Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut
My one liner: Galapagos is Kurt Vonnegut's intrusive thoughts on the absurdity of the human condition; he uses the concepts of evolution as a theme to display the method to his madness.
I first picked up Galapagos towards the end of the summer in the Holmdel library. I had 30 minutes to kill and said why not. I was instantly reminded of Kurt Vonnegut's outlandish humor and absurdist philosophy. After a few months of not really touching much fiction, I've finally been able to escape the seriousness of business reading and get back to the enjoyable stuff.
Galapagos is a great pass time. It reminds me more of Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy by Douglas Adams more than the usual Vonnegut I read, although to be fair I've only read his short stories. Because Vonnegut takes an absurdist position on so many aspects of human behavior and society throughout the book, he gives himself room to make to great social commentary. Some of it is subtle and other times it's scathingly not. The book starts off in a world within a financial crisis, where money from most governments no longer held any real tradable value (they were just pieces of paper). A crew of characters, in which about half of them would *die within two days(Vonnegut always used the * to denote somebody would soon be dead), were set to be on the Bahia de Darwin aka "the nature cruise of the century" in the Galapagos islands. Vonnegut uses each character and situations to display various human paradoxes that just simply don't make sense by normal logical standards. It's funnier when you realize how common they are everyday and how vital they are to the working of human society.
Overall, I enjoyed reading the book but at the same time I did struggle to read it straight. I got quite bored at some times, probably because it didn't have a very strong plot. Not that it should have... it's built on randomness after all.
Some notable moments:
The parallel of how the launching of a missile was virtually identical with the role of male animals in the reproductive process (Ch 34)
Big Brains
The inner workings and desires ($) of Andrew MacIntosh -- quite similar to several people I've met
"Like so many other pathological personalities in positions of power a million years ago, he might do almost anything on impulse, feeling nothing much. The logical explanations for his actions, invented at leisure, always came afterwards"
The misunderstanding between the Hiroguchi's with the Mandarax
The use of random genetic mutations and diseases (Huntington's, blindness // retinitis pigmintosa, furry nuclear babies, etc)
"Nobody nowadays, I must say, expects to be rescued from anything, once he or she is more than nine months old. That's how long human childhood lasts nowadays" -- in reference to developing countries
"He had transformed what was to have been a routine, two-week trip out to the islands and back into the nature cruise of the century. How had he worked such a miracle? By never calling it anything but 'The Nature Cruise of the Century'"
Noble Clagget's poem about the bird courtship dance that repeated the phrase (which should be taken into parallel about Mary Hepburn and suburban boredom/routine)
"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;
Of course I love you,
So let's have a kid
Who will say exactly
What its parents did--;
Et cetera"
Next on the reading list:
On China by Henry Kissinger
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu