Kurt Vonnegut
La colazione dei campioni

For all the years I've spent here, I've never dared, and it was probably for the best, to try writing a review on something that falls into that vast category of human creativity called literature.

And the reason is simple: I don't feel prepared, I'm not a reader with "stripes," I lack almost entirely, with a few exceptions, the classics.

Or rather, I often prefer to know them indirectly, and if that indirect path doesn't appear, the classic remains unread.

This, fortunately, didn't happen with Kurt Vonnegut; I found the indirect path, and in the end, I read his classic "Slaughterhouse-Five," although I started with "Breakfast of Champions" first.

Listen to how it went.

A while ago, in a hypermarket museum in my city, I became intrigued by a book displayed on a shelf, "The Universe Versus Alex Woods," by a certain Gavin Extence, a young English author.

A cute book, full of original ideas, scientific/philosophical/existential disquisitions that I enjoy, but above all, featuring a very particular character with an unbridled passion for the works of the author of "Slaughterhouse-Five."

One in particular, "Breakfast of Champions."

So, since I want to talk about "Breakfast of Champions" but I'm not sure if I'm capable, I'll let Extence talk about it first; you decide if this can be read as a review of Vonnegut's book or perhaps, better yet, at least in part, of the English author's book.

“I had already read two-thirds of Breakfast of Champions, a novel that begins at a literature festival in Ohio and tells the story of an old, destitute science fiction writer named Kilgore Trout, and a wealthy car dealer named Dwayne Hoover who becomes convinced that every other individual on the face of the Earth is a robot, perfectly functional but devoid of feelings, imagination, free will, and all the other things that make up the soul.”

“This idea is put into his head by reading one of Trout's books. Then Dwayne Hoover goes completely mad.”

"As in many of Vonnegut's novels, the plot was absurd and irrelevant. You could tear all the pages out and put them back together at random without compromising your reading experience. The book would still work because every page, if not every paragraph, was a standalone unit that shone with its own light."

"What I liked most about Breakfast of Champions was this: unlike most books, it didn't assume that the reader knew everything about human beings, their habits, and the planet they inhabited. It seemed like the author was addressing an alien from a distant galaxy, therefore describing everything in detail, from peas to beavers, sometimes lingering on the most eccentric details, sometimes helping himself with illustrations and diagrams. He explained all the things that others considered too obvious to be explained. And the more I read, the more I realized that many of those things weren't obvious at all. On the contrary, they were decidedly bizarre."

Oh yes, indeed a truly absurd plot in "Breakfast of Champions," a book that seems almost written at the same moment its author is thinking and imagining it, based on his personal memories, and you're reading it, I would add.

Consider the following passage taken directly from Vonnegut's book:

"I don't know who invented the body bag. I know who invented Kilgore Trout. Me."

"I made him with crooked teeth. I gave him hair, but I made it white. I didn't let him comb it or go to the barber; I let it grow long and messy."

"I gave him the same legs that the Creator of the Universe gave my father when he was an old man in terrible shape. Bloodless like broom handles. Hairless. Knobbly because of varicose veins."

And again:

"Trout took the tuxedo out of the trunk and wore it. It looked very much like the tuxedo I saw on my father when he was very, very old."

There is also plenty of satire and social criticism about the American way of life and a continuous desecration of its symbols and founding myths, like Thomas Jefferson, "a slave owner who was one of the world's top theorists on human freedom."

And there are many science fiction plots, entire books imagined by the fertile mind of Vonnegut, through the character of his alter ego Kilgore Trout, almost reminiscent of J.L. Borges and his imaginary literature, a J.L. Borges perhaps less erudite, certainly more insane, but no less philosophical.

And often within these "science fiction" books, Earth is visited by aliens, with imagined futures that Vonnegut-Trout uses to express more universal criticisms that fit the modern world, the world of social networks and beyond, in an almost eerie way.

"On Earth, ideas symbolized friendship or enmity. Their content didn't matter. Friends got along with friends to express friendship. Enemies didn't get along with enemies to express enmity."

But there is always, beyond criticism, a great sense of pity for all of humanity, and especially for his characters, all somewhat victims of their existential traumas, like Dwayne Hoover, orphaned of a mother at birth and abandoned by his father in the cradle.

"The mother was a defective gestational machine. She automatically broke down giving birth to Dwayne. The printer disappeared. It was a disappearing machine."

And to finish, a few words about the fantasmagoric ending, in which Vonnegut-Trout, after Dwayne Hoover discovers, in Trout's book, his fate and true nature as the only conscious being in the Universe, inevitably going insane, he frees, also somewhat in the part of a God, all his characters, including the dog Kazak.

And especially Kilgore Trout himself is freed, after a heartbreaking dialogue with his author.

Or rather, it's the God-Author who leaves, leaving Trout alone in his world, disappearing from his sight forever.

"I lazily and pleasantly tumbled into the void, which is my favorite hiding place when I dematerialize. The shouts Trout sent after me faded as the distance between us increased.

"The voice was my father's. I heard my father... and saw my mother in the void. She stood far, far away, because she bequeathed me a suicide.

"A little mirror passed by. It was a flaw with a handle and mother-of-pearl frame.

"I grabbed it effortlessly, held it up to my right eye, which appeared like this: (1)"

"Here's what Kilgore Trout shouted after me with my father's voice:

Make me young, make me young, make me young!"

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(1) The final image, with the tear falling from the author's right eye, like all the others, is an extremely important added value (see at the beginning, the one of the sphincter, to explain to aliens what a hole of c... is like), unfortunately, I cannot reproduce it, but I assure you it's a heart-wrenching moment, the last gift of a great book.