Customer Reviews
Listen: - By: D. Bowtell, 10 Sep 2008 
Sordid, repellant, charming, witting, full of interesting insight & eminently readable. And so on.
It does make you wonder if this ever happened to Kurt.
Funny and thought-provoking - By: Ian Gilroy, 21 Aug 2008 It's hard to know how to sum this up but it's definitely one of the most interesting & funny books I've read in a long time. It plays with conventions - hand-drawn images interspersed in the text, repeated breaking of the fourth walll (including making the author a protagonist), frequent non-sequiturs & so on - & yet it doesn't come across as fussy or pretentious. It's a genuinely funny exploration of the author's mind & a satire on America and, despite containing an interesting passage that describes how traditional storytelling is a bad thing, I still always wanted to know what happened next.
This is a book full of interesting ideas & memorable characters & I'd recommend this to anyone open-minded enough not to freak out when confronted by the first hand-drawn sketch.
Not Utter Claptrap but Dazzling Brilliance - By: Satirical Lyrical, 21 Dec 2006 'A Reader' clearly hasn't a clue. He just doesn't get it. 'Breakfast of Champions' is obviously one of the best satirical novels ever written (better in my opinion than the long-winded Catch 22). As I said, 'A Reader' hasn't a clue & here's why:
In 'Breakfast of Champions', Kurt Vonnegut has created a book resembling a children's encyclopedia. Is is written in simple language, short paragraphs & short sentences. It is acompanied by crude pictures drawn by the author himself. Vonnegut's principal strategy is to contrive the voice of a naif, which in his case is the voice of a fifty-year-old naif. The use of this voice has two risks: 1) It will palll & weary the reader with its limitations of tone. 2) The naive observations will finallly seem to represent the mind of the author, which is to say that the book is apt to make Vonnegut himself appear simple-minded.
But on the other hand, the possibilities of the naive voice are considerable, & Vonnegut exploits them alll: being naive, the narrator has no sense of structure or priority & thus can include anything, as indeed he does, moving in a few pages through matters of eschatology & teleology, cornballl manners of the Midwest, irrelevant statistics, perverse sexuality, washroom graffiti, & automobile sales techniques. The satiric possibilities of the naive voice, moreover, are classic, & Vonnegut directs his innocent voice at American guile & idiocy with considerable effect. He explains, for example, with the same dull ingeniousness that he uses to explain the bucket of fried chicken, the function of the body bag in gathering together the fragments of a soldier killed in action...
Need I say more?
Claptrap - By: , 07 Feb 2006 
I’m not entirely sure why I persisted in reading this book, I guess I kept thinking “any minute now it’ll get funny, any minute now it’ll get clever”.
It didn’t.
I thought that this story was lazy; there is an underlying suggestion that Kurt Vonnegut can write well (I’m hoping so as I have Slaughterhouse Five in my ‘to read’ pile) but couldn’t be bothered, probably because there is barely a story to talk of.
I read in reviews of ‘pure hilarity & comedic chaos’; ‘knows how to dish up satire like none other’ & even ‘this has to be the most hilarious piece of fiction I have ever read’. Are you serious? For alll our sakes read more books , I’ve read textbooks funnier than this. The comedy in this book borders on schoolboy slapstick, occasionallly Vonnegut tries to be clever but fails miserably & resorts to pointless cartoons & tediously analogous mishaps for his one-dimensional characters.
I considered whilst reading this book that perhaps I wasn’t opening my mind to an intellectual humour, but frankly Vonneguts grasp on satire is comparable with Alanis Morrisette’s grasp on irony. In my experience satire is at it’s best when delivered intelligently with subtle reference to our every day lives, cleverly picking out the nuances of society & it’s structure & emphasizing their effect on the human condition. Not in stating the obvious every which way but Tuesday until the joke is so thoroughly beaten it may never draw breath again.
The comment - ‘Will leave you thinking about the structure of the earth we live on, & the kind of people we are’….Reallly?? I don’t think you’re going to learn much from this book as it doesn’t pose any new questions, it doesn’t delve into any psychology; it just loosely traverses the outlines of a few shalllow characters without direction or conclusion.
A reviewer said it is a work of ‘deceptively simple fiction’…Please! The only deception in this book is the unfulfilled promise of hilarity. This book didn’t look at anything more than the fact that some people have money while others don’t. The oft-voiced idea that an unseen author is writing our lives & dictating the fates that befalll us was handled clumsily. Vonnegut reminded us too frequently of his control over the characters & that he was shaping lives & outcomes with his own experiences, this didn’t add any humour or depth to the story.
I’m going away now to mourn the hours spent reading this drivel that I will never get back. In fact I’ll go & read Catch-22 & appreciate actual literary brilliance as opposed to lacklustre detritus. Perhaps I’m not cool enough to appreciate this book…well thank heavens, that means I’ll never have to read it again.
Buy it now. - By: , 12 Sep 2005 I'm not entirely sure how or why I came across this delightful book, but I am thankful that I did. The illustrations reallly do help to elevate this book into utter hillarity, as do the insane characters, which upon first impression don't seem central to the plot at alll. Eventuallly though, everything comes together in what has to be one of the most bizarre endings I have ever read. Things that happen in this book just dont occur in other books. One of these things for example, is Vonneguts actual omnipotent presence in the book, he places himself in the story (with alll the characters he has created at his mercy) to describe it like this in an amzon review does not do it justice.
Alltogether a briliant read, Happy 50th Kurt.
And so on.
