Breakfast of Champions or Goodbye Blue Monday by Kurt Vonnegut

It was just over a year ago that I read Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death. This book, it would be fair to say, broke my mind a little bit. It broke the way I thought about time, and lead to such incidents as me visiting Greenwich and stomping on the line of GMT shouting 'Take that, time!', to the amusement of my friends and the horror of the attendant. This resulted in an afternoon in Greenwhich park with me saying things like 'If time is a place, there are only 2 dimensions, and we're all flat. Everything is flat'. It's not really picnic conversation. Still, now, I am perplexed as to how one is to reconcile this made up ridiculous idea of the 'passage of time'. Daylight savings is minor crisis I endure twice a year when I think 'Why bother keeping time if we're only going to change it to suit ourselves?'. My dear friend Guy, whose couch I was calling home when I read this book, seems to be able to tell, before I've even opened my mouth, when I'm about to being a rumination on the topic of time. He'll invariably try to distract me with something shiny, or alcoholic, or just take his head in his hands and say, 'No, Amber. No talking about time'. Poor Guy.

Don't get me wrong, I LOVED Slaughterhouse-five: I dream of having the perspicacity of the beings on Tralfamadore to be able to see through time, but it has had some pretty deep reverberations. For example, I no longer believe in the concept of being late. So, on the basis of what that book has done to my life, and my ability to meet people in bars without coming off like a completely steam-punk worshiping freak, I hesitated to embark on Breakfast of Champions.

Ok, that's a lie: I didn't hesitate. I couldn't get into it fast enough. A friend gave it to me at her leaving party while she was packing to go overseas, in the kind of way you haphazardly discard your belongings in this process - you're ecstatic at the thought of off-loading something to someone else, no matter how precious, simply because it means you don't have to pack it. So, I made my excuses, left the party, and went home to start the book. I was not disappointed. I should have known I wouldn't be, and if I wasn't such a rudimentary creature who experienced time as linear, I could've told you how much I would enjoy this book before I even started it. Alas.

Breakfast of Champions or Goodbye Blue Monday is also illustrated by the narrator (who is also the author - Philboyd Studge). This paragraph in the preface sets the tone perfectly:

This book is my fiftieth birthday present to myself. I feel as though I am crossing the spine of a roof--having ascended one slope.
I am programmed at fifty to perform childishly--to insult "The Star-Spangled Banner", to scrawl pictures of a Nazi flag and an asshole and a lot of other things with a felt-tipped pen. To give an idea of the maturity of my illustrations for this book, here is my picture of an asshole:

And so on.

This books is the biggest piss-take ever. Nothing is sacred and, in a sense, since as it plainly says in the preface, this book is an attempt "to clear my head of all the junk in there--the assholes, the flags, the underpants... I'm throwing out characters from my other books too. I'm not going to put on any more puppet shows..." this book is even a piss-take of writing. Vonnegut recycles characters from his and other people's writing. It would be lazy, if it weren't so incredibly well crafted and superbly executed.

It's an anti-novel of a sort. A good sort. An hilarious, laugh-out-loud, read-pages-to-your-mates sort.

If that's not enough to get you to the library, allow me to refer you to p.22 of the 2000 Vintage edition:

Intimacy by Hanif Kureshi

All men are bastards, apparently. They'll marry you out of some misplaced sense of obligation (and because they don't fancy being alone), have kids with you, shag other women with no guilt whatsoever and fantasise about leaving you. And then they will leave you with a note on the kitchen table with no real explanation other than 'I can't do this anymore'. Greash. Get my a white dress and a priest stat.

I know that not all men are bastards, but this novella doesn't fill me with confidence (much like the distubring portrait of suburban dreams gone sour in Richard Yates excellent Revolutionary Road). This is a fairly bleak and depressing insight into the workings of a male mind, and the protaganist of this piece Jay, is apathetic, selfish and unlikeable.

The theme can be broadly described as 'when is enough not enough?' - that weird feeling when we know we should be happy with our lot (health, family, a job) but still something is missing.....that first world depression of not feeling like we've achieved enough despite a wealth of love and happiness. Now that's something that men and women can relate to.

People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks

The cover of this book proudly states ‘the Pulitizer Prize winning author of March’, so I had fairly high expectations of Geraldine Brooks’ writing skillz. I mean, they don’t just hand out Pulitizers these days do they? Perhaps, like Sandra Bullock winning a Best Actress Oscar, ol Geraldine just snuck in with the best of an average bunch that year. Or maybe I read too much, and have gotten to the point where a book needs to be REALLY amazing for me to even be vaguely impressed.

Following the journey of Aussie book restorer Hannah to retrace the history of a sacred Jewish Haggadah, salvaged by a Muslim librarian during the Bosnian war, it covers a huge amount of narrative ground; and in doing so, spreads itself a little too thin. There’s the rabbi during the Spanish Inquisition, a slave girl from the 1400’s, an Austrian physician and then the modern story of Hannah, all interwoven and revealing how the book came to be. One of the book’s strengths is that the historical detail seems well researched, and paints a rich backdrop for this manuscript mystery.

The bit that made me cringe the most was the characterisation of Hannah; Brooks seemed to be trying waaaay too hard to make her into this no-nonsense ocker chick and it totally grated on me. The relationship between book nerd Hannah and her over-achieving, cold neurosurgeon mother came across as clichéd, and the Father-She-Never-Knew-Big-Reveal fairly unbelievable. Oh and the attempt at sex scenes – so very Mills and Boon.

I imagine that this would have been the perfect candidate for an Oprah’s Book Club recommendation…..and if you know me, that’s not considered very high praise.