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David Foster Wallace, in an interview with Larry McCaffery (an interview I truly can’t recommend enough) talks about experiencing a special sort of buzz in his favourite literature, a sense of internal resonance which he labels a “click”, a term borrowed from Yeats, who analogised this experience to “the click of a well-made box.”
There are dozens of authors who click for me: DeLillo, Pynchon, Helen DeWitt, DFW. They’re the experiences I’m constantly chasing in literature – they’re the quotes that knock around endlessly in my head as the anchors to my thoughts.
I can trace the lineage of my clicks through major figures all the way back to the beginning, to my personal Original Sin, to Kurt Vonnegut. He wasn’t the first writer that clicked for me (that goes to Joseph Heller), but he was my first literary hero – he got me hooked on his click.
Over the last year or two, I’ve realised that the reason I’m still alive is mostly out of a sense of debt, a personal awareness I can’t throw in the towel until I’ve created something which at least attempts to repay my immense debt to all the great artists that have carried me to where I am today, of whom Vonnegut was my proverbial snake.
There are a few obvious Vonnegut books better than this one but this one meant a lot to me back when I first read it in 2017 (and plus, before rereading this book I had just finished reading Nietzsche and with notions of eternal recurrence at the forefront, Timequake seemed most appropriate…).
Timequake is ostensibly about a ten-year period – starring, of course, the eternal Kilgore Trout – wherein the universe momentarily shrunk back 10 years forcing everyone to relive this period internally knowing this shrink had happened but not being able to act differently from how they had the first time. Much more so than this it’s an autobiography and an homage to what makes life worthwhile, a list which includes (but is not limited to): chewing the cud, being sure to notice the simple pleasure by remarking “if this isn’t nice, what is?”, and art (particularly literature because, well).
Vonnegut is probably the funniest writer I’ve read and possess a remarkably rare ability to spin horribly bleak remarks about the “crock of shit” that is life into sentences that I guarantee will make you laugh out loud.
Whenever someone who’s less familiar with literature wants a book recommendation, I immediately revert to Vonnegut because I know from personal experience that one Vonnegut book can doom someone forever to chasing the moments of ecstasy only found in art, all the while convincing them they’ve enjoyed what may ultimately be a life sentence.
There are dozens of authors who click for me: DeLillo, Pynchon, Helen DeWitt, DFW. They’re the experiences I’m constantly chasing in literature – they’re the quotes that knock around endlessly in my head as the anchors to my thoughts.
I can trace the lineage of my clicks through major figures all the way back to the beginning, to my personal Original Sin, to Kurt Vonnegut. He wasn’t the first writer that clicked for me (that goes to Joseph Heller), but he was my first literary hero – he got me hooked on his click.
Over the last year or two, I’ve realised that the reason I’m still alive is mostly out of a sense of debt, a personal awareness I can’t throw in the towel until I’ve created something which at least attempts to repay my immense debt to all the great artists that have carried me to where I am today, of whom Vonnegut was my proverbial snake.
There are a few obvious Vonnegut books better than this one but this one meant a lot to me back when I first read it in 2017 (and plus, before rereading this book I had just finished reading Nietzsche and with notions of eternal recurrence at the forefront, Timequake seemed most appropriate…).
Timequake is ostensibly about a ten-year period – starring, of course, the eternal Kilgore Trout – wherein the universe momentarily shrunk back 10 years forcing everyone to relive this period internally knowing this shrink had happened but not being able to act differently from how they had the first time. Much more so than this it’s an autobiography and an homage to what makes life worthwhile, a list which includes (but is not limited to): chewing the cud, being sure to notice the simple pleasure by remarking “if this isn’t nice, what is?”, and art (particularly literature because, well).
Vonnegut is probably the funniest writer I’ve read and possess a remarkably rare ability to spin horribly bleak remarks about the “crock of shit” that is life into sentences that I guarantee will make you laugh out loud.
Whenever someone who’s less familiar with literature wants a book recommendation, I immediately revert to Vonnegut because I know from personal experience that one Vonnegut book can doom someone forever to chasing the moments of ecstasy only found in art, all the while convincing them they’ve enjoyed what may ultimately be a life sentence.