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Loading... Hocus Pocus (edition 1997)by Kurt Vonnegut
Work InformationHocus Pocus by Kurt Vonnegut
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Not Vonnegut’s best, but still interesting and a fairly quick read. ( ) I gave it my best for 40 pages, but finally just saw no reason to continue. This book does have a perverse sort of humor and is funny in places, but it was also off-puttingly angry. The conceit of this book is that it is the disjointed scribblings of a (possibly mad) man who is imprisoned in a library, and he decides to write his life story on random little scraps of paper he found laying about. So even as I recognize that the story's rambly structure and style is meant to illustrate the set up, I still found myself utterly unable to summon the will to keep reading. YMMV DNF at 40/325 pages. Paperback, picked up from... somewhere, and had been sitting on my shelf for 3 years. Fly free now, little book, and I hope you end up with someone who wants to read this kind of drivel. I was attempting to read this for The 24 Tasks of the Festive Season game, for door 19 Festivus (Dec. 23) book task: Read any comedy, parody, or satire. Instead, I'm going to listen to the audio of Carol Burnett's In Such Good Company. The name of the main character of this book is Eugene Debs Hartke. Oddly enough, I grew up familiar with Eugene Debs even though he was not exactly a headline name in the 50’s and 60’s because as a child my mother was taken by her older brother to hear him speak, a fact she mentioned on a number of occasions. Presumably he made a big impression on a child who couldn’t have been more than 10 at the time. Equally odd - one of my most vivid memories of that same uncle’s house is the omnipresent stack of Wall Street Journals in his living room. What would Debs have made of that? Back to the book. It’s vintage Vonnegut, with a slippery timeline. It was written in around 1990, with the principle events occurring 10 years into that future, which means 2o years ago now. Over the course of the book Hartke recounts the life circumstances that led him to his status at the time of the narrative, a convict awaiting trial in the library of a college that has been converted to a prison. Most of the action post-Vietnam takes place in the Finger Lakes district of NY state, an area I know very well. So, another personal connection. One of Vonnegut’s themes, perhaps the major theme, is the wealth disparity between those at the very top and the rest of us. In the book, the source of the inordinate wealth of the elite is the sale to foreigners of all the income producing assets of the US. In reality, the growth of the 2% has been due to all manner of greed, abetted by politicians and tax codes and various slimy undertakings. But regardless of the means, we are moving ever closer to the scenario painted by Vonnegut. Which made this book a wee bit too close to reality for me to enjoy it in quite the same manner as I have other of his books, although it does carry the same acerbic, ironic sparkle as they do. no reviews | add a review
Distinctions
Hocus Pocus is the fictional autobiography of a West Point graduate who was in charge of the humiliating evacuation of U.S. personnel from the Saigon rooftops at the close of the Vietnam War. Returning home from the war, he unknowingly fathered an illegitimate son. In 2001, the son begins a search for his father and catches up with him just in time to see him arrested for masterminding the prison break of 10,000 convicts. Using his famous brand of satire and wit, Vonnegut captures twenty-first century America as only he could foresee it. In Hocus Pocus, listeners will find a fresh novel, as fascinating and brilliantly offbeat as anything he's written. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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