegut makes several observations about the falseness of literature in comparison to reality and fills the book with his own amusing illustrations (including, famously, a simplistic drawing of a human anus), and there isn't a single dull paragraph to be found in this whole book. Kilgore exists as a kind of alter-ego for Vonnegut - he appears marginally in several of Vonnegut's books, though in 'Breakfast of Champions' he actually serves as a major character for once. I think he's one of my favourite characters in literature... he's so wonderfully horrible and out there, and his own science-fiction stories (of which we are told the storylines of several throughout this novel) are great mini-classics too. If anything, these various pieces of microfiction are a good inidcation of Vonnegut's inventive brilliance, and in this short novel he manages to include more hilarious and astounding ideas than most good authors manage in a life time.
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