Vonne Gut Reactions: Galapagos

It's been too long, but we're too late to apologize now.

Galapagos is the first really excellent Vonnegut book that I've read since Breakfast of Champions. That's a run of three pretty mediocre books - Deadeye Dick, Jailbird, and Slapstick. This is a return to Vonnegut's strength, to a story that matters to him and consequently to us.

This may also be Vonnegut at his most hopeful - as only Vonnegut could be, however. Our tale is told by a ghostly narrator who died in the building of the ship on which much of our tale revolves. Our narrator, Kilgore Trout's son, has chosen to avoid heading into the blue tunnel of the afterlife, a fate that his father begs him to take. Instead, Leon Trout stays on Earth to hope to understand the human condition just a little better and is given a million years to do so.

In the million years of watching, Trout sees humankind evolve from what we are to an ocean- and island-dwelling species with fins and fur suited for fishing in the waters off the Galapagos islands on which our entire species lives. The book thankfully focuses on the events that lead to our modern Noah's Arc of fewer than a dozen survivors finding themselves shipwrecked on Santa Rosalia island on which they are to make their home in perpetuity. The world's economy collapses, Peru attacks Ecuador, mental instabilities bring together our cast of characters, accidents and chance clear the remainder of the book's characters, and natural selection works its magic from there.

Vonnegut's main themes here are ones that we have seen before: the failings of our big brains and the effects of chance events on our future. Repeatedly Vonnegut explains that our big brains - shrunken to allow for more streamlined swimming a million years in our future - and their failings constantly lead to problems in our modern world, allowing us to lie, to delude ourselves, and to choose actions clearly designed to overcome evolution and somehow remove ourselves from the gene pool. Chance also plays a huge part in shaping events, bringing together figures that will become our species's eventual genetic starting points.

Things I noticed along the way...(pages refer to the edition of the book shown at the top there)

• p8 - "...every adult human being back then had a brain weighing about thee kilograms! There was no end to the evil schemes that a thought machine that oversized couldn't imagine and execute." - the first mention of our big brains being the source of so many of our problems
• p14 - "in his native city of Midland City, OH" - Hey, we've seen Midland City before.
• p18 - "Only one English word adequately describes his transformation of the islands from worthless to priceless: magical." - A number of times in his books, Vonnegut had given us examples of objects whose value has changed dramatically because of one person's efforts or words or beliefs. This shows up again late in Galapagos when 'the nature cruise of the century' becomes The Nature Cruise of the Century because Jackie O signs on to take it and because the cruise's promoter refuses to refer to it as anything but 'the nature cruise of the century'.
• p19 - "The two with stars by their names would be dead before the sun went down." - Vonnegut again tells us of the fate of our characters long before that fate takes place.
• p24 - "It was all in people's heads. People had simply changed their opinion of paper wealth, but, for all practical purposes, the planet might as well have been knocked out of orbit by a meteor the size of Luxembourg." - Again, opinions changing the value of something - and our big brains causing problems.
• p65 - " 'Marriage: a community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two.' Ambrose Bierce (1842-?)...'Marriage from love, like vinegar from wine --/A sad, sour, sober beverage --by time/Is sharpen'd from its high celestial flavour,/Down to a very homely household savour.' Lord Byron (1788-1824) " - Two quotes from Vonnegut that don't present a positive view of marriage. Shocking...
• p70 - "I have already given my opinion as to the cause for the craze back then for having machines do everything that human beings did -- and I mean everything." - One of Vonnegut's recurring themes throughout his books is our urge to develop machines to replace ourselves and our subsequent dissatisfaction with being replaced.
• p74 - " And the people would eat all the food, gobble, gobble, yum, yum, and it would become nothing but excrement and memories." - Vonnegut seems to see everything we do as pointless and dramatically impermanent. 
• p81 - "And if I were criticizing human bodies as they were a million years ago, ... I would have two main points to make -- one of which I have surely made by now in my story: 'The brain is much too big to be practical.' " - Yup, big brains are the source of so many of our problems.
• p90 - ""He had just moved into new offices within the hollow crown of the Chrysler Building, formerly the showroom of a harp company" - We got to meet that harp company back in Jailbird.
• p108 - " Of course I love you,/So let's have a kid/Who will say exactly/What its parents did:/ 'Of course I love you,/So let's have a kid/Who will say exactly/What its parents did: ...Noble Claggett (1947-1966)" - We've seen a number of repetitive poems in Vonnegut's works (Yon Yonson from Slaughterhouse, for example). The mating dance of the blue-footed booby is also mentioned as being repetitive and without reason in this book.
• p111 - "Human beings use to be molecules which could do many, many different sorts of dances, or decline to dance at all-- as they pleased." - Vonnegut often refers to humans as nothing more than molecules or machines or animals trained or programmed to do what they do.
• p120 - "The other nobody was her husband, who himself played a crucial role in shaping human destiny by booking, when facing his own extinction, that one cheap cabin below the waterline." - Mary's husband Roy booked that cabin because he had gone insane, his big brain betraying him. If the cabin hadn't been booked, Mary wouldn't have become the Mother Nature to the future human race. Random events...
• p136 - "If I'm what's bothering you, you can tell me to take a flying f*** at a rolling doughnut, and I'll be the first to sympathize." - Vonnegut has used this phrase "a flying f*** at a rolling doughnut" before, in Slapstick.
• p149 - "His brain was telling him all sorts of things that were not true -- that he was the greatest dancer in the world, that he was the son of Frank Sinatra, that people envious of his dancing ability were attempting to destroy his brains with little radios, and on and on." - Dwayne Hoover had this happen to him. So did, perhaps, Billy Pilgrim. It's a common problem for Vonnegut's characters.
• p162 - "But then some tiny animals evolved into rodents. These easily found and ate the ggs of the tortoises -- all of the eggs." - The eventual downfall of the human race - other than the few survivors on Saint Rosalia - is a bacterium that evolves to destroy the eggs of human women. A parallel between us and animals...
• p219 - "I was the ghost of a ghost ship. I am the son of a big-brained science fiction writer, whose name was Kilgore Trout." - This is the first time that our narrator is given a name, and he is connected to Kilgore Trout, Vonnegut's literary alter ego.
• p226 - "Mary said things like this to *Wait in so many words, but her tone alone would have delivers the same messages: 'We love you. You are not alone. Everything is going to be all right,' and so on." - Vonnegut often explains that all we hope for is a bit of reassurance, kindness, and connection. Here, a dying man is comforted by just those simple messages.
• p229 - "and he was mowing the lawn of a fabulously well-to-do automobile dealer and owner of local fast-food restaurants named Dwayne Hoover." - Hey, Dwayne, it's been a while since we've seen you. In these pages we find out that Dwayne's son - "a good dancer and very musical, just like *Wait" - was actually not Dwayne's genetic son.
• p255 - "Like the people on this accursed ship, my boy, they are led by captains who have no charts or compasses, and who deal from minute to minute with no problem more substantial than how to protect their self-esteem." - Vonnegut doesn't have a whole lot of faith in our leaders.
• p292 - "Have natural rafts of vegetable matter from anywhere arrived here in my time, with or without passengers? No." - One of the theories (source) of how some of the larger land animals got to the Galapagos Islands is that they arrived via natural rafts, the mechanism of which is seriously in doubt. Vonnegut mentions this in passing, and I found it funny.

This cover, by the way,
 is my favorite of the various
ones I found online.

Vonnegut commits his apocalypse via evolution (bacteria evolving to feed upon human eggs) but also offers his version of salvation via the same mechanism of natural selection and evolution. The first child born on Saint Rosalia is mutated because of her mother's exposure to radiation from Hiroshima and comes out with a thin coating of fur, protecting her from the rough rocks on and the cold water around the island. This advantageous trait is then passed along generation by generation as the last vestiges of humanity evolve to their new habitat.

It's nice to read a great Vonnegut book again.

Three more books to go before the end of the year.

Ranking Vonnegut's books based on which ones I enjoyed most (not necessarily which are the best or the worst)...

1. Salughterhouse Five, of the Children's Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death (excellent)
2. Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday (excellent)
3. Cat's Cradle (really, very good)
4. Galapagos (really, very good)
5. Mother Night (really, very good)
6. God Bless You, Mr Rosewater, or Pearls Before Swine (good)
7. Jailbird (good)
8. Player Piano (meh)
9. Deadeye Dick (meh)
10. Slapstick (meh)
11. The Sirens of Titan (painful)

Still to come...Bluebeard...Hocus Pocus...Timequake...