Title:: [[Timequake]] Authors:: [[Kurt Vonnegut]] Tags:: #fiction #vonnegut Read:: [[2022-12-28]] ## Editions - Edition:: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1997, First Edition - Original Copyright:: 1997 - Pages:: 219 ## Annotations # Vonnegut famously opens Timequake with the disclaimer that all persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental. The plot of what follows, however, is most certainly not coincidental. A key point in the novel is the celebration of the return of free will that was stolen from people by a timequake that forced everyone on Earth to relive the last ten years exactly as they first did, with an awareness that it was happening and an inability to do anything about it. I haven’t shied away from my feelings that many of Vonnegut’s later novels felt phoned-in, formulaic, and forced. As a reader, it felt like he was writing for what was expected of him and not because he had anything new to say. Almost like he was rewriting through reliving his own timequake. It’s clear Vonnegut knew this would be his last novel. He writes it with full awareness of his own mortality. The version we read is not what he first intended. He struggled with the book for years, toiling through writer’s block until he decided to abandon most of it and retell it as a meta-retrospective of his life and career masked in a retelling of the abandoned plot.  Does this sound like a confession? I think it does! My not so hot take is that Vonnegut spent most of his early career finding the sardonically poignant voice necessary to tell the story of the bombing of Dresden and the horrors of war in a way that no one else ever could. How could anyone feel like they had anything more worthwhile to say after writing Slaughterhouse 5? The expectation to keep saying something important is, I can only imagine, a heavy burden. It’s not that his later novels don’t have worthwhile things to say, it’s just the magnitude of what they say pales in comparison. I have to believe that Vonnegut was fully aware of this burden and felt it more with each novel.  Timequake was wonderful and Vonnegut is a writer that I will always love. My overall thoughts are so closely tied to the fact that I read his novels in a way-too-tight timeline of a calendar year, I do wonder if I would have different feelings if I read them over a longer timeline.  So read all of him, but take your time.