Breakfast of Champions: A Novel
“Marvelous . . . [Vonnegut] wheels out all the complaints about America and makes them seem fresh, funny, outrageous, hateful and lovable.”—The New York Times
In Breakfast of Champions, one of Kurt Vonnegut’s most beloved characters, the aging writer Kilgore Trout, finds to his horror that a Midwest car dealer is taking his fiction as truth. What follows is murderously funny satire, as Vonnegut looks at war, sex, racism, success, politics, and pollution in America and reminds us how to see the truth.
“Free-wheeling, wild and great . . . uniquely Vonnegut.”—Publishers Weekly
In Breakfast of Champions, one of Kurt Vonnegut’s most beloved characters, the aging writer Kilgore Trout, finds to his horror that a Midwest car dealer is taking his fiction as truth. What follows is murderously funny satire, as Vonnegut looks at war, sex, racism, success, politics, and pollution in America and reminds us how to see the truth.
“Free-wheeling, wild and great . . . uniquely Vonnegut.”—Publishers Weekly
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Community Reviews
Vonnegut really amped up the metafictional stuff to 11 here, and I'm all for it.
I really dug his whole idea for writing this novel as a kind of anti-story: being tired not only with traditional writing troupes but what they represent about the american ethos, and people who want to live their lives like clean, neat stories.
I really dug his whole idea for writing this novel as a kind of anti-story: being tired not only with traditional writing troupes but what they represent about the american ethos, and people who want to live their lives like clean, neat stories.
Reading Breakfast of Champions is like speaking to someone willing to give attention to details otherwise ignored but unwilling to reveal any emotional attachment to those details. It's a remarkable book that reads quickly, drawing the eye across the page, and that effectively marries modern and postmodern struggles in a way that accurately depicts life in the US.
I loved the beginning so much but it fizzled out a little. There were amazing sentences and thoughts throughout. A mentally ill author (fictional interior voice which I’m sure resembles Vonnegut but is not quite him- and oh hey was this also Kilgore or no?) writes about the breakdown of his mentally ill character, Dwayne.
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