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Original Essays | December 12, 2009

The Courage of Others

0 comments By Alexander McCall Smith

I have recently written a novel about life in England during the Second World War. I felt some concern before I tackled this theme — the War... Continue »

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   $16.76 Sale Hardcover add to wish list

   La's Orchestra Saves the World

   Alexander McCall Smith

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Caleb.hickenlooper, January 25, 2008

Breakfast of Champions, in its simplest form, is the story of a very unbalanced car salesman named Dwayne Hoover who, after reading a science fiction novel by the poor, lonely, eccentric, and extremely prolific writer, Kilgore Trout, becomes convinced that he is the only real human being on earth. It is a very simple story and can only account for about half of the pages of this “novel”.
The rest of the book is devoted to various tangents, rambles, and other forms of drool (easily recognized by his unique arrows) that seem to be intended to be either profound and insightful, or shockingly perverted and explicit. Whatever they’re intended purpose, these little side-shows, because of their content: penis measurements, descriptions of pornography, and a list of activities in the average prisoner’s sex life, (including gay oral and anal sex, as well as cow raping) are inarguably memorable. (I already forgot the ones that were supposed to be profound.(I’m pretty sure there was a decent one about white men “colonizing America”)). In order to further imprint his book on your mind, Vonnegut draws pictures, always preceded by the phrase “It looked like this:” Again, some, such as the electric chair, were somewhat profound, but most were either pointless (Goodbye blue Sunday?), or disgusting (Assholes and “Beavers”), or both.
In his defense, his writing is sometimes clever, for example, I loved the way he put himself into his own story, but it is not naturally entertaining. It seems to me that he is trying desperately to be insightful and culturally relevant, but he comes out seeming just scatter-brained. There is no unifying point to the story. It ends very randomly with the Author “setting his characters free”, after making them all very poor, very confused, very miserable, or very dead, or all four at the same time. Hopefully this can be taken as a promise that he will never write another book like this “novel”, ever again.

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