Galapagos: A Novel

By Kurt Vonnegut

“A madcap genealogical adventure . . . Vonnegut is a postmodern Mark Twain.”—The New York Times Book Review

Galápagos takes the reader back one million years, to A.D. 1986. A simple vacation cruise suddenly becomes an evolutionary journey. Thanks to an apocalypse, a small group of survivors stranded on the Galápagos Islands are about to become the progenitors of a brave, new, and totally different human race. In this inimitable novel, America’ s master satirist looks at our world and shows us all that is sadly, madly awry–and all that is worth saving.

Praise for Galápagos

“The best Vonnegut novel yet!”—John Irving

“Beautiful . . . provocative, arresting reading.”—USA Today

“A satire in the classic tradition . . . a dark vision, a heartfelt warning.”—The Detroit Free Press
 
“Interesting, engaging, sad and yet very funny . . . Vonnegut is still in top form. If he has no prescription for alleviating the pain of the human condition, at least he is a first-rate diagnostician.”—Susan Isaacs, Newsday
 
“Dark . . . original and funny.”—People
 
“A triumph of style, originality and warped yet consistent logic . . . a condensation, an evolution of Vonnegut’s entire career, including all the issues and questions he has pursued relentlessly for four decades.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer
 
“Wild details, wry humor, outrageous characters . . . Galápagos is a comic lament, a sadly ironic vison.”—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
 
“A work of high comedy, sadness and imagination.”—The Denver Post
 
“Wacky wit and irreverent imagination .  . . and the full range of technical innovations have made [Vonnegut] America’s preeminent experimental novelist.”—The Minneapolis Star and Tribune

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Aug 11, 2009
• ISBN: 9780440339083

Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut was a master of contemporary American Literature. His black humor, satiric voice, and incomparable imagination first captured America's attention in The Siren's of Titan in 1959 and established him as ""a true artist"" with Cat's Cradle in 1963. He was, as Graham Greene has declared, ""one of the best living American writers.""

Reviews for Galapagos

[technodiabla · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Galapagos is a highly cynical Darwinian tale of the demise and rebuilding of the human race told in true Vonnegut style. I found it to be an approachable read that seems like it must have been ahead of its time in 1985. It's as if Vonnegut was peering well into the 21st century and cautioning us. The subtle and less-than-subtle commentary of the natural selection and survival of the fittest makes for an interesting conversation. I suspect Vonnegut had mixed opinions. One of my favorite Vonnegut novels!

[danielstj · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This was decent, but I felt that Vonnegut really didn't put as much effort-- or style, into this one as his other books. While the quotations were interesting, I felt that he didn't expand enough on them to make them really worthwhile and therefore it made me question the integrity and purpose behind them in the book. Overall, not bad-- but nothing that great.

[jaybee2008 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

weirdly freaky!

[amobogio · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Terrible, mean spirited book lacking even a single likeable character and without a trace of humour.

[unclebob53703 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I read a lot of his stuff back when I was in college (in a previous century) and saw this book on a list of post-apocalypse novels, which I am collecting. It was more or less what I expected, sad, funny, very much in the style I remembered. His thesis here is that our species big brains are an evolutionary disadvantage, and the book follows this to a conclusion that is at once bizarre and entirely sensible. There are even a couple beloved old characters of his tossed in for good measure. Very happy I got this

[lararose · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This was my first Vonnegut novel, and I'm not sure what to say about it. Its a quick and sometimes thought-provoking read but lacks character development. It doesn't have me rushing to read Vonnegut again.

[aug3zimm-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I liked the disjointed, chronological but not narrative and in a weird way it was very comforting. Its been 30 years since this book was written and we haven't destroyed ourselves yet, even though we think we are right on the cusp of it (and did 30 years ago, too). We are our own biggest enemies (that "big brain" thing), yet maybe what makes that the case is also what makes us human? What defines a human and what makes them worthwhile? Composing symphonies or philosophical knowledge or getting so drunk you can't properly navigate? Anyway, an entertaining, odd and interesting read that brings up some interesting questions but not in a way that will haunt you if you can't discover an answer.

[lamotamant · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I think Vonnegut is one of those authors that should be read by everyone at some point in their lives and that point largely differs for everyone. For me, the point might have passed where the overall theme of the book would have been novel and ensnaring. So, strictly from an analytical point, it's a good enough book with a simple theme, the value of humans/humanity. We're led along by a seemingly omnipresent narrator and introduced to characters that have quite a lot going on under the surface but it's also so briefly touched upon that it seemed pretty vague. Which kind of makes the point of the theme, neatly enough.

I don't know, I'm still a little undecided about this book. I didn't fall for it quite as much as I imagined I would but I liked it well enough.

[altheaann · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I've kind of intentionally avoided Vonnegut since disliking the couple of books I read by him back in highschool. But, on the urging of many Vonnegut-fans, I agreed to read this one. Well, it was OK.
I might have really liked it if it had been about a fifth of the length it was. It really is a one-joke story, and it stretches out for far too long. It's also much too enamored with its own cleverness.
The concept is that it's narrated from the point of view of a ghost, a million years in the future. He reiterates, repeatedly, that the downfall of humanity was their big brains, and that now that the descendants of humanity have evolved into simple, seal-like creatures, there's no trouble.
And how did we get there? Well, back in the 80's (present, for this book) there was advertised a 'Nature Cruise of the Century' to the Galapagos Islands. It was supposed to be filled with all kinds of celebrities, but due to political and economic strife, most of the scheduled guests don't show up. The destined parents of future humanity are an odd, ragtag bunch...

[burritapal · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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

[magicians_nephew · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Kurt Vonnegut's Galapagos is a book he wrote in the latter end of his career. Now instead of "Kilgore Trout" we have Kilgore Trout's son telling the story of a pandemic and mass diet from the perspective of a million years from now. He could have left - gone through "the Blue Tunnel" to the afterlife, but don't you know - he wanted to stay and hear the end of the story.The human race has gone through a plague and a purge and has almost died out. A ragtag band of survivors have taken a ship and found themselves stranded on an island in the Galapagos chain. Will the human race survive? Yes . . . and no. This is a novel of ideas much more than a novel of character or plot. Like Mark Twain before him, Vonnegut is chronicling "The Damned Human Race" and frankly he doesn't think much of it.But even here is this slow moving and very didactic book there are characters you care about and acts of great kindness and generousity and love.Perhaps there are worse fates for the human race than to spend its time catching fish and having exuberant guilt free sex play in a sunny paradise.It's no "Slaughterhouse Five" but its still Vonnegut and still thoughtful and interesting.

[ffortsa · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

was not much impressed with this book when I read it, but it made for a very interesting discussion in our reading group. Even people who, like me, found the tone annoying were adding to the discussion, and it did give me some added perspective. So maybe three stars, for its ability to stir the discourse.

[shanaqui_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Galapagos is a fun read, playful; for a book about the end of the world, it's certainly more humorous and light-hearted than most, except perhaps Good Omens. The narration is fun -- the narrator is pretty much a character, but also pretty much omniscient, so you get to know everything that's going, but with opinions into the bargain.

When I think about it, though, I can't find much substance in this. It's very repetitive, and if there's one single point that comes out of it strongly, it's that humans have big brains and we cause our own problems, and maybe it would be better if we evolved to have smaller brains and less able to cause trouble. Which... sure, fine, but ~250 pages of story all focused around that begins to lose its charm.

Still, that's what saves it -- the charm, and the fact that the narrative reveals facts haphazardly, so you have to hang on to almost the last page to piece together exactly what happened throughout the book. It is charming, like I said, and very readable, but... Shrug?

[rockinghorsedreams-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Excellent silly book. I like the way everything is pretty much right on the table from the beginning.

[behemothing-2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The copy I read had a really nice cover. That's about all I've got to say. Oh and I liked it a lot a lot.

[steadfastreader · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Classic Vonnegut. Commentary on Vietnam, the human condition and how we'll eventually destroy ourselves. Satire. Awesome.

[wethewatched · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

As a writer myself, I am so impressed with just how coherently Kurt Vonnegut can ramble. Vonnegut takes a goofy story about the time when humans still had big brains, chops it up into pieces and reorders into it into an even goofier story. Quite fun, if perhaps not as substantial as Slaughterhouse-Five.

[isabelx_21 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

People still get the hiccups, incidentally. They still have no control over whether they do it or not. I often hear them hiccupping, involuntarily closing their glottises and inhaling spasmodically, as they lie on the broad white beaches or paddle around the blue lagoons. If anything, people hiccup more now than they did a million years ago. This has less to do with evolution, I think, than with the fact that so many of them gulp down raw fish without chewing them up sufficiently.(PEOPLE)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 laughs and laughs, just as people would have done a million years ago.The Nature Cruise of the Century is the over-hyped maiden voyage of a new cruse ship to the Galapagos Islands, which has attracted celebrities from Jackie Onassis to Mick Jagger, but a world economic and political crisis means that only six passengers have made it to the port of Guayaquil in Ecuador and they expect the cruise to be cancelled at any moment. There was still plenty of food and fuel and so on for all the human beings on the planet, as numerous as they had become, but millions upon millions of them were starting to starve to death now. The healthiest of them could go without food for only about forty days, and then death would come.And this famine was as purely a product of oversize brains as Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.It was all in people's heads. People had simply changed their opinions of paper wealth, but, for all practical purposes, the planet might as well have been knocked out of orbit by a meteor the size of Luxembourg.When a small group of people end up marooned on an uninhabited island in the north of the Galapagos, they expect to be rescued, but humanity is in melt-down, and the islanders end up as the sole fertile representatives of the human race. Over the next million years, they evolve into creatures rather like seals and their brains shrink to allow their heads to be more stream-lined. According to Leon Trout, the ghost of a ship worker killed during the construction of the cruise ship, all mankind's problems were caused by our big brains. Apparently our descendants are much happier, lying round on the beach, with plenty of fish to eat and sharks to keep their numbers down so the population doesn't outgrow the Galapagos Islands (since the bacteria that causes human infertility is still extant everywhere else).

[jmoncton_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Read this book while in the Galapagos - pure Vonnegut - odd, quirky, laugh-at-loud funny.

[kirstiecat · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I've seen some well deserved ratings for many of Vonnegut's other books but oddly enough not this one and it's definitely one of my favorites.

I hadn't read this book since 2003 and this was my third time, after the last of the giant tortoises on Galapagos died so recently I felt I needed to have this re0visit with Vonnegut, who was much like the giant tortoise at the end I think..strange wonderful and one of a kind and when Vonnegut became extinct, it was just as much a loss to the world. A re-occurring theme in Galapagos (instead of the So it Goes saying that frequently invades the writing style of many of his others) is a yet similar sentiment when a human being dies that well this human being wasn't going to compose Beethoven's Ninth Symphony anyways. But Vonnegut did far greater things than Beethoven did for people like me. He was a philosopher who forever sensed the tragicomedy of the past, present, and future, and even more wondrous was able to share all his notions and ideas with the rest of the planet. Vonnegut gave us many gifts. They are gifts to enrich and pass along to others just as they are gifts to help increase our sense of insight into the world and to humanity.

Vonnegut, if you are a ghost who, like our storyteller of Galapagos, has chosen to exist for a million years before venturing into the blue afterlife tunnel, I hope you sense your value on this planet and how much you are missed by people like me.

Getting more specific to the novel, there is a clear sense of Vonnegut exploring ideas of evolution and possibilities of war and nuclear radiation factoring into all that...and, for most of the novel the ghost of the protagonist (who is also the son of Kilgore Trout, an often appearing character in some of Vonnegut's other novels), seems to think it's just fine that human beings evolved into furry seal like creatures with fins instead of hands, smaller brains, and much shorter lifespans (and therefore able to avoid all of the pain of so many genetic diseases such as Huntington's and also diseases of aging such as Alzheimer's.) Yet, it's obvious Vonnegut sees avoiding all this pain and agony also leads to the sacrifice of great art, music, and literature. It's just too bad humans typically prefer to build weapons to kill each other instead of all that, of course.


It's always a delight to see some reappearing characters like Kilgore Trout mentioned as well, even though he's not the center of the story by any means. In many ways, I've always thought one must re-read all of Vonnegut's novels again and again throughout life because they all make sense as one grand intersecting story in a way that enhances them. In other words, one cannot sense the same kind of greatness reading them singularly. They are all like great friends on Vonnegut's journey through life and understanding the adventures of all of his characters simultaneously seems key to fully comprehending Vonnegut's meaning and perhaps his own rich journey.

Truly, though this book takes place in 1986, Vonnegut's ideas about humans as they are having the capacity to act on destroying each other and what that would lead to as well as looking at the trends then now that still exist today such as food scarcity and extreme classism are very relevant. Take heed! Because, as Vonnegut talks about all of the easiness of humans evolving into smaller brained creatures who care more about their own survival than any other high concepts, he is simultaneously revisiting all of humanity's best words on all sorts of topics. It is so clear there is a loss to be had even if our big brains are diabolocal.


As in many Vonnegut novels, this will make you question, search, laugh, and cry quite a bit. It's written in more of a matter of fact kind of narrative-like it or not, this is how humans died and how others evolved but I believe Vonnegut was a deep feeling person and for as many times that he wrote the words "So it Goes" throughout his life, he was able to despair in humanity's pitfalls because he was able to sense them so deeply within his own life's experiences. I do believe Vonnegut also took joy in the idea of random luck, too, and the utter absurdity of luck sometimes. Thank goodness Vonnegut didn't perish in war. Thankfully, he led a very long life. He was no Beethoven...he was something better, something richer, something fully evolved.


Favorite quotes:

pg. 25 "To the credit of humanity as it used to be: More and more people were saying that their brains were irresponsible, unreliably, hideously dangerous, wholly unrealistic,-were simply no damn good."

pg. 29 "If I may insert a personal note at this point: When I was alive, I often received advice from my own big brain which, in terms of m own survival, or the survival of the human race, for that matter, can be charitably described as questionable. Example: It had me join the United States Marines and go fight in Vietnam.

Thanks a lot, big brain."

pg. 98 "In the era of big brains, life stories could end up any which way. Look at mine."

pg. 129 "This was a particularly tragic flaw a million years ago, since the people who were best informed about the state of the planet, like *Andrew MacIntosh, for example, and rich and powerful enough to slow down all the waste and destruction going on, were by definition well fed.

So everything was always just fine as far as they were concerned.

For all the computers and measuring instruments and news gatherers and evaluators and memory banks and libraries and experts on this and that at their disposal, their deaf and blind bellies remained the final judges of how urgent this or that problem, such as the destruction of North America's and Europe's forests by acid rain, say might really be."


pg. 187 "His name was Guillermo Reyes, and he was able to survive at such an altitude because his suit and helmet were inflated with an artificial atmosphere. People use to be so marvelous, making impossible dreams they made come true."


pg. 233 "Human beings were so prolific back then that conventional explosions like that had few if any long term biological consequences. Even at the end of protracted wars, there still seemed to be plenty of people around. Babies were always so plentiful that serious efforts to reduce the population by means of violence were doomed to failure. They no more left permanent injuries except for the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then did Bahia de Darwin as it slit and roiled the trackless sea.

It was humanity's ability to heal so quickly. by means of babies, which encouraged so many people to think of explosions as show business, as highly theatrical forms of self expression, and little more.

What humanity was about to lose, though, except for one tiny colony on Santa Roaslia, was what the trackless sea could never lose, so long as it was made of water: the ability to heal itself.

As far as humanity was concerned, all wounds were about to become very permanent. And high explosives weren't going to be a branch of show business anymore."

pg. 259 "Nothing ever happens here anymore that I haven't seen or heard so many times before. Nobody, surely, is going to write Beethoven's Ninth Symphony-or tell a lie, or start a Third World War.

Mother was right: Even in the darkest times, there really was still hope for humankind."

pg. 266 "That, in my opinion, was the most diabolical aspect of those old-time big brains: They would tell their owners, in effect, 'Here is a crazy thing we could actually do, probably, but we would never do it, of course. It's just there to think about.'

And then, as though in trances, the people would really do it-have slaves fight each other to the death in the Colosseum, or burn people alive in the public square for holding opinions which were locally unpopular, or build factories whose only purpose was to kill people in industrial quantities, or to blue up whole cities, and on and on."

pg. 270 "And why was quiet desperation such a widespread malady back then, and especially among men? Yet again I trot onstage the only real villain in my story: the oversize human brain.

Nobody leads a life of quiet desperation nowadays. The mass of men was quietly desperate a million years ago because the infernal computers inside their skills were incapable of restraint or idleness; were forever demanding more challenging problems which life could not provide."

pg. 289 "This animal had its eyes on the ends of stalks, a design perfected by the Law of Natural Selection many, many millions of years ago. It was a flawless part in the clockwork of the universe. There was no defect in it which might yet need to be modified. One thing it surely did not need was a bigger brain.

What was it going to do with a bigger brain? Compose Beethoven's Ninth Symphony?

Or perhaps write these lines:

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players/
They have their exists and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many
parts.....?

(William Shakespeare (1564-1616)



pg. 292 "Do people still know they are going to die sooner or later? No. Fortunately, in my humble opinion, they have forgotten that."

pg. 294-295 "But that Swede foud something to say which made me cry like a baby-at last, at last. He was as surprised as I was when I cried and cried.

Here is what he said: 'I notice your name is Trout. Is there any chance you are related to the wonderful science fiction writer, Kilgore Trout?'

[nickidemus · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Basics

A disembodied spirit "living" a million years in the future gives us the lowdown on exactly how evolution reached the point it did. Which is to say mankind took a sudden leap from having big brains to having small ones. And why having small ones is actually better.

My Thoughts

This is a hard one to talk about. This is the first Vonnegut I’ve read that didn’t knock my socks off. Did I hate it? No, not at all. But after reading five Vonnegut novels last year and being head-over-heels for each one, I’m bemused by the fact that I just thought this one was good. Not great. Good. Maybe even just… okay. I’ve over-analyzed like a mother trying to figure out why that is. Technically, it should have all the charm of his other books, but somehow I wasn’t feeling it here.

And that’s where reviewing becomes hard. Because I don’t think it has anything to do with aspects of the book that need to be picked apart, though I’ll probably try to anyway. I think in this case it’s me and my tastes and the semi-slump I’ve been in when it comes to reading this month. I felt like I plodded through this book, whereas Vonnegut has been a writer I devour every time. I’m reluctant to blame him with that.

I find myself wanting to compare this book to Breakfast of Champions. I’ve seen people accuse that book of being too flighty, all over the place, no direction. I felt like there was a distinct method to the madness in that book. By contrast, there were times when I felt I was seeking the method with Galapagos and finding only a lack of damns that Vonnegut gave when it came to story structure. That’s typical of him, but I think Galapagos proved to me it works better some times than others.

He’s clearly the type to not focus on the science in his science fiction, and that has never bothered me. Over-explaining isn’t always fun and can just bog things down. But there was a moment in this book that made me bristle. It’s not science-related really. It’s more just a symptom that connects with his need to skim over the science. This book is a story about an apocalypse, and it starts with everyone deciding money is now worthless. Maybe he meant the stock market crashed super hard, but the way he put it was to say people realized money is worthless, and it felt cheap to me. Social commentary, I get it. But it didn’t work for me. Then he goes on, over halfway through the book, to come up with more ways that humankind is going extinct, and it felt like he was shrugging and saying, “oh yeah, I forgot to put that in. Sorry. Here’s some BS that should cover it.” It made me unsure that he cared about what he was writing at all.

But were there things I liked? Of course! Vonnegut’s unique brand of philosophy is here in abundance. So is his trademark sense of humor. It’s full of universal truths and nods to old characters and amusing tidbits and everything I love about his writing. I just didn’t connect with it like I normally do.

Final Rating

3.5/5

[bookworm12_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Vonnegut tends to be one of those authors that you just get or you don’t. I love his sarcastic style, but I know it doesn’t work for everyone. I also think I have a particular soft spot for him because he is a fellow Hoosier. In this novel we meet Mary, a widow who is taking a cruise to the Galapagos islands. Little does she know that their cruise ship will soon become a second Noah’s ark when the world ends and the only people left are those on the ship. The story is told a million years in the future by the son of Kilgore Trout. The few remaining humans must attempt to restart the human race on the Galapagos islands. One of the themes in Vonnegut’s work is the absurdity of man; our willingness to destroy both ourselves and each other. This is a central point in Galapagos as well. He can’t help but add a few lines about his own big brain’s crazy idea to go fight in Vietnam, which echoes his own experience fighting in WWII. BOTTOM LINE: An overlooked classic and one of Vonnegut’s better books. If you’ve already checked out his big ones (Breakfast of Champions, Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle) then pick this one up. It’s an incredibly quick read and sure to make you laugh if you love Vonnegut’s sense of humor. “I say the same thing about the death of James Wait: "Oh, well - he wasn't going to write Beethoven's Ninth Symphony anyway." This wry comment on how little most of us were likely to accomplish in life, no matter how long we lived, isn't my own invention.”

[krazy4katz · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

What should I say? Not my favorite Vonnegut, but Vonnegut is one of my favorite authors. A fascinating premise -- that we are not finished evolving and that we may be in for a redo in the next millennium due to the inability of our big brains to protect our bodies from killing ourselves off. In fact, our big brains may be the biggest problem for the entire earth. Darwinian to the core but taking a longer view. Humorous, ironic, twisted, as always.

[rolyat-2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

i read this book in 1985 and loved it than. after rereading it now, i still love it. def. one of my top 5 fave books.

[browner56 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I suppose that I should start by saying that this is among the saddest reviews that I have ever written. Throughout my high school and college years, Kurt Vonnegut was one of my literary heroes. I voraciously consumed everything he wrote and spent countless hours discussing his clever wordplay and the intricacies of his ideas (or at least my perceptions of those ideas) with all of my friends who were similarly smitten. However, like most love affairs from that time in one’s life, the ardor soon cooled and I had stopped reading the author’s work altogether before he published Galapagos. Indeed, it was only when I was on the verge of my own trip to the Galapagos Islands some 25 years later that I decided to read the novel. Whether driven by nostalgia for the past or a simple attempt to pair my passions for travel and literature, it was a decision that did not end as well as I had hoped.I suspect that Vonnegut intended this to be work of meta-fiction: a straightforward science fiction story wrapped inside of an Important Message about the foibles of human nature. However, Galapagos fails badly in both respects. The plot involves a ghost from a million years in the future—the son of Kilgore Trout, for fans of the author—who observes the ill-fated outcome of a much-ballyhooed “Nature Cruise of the Century” from the Ecuadorian port city of Guayaquil to the Galapagos Islands where Charles Darwin first began his ruminations on what would become the theory of Natural Selection. This is truly thin stuff that is simply uninteresting and, worse, poorly conceived. In fact, the only purpose the narrative seems to serve is to promote the author’s main argument that the “big brains” humans possessed in the late-20th century were the source of all of the world’s problems and that mankind could not survive until it evolved into a simpler life form. However, such a tired argument holds little substance, which does not stop the author from repeating it scores of times throughout the book.I wish that I had read this novel when it was first published in 1985 for two reasons. First, reading it more than a quarter-century later, the book felt hopelessly dated with its integral references to celebrities such as Jackie Kennedy Onassis and Johnny Carson whose stars have long since faded. Of course, as Jane Austen and Gustave Flaubert have proven, it is possible to write stories that still seem fresh today despite the words on the page being centuries old; unfortunately, Vonnegut’s work does not stand the test of time in that way. Second, I really wonder if I would have found Galapagos to be compelling—or even liked it at all—if I had read it back when it may have seemed new and insightful. Sadly, given its simplistic, heavy-handed message and repetitive use of foreshadowing, I suspect that the answer to that question is “no”. Reading this novel, then, was ultimately just a reminder that the ship of fiction that Vonnegut guided sailed away for me a long time ago.

[5hrdrive · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Vonnegut at the top of his game. All the humor, satire and scathing social commentary that we've come to expect is here - along with a great story. And the narrator is a ghost from one million years in the future... who else could come up with an idea like that?

[emscape · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In this cautionary tale, Kurt Vonnegut tries to point out that a lot of mankind's problems would be solved if we didn't have such excessively large brains. Apparently, animals have the right idea, just eating and screwing and surviving their way through life. I disagree with this premise, because my large brain is essentially what allows me to read books by Kurt Vonnegut.In order to hammer home his theory, Vonnegut has the ghost of Kilgore Trout's son Leon tell us about "The Nature Cruise of the Century" upon which many celebrities are supposed to travel to the Galapagos Islands. He does not tell the tale in a linear format, rather mentioning extremely important bits of information (what one might call spoilers if I were to mention them in this review) right at the very beginning, and then sort of filling in the details as we go along. His narrator is also very conversational in his first-person account of the events. He frequently divulges things in an aside that one might think are completely irrelevant, but turn out to be quite germane later on. Vonnegut is the inventor of the puzzle-book format, paving the way for those like Danielewski and Eichner, and he proves it with this work.

[jimnightshade · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

i feel like its just a lesser version of Breakfast Of Champions, but i loved B.O.C., so i can still give this one a 3.5

[booksfordinner · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

KV at his best. All the world infertile, a fictional island in the Galapagos one million years in the past (1986 of course), and the ghost of the son of Kilgore Trout.

[weeksj10 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

In this wondrously funny and enlightening book Vonnegut gives a simple explanation for all the troubles of humanity: our brains are too big to be practical. The solution? Evolve smaller, more "streamline" brains. Read this book; it is one of the best books of one of the best authors that this overcrowded, sick, dying planet has to offer. I would also like to note that although Vonnegut does have a sense of dark humor and his satirical novels often poke fun at the direction of humanity, he also gives us a hopeful message for the future of human kind, although these messages are often delivered in a backhanded, disguised manner.Simply wonderful, thought-provoking, and inspiring.