There is no way a beautiful woman can live up to what she looks like for any appreciable length of time.
-Kurt Vonnegut
Timequake, it was said, would be Kurt Vonnegut’s last novel. As it turns out, he was, in fact, sadly correct. We all hoped that one day, Kurt would break his silence, get tired of not writing again, surprise us all with a broken promise. IT never happened.
For a lot of people, that’s really too bad — the book was not well-received. Which to me is too bad. Certainly, some of his books are better as whole pieces, at least more accessible. And Timequake really isn’t a novel, as much as a collection of ponderings, and documenting the process of writing the first iteration of Timequake, and bits and pieces of that novel, and musings on life.
It’s that experimental idea that makes the book so wonderful to read. Because it should be filled with a sense of disconnect, leaving you wanting a thread that runs through all, but it isn’t and doesn’t. Somehow it works.
The plot — such as it were — is simple, and brilliant in its simplicity: there is a timequake that rolls the years back a decade, from 2001 to 1991. And when time finally resets itself, and starts moving forward again, everything happens exactly as it once did for ten years. All the same actions and reactions, lives and deaths, triumphs and mistakes. This time, though, the person carries full awareness of what’s coming.
If you knew that you might one day have to relive these ten years of your life, would you be acting and reacting like you do? Knowing with all certainty that you’ll have to relive it again?
Timequake is filled with bits and pieces, perhaps a final clearing space for Vonnegut’s thoughts that never found a larger home over the years. I don’t know if he’d be really happy about having to relive any ten years of his life, but I know that being presented with that thought helped me shaped my own life going forward.
I try to reread it every six or eight months — both to remind myself of certain things, and because if I have to rewind and relive my life, at least I’ll know that every few months, I’ll be reading a good book again.
Many people need desperately to receive this message: “I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don’t care about them. You are not alone.”
-KV
