This book was not for me at this time. The author has an interesting storytelling method, revealing a bit more about the plot and characters bit by bit as we move from one character to the next. I'm not sure how to describe it, but the clock moves forward very slowly. Like an old typewriter, you get to the end of one moment, hit carriage return, begin again on that same moment with a different character. I read far enough to know that the author had no intention of ever letting us like any of the people in the story. I can see where this would appeal to different types of readers, it just didn't appeal to me.

I wanted to like this book, but it just moved soooo sloooow. I made it about a third of the way through, and they are still in the damn hotel! Most of it is just forshadowing, either of what will happen to these specific people or of what will happen to the human race a million years in the future. ( )

This is a funny, satyrical book not unlike Slaughterhouse-Five. I really liked it. Those two are the only two Vonnegut books I've read so far and hopefully the rest of them are equally good.

Like in Slaughterhouse-Five, the narrator here is omniscient, but instead of being the author's voice or a meta-comment on his own experience, here he chooses -brilliantly- a ghost, that of his alter-ego Kilgore Trout's son. He's not an important character, just a disembodied voice that tells the main story, but his own story is where Vonnegut's warmth comes through. He, too, (Leon Trout, that is) has been scarred by a war.

But the book itself is a play on Darwin's evolutionary theory, using it (and the Galapagos islands) as a backdrop against which to tell a surreal story about a group of people surviving a plague that makes the rest of the world infertile, by shipwrecking in the Galapagos, and how, over 1 million years of evolution later, their big mammal brains have evolved so that they're little more than animals now. No tools, no philosophy, no worrying about the future. Just fishing with their fins and sleek bodies.

What in a lesser writer would have sounded stupid, or a mean critique of manking, or preposterous, plays to Vonnegut's strengths. He fills his characters with humanity -that is, failures- and each phrase is beatiful to read and say aloud. The story jumps back and forth as the narrator fancies, very much like in Slaughterhouse-five, only the excuse here for that technique is not Billy Pilgrim being unstuck in time, but rather that a million years is a long time for a ghost to dwell on humanity's foibles, and so we give him a little leeway to shape the story however he wants to.

The book is brilliant, and I didn't give it a five because I felt it lacked a stronger conclusion or another anchor to the story. The very nature of the back and forth technique takes some of the energy out of the end of the story, but that's what gives the overall experience a very solid feel, without ups and downs in plot.
Likewise, the characters are well-crafted, but not especially likable or interesting. Only the narrator, whose voice grows in strength and weight as the story rolls out, ends up being our own small conscience in our big brains. ( )

Strange book, quirky and unexpected. I’m glad I read it but I’m not rushing to read his other books. ( )

I love Vonnegut. This book made me very happy; it was entertaining and it made happen what I fantasize about. ( )