Galapagos: A Novel Author: Visit Amazon's Kurt Vonnegut Page | Language: English | ISBN:
0385333870 | Format: PDF
Galapagos: A Novel Description
From School Library Journal
YA Leon Trout, the ghost of a decapitated shipbuilder, narrates the humorous, ironic and sometimes carping decline of the human race, as seen through the eyes and minds of the survivors of a doomed cruise to the Galapagos Islands. Vonnegut's cast of unlikely Adams and Eves setting out in a Noah's ark includes Mary Hepburn, an American biology teacher and recent widow; Zenji Hiroguchi, a Japanese computer genius (who does not make it to the ship, although his language-translating and quotation-spouting computer does); his wife, Hisako, carrying radiated genes from the atomic bombs; James Wait, who has made a fortune marrying elderly women; and Captain Aolph von Kleist. Also included: six orphaned girls of the Kana-bono cannibal tribe, who will become the founding mothers of the fisherfolk after bacteria render all other women infertile. Serious fans of Vonnegut's wry and ribald prose will welcome this tale of the devolution of superbrained humans into gentle swimmers with small brains, but others may find this Darwinian survival tale too packed with ecological and sociological details that trap the story line in a series of literary devices, albeit very clever ones. Mary T. Gerrity, Queen Anne School, Upper Marlboro, Md.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
For many Vonnegut fans, Galapagos will be a disappointment. The story is set ``one million years ago, back in 1986 A.D.'' and concerns the maiden voyage of the Bahia de Darwin to the Galapa gos Islands. The narrator is a ghost, and the main characters are those involved with the cruise. As the narrative devel ops, we learn that people have evolved from having ``big brains'' that always get them in trouble, to creatures with flippersbut they keep getting eaten by sharks. The narration jumps back and forth between past and future, so that there is no real sense of what life is like in the ``present'' of the story, and it is difficult to grasp what these new hu mans are really like. Vonnegut's usual stylistic devices just don't work here. Buy for demand. Susan Avallone, ``Library Journal''
Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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- Series: Delta Fiction
- Paperback: 336 pages
- Publisher: Dial Press Trade Paperback; Reissue edition (January 12, 1999)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0385333870
- ISBN-13: 978-0385333870
- Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 0.8 inches
- Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
"And people still laugh about as much as they ever did, despite their shrunken brains. If a bunch of them are lying around on a beach, and one of them farts, everybody else around laughs and laughs, just as people would have done a million years ago."
Galapagos was the very first Kurt Vonnegut book that I ever read- serendipity saw me come across it at the school library when I was thirteen years old. Thirteen years later I don't think a more glorious introduction could have been made.
You know what is going to happen right from the beginning, the ghost of Leon Trout (son of fictitious sci-fi author Kilgore Trout) has no qualms about informing you of how, a million years in the future (well, 999,980 if you consider that most of the events were meant to have taken place in 1986), the Laws of Natural Section have seen human beings evolve, their Big Brains shrinking and their bodies adapting to a life of fishing and copulation on the Galapagos Archipelago. The tale that follows then is the story of how `modern' humans came to be, the chronicle of the few passengers who stole away from a dying planet on the Bahia de Darwin and found themselves stranded on a volcanic rock for the remainder of their lives and thus making them the Adam and Eves of a new world where children are furry and have flippers.
It isn't just about Natural Selection, but an array of other subjects that are too far reaching to go into now, but would make it an enjoyable book to study further. He does make it clear that we don't fit into this world and we are destroying it, that our big brains cause most of the problems in the world and it would be much easier if we evolved to the same level as the animals that surround us.
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