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Slapstick
- Narrated by: Adam Grupper
- Length: 4 hrs and 34 mins
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Publisher's summary
Perhaps the most autobiographical (and deliberately least disciplined) of Vonnegut's novels, Slapstick (1976) is in the form of a broken family odyssey and is surely a demonstration of its eponymous title. The story centers on brother and sister twins, children of Wilbur Swain, who are in sympathetic and (possibly) telepathic communication and who represent Vonnegut's relationship with his own sister who died young of cancer almost two decades before the book's publication. Vonnegut dedicated this to Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.
Like their films and routines, this novel is an exercise in non-sequentiality and in the bizarre while using those devices to expose larger and terrible truths. The twins exemplify to Swain a kind of universal love; he campaigns for it while troops of technologically miniaturized Chinese are launched upon America. Love and carnage intersect in a novel contrived to combine credibility and common observation; critics could sense Vonnegut deliberately flouting narrative constraint or imperative in an attempt to destroy the very idea of the novel he was writing.
Slapstick becomes both product and commentary, event and self-criticism; an early and influential example of contemporary "metafiction". Vonnegut's tragic life - like the tragic lives of Laurel, Hardy, Buster Keaten and other exemplars of slapstick comedy - is the true center of a work whose cynicism overlays a trustfulness and sense of loss which are perhaps deeper and truer than expressed in any of Vonnegut's earlier or later works. Slapstick is a clear demonstration of the profound alliance of comedy and tragedy which, when Vonnegut is working close to his true sensibility, become indistinguishable.
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David is the small boy who is always asking questions. Simon and Ines take care of him in their new town, Estrella. He is learning the language; he has begun to make friends. He has the big dog, Bolivar, to watch over him. But he'll be seven soon, and he should be at school. And so, with the guidance of the three sisters who own the farm where Simon and Ines work, David is enrolled in the Academy of Dance. It's here, in his new golden dancing slippers, that he learns how to call down the numbers from the sky.
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SEXUAL PERVERSION PRESENTED AS BRILLIANT
- By Amazon Customer on 09-29-18
By: J. M. Coetzee
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The Night Ocean
- By: Paul La Farge
- Narrated by: Elisabeth Rodgers
- Length: 13 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Marina Willett, MD, has a problem. Her husband, Charlie, has become obsessed with H. P. Lovecraft, in particular with one episode in the legendary horror writer's life: In the summer of 1934, the "old gent" lived for two months with a gay teenage fan named Robert Barlow, at Barlow's family home in central Florida. What were the two of them up to? Were they friends - or something more? Just when Charlie thinks he's solved the puzzle, a new scandal erupts, and he disappears.
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Frustratingly Uneven Due to Clumsy Plot Structure
- By Adam on 06-15-17
By: Paul La Farge
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The Short Reign of Pippin IV
- A Fabrication
- By: John Steinbeck, Robert E. Morsberger - introduction, Katherine Morsberger - introduction
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 4 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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In his only work of political satire, The Short Reign of Pippin IV, John Steinbeck turns the French Revolution upside down as amateur astronomer Pippin Héristal is drafted to rule the unruly French. Steinbeck creates around the infamous Pippin the most hilarious royal court ever: Pippin's wife, Queen Marie, who "might have taken her place at the bar of a very good restaurant"; his uncle, a man of dubious virtue; and his glamour-struck daughter and her beau, the son of the so-called "egg king" of Petaluma, California.
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Political Satire at its Best!
- By Matthew G. Lara on 03-01-20
By: John Steinbeck, and others
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Seize the Day
- By: Saul Bellow
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 3 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Fading charmer Tommy Wilhelm has reached his day of reckoning and is scared. In his forties, he still retains a boyish impetuousness that has brought him to the brink of chaos: he is separated from his wife and children; at odds with his vain, successful father; failed in his acting career (a Hollywood agent once placed him as “the type that loses the girl”); and in a financial mess.
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Why?
- By Ashraf Abaza on 05-16-19
By: Saul Bellow
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More Die of Heartbreak
- By: Saul Bellow
- Narrated by: Ramiz Monsef
- Length: 12 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Kenneth Trachtenberg, an eccentric and witty native of Paris, travels to the Midwest to spend time with his famous American uncle, a world-renowned botanist and self-described "plant visionary". After numerous affairs and failed relationships, the restless Uncle Benn seeks a settled existence in the form of marriage - but tying the knot again opens the door to a host of new torments.
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A great book
- By John A. on 03-16-22
By: Saul Bellow
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The Ground Beneath Her Feet
- By: Salman Rushdie
- Narrated by: Steven Crossley
- Length: 27 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Salman Rushdie is widely considered one of a handful of truly great living writers. The internationally acclaimed, Booker Prize-winning author's storytelling shines in this epic love story, a modern retelling of the myth of Orpheus.
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Okay, Salmon, We get that you're a genious already
- By Julie A Quinn on 04-23-09
By: Salman Rushdie
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The Sheep Queen
- By: Tom Savage
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 8 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Thomas Savage, a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and a PEN/Faulkner Award nominee, has long been a critically acclaimed author. The New Yorker calls him "a writer of the first order". This starkly elegant story details the lives of Emma Russell Sweringen and her family in the early 1900s. Emma’s daughter Beth secretly gave up a baby girl for adoption many years ago. Now, Beth’s secret life is being unraveled as her daughter comes looking for her long-lost family.
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Excellent in all respects
- By Marlene J. Gustafson on 05-11-19
By: Tom Savage
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What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours
- Stories
- By: Helen Oyeyemi
- Narrated by: Ann Marie Gideon, Piter Marek, Bahni Turpin
- Length: 7 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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In "Books and Roses", one special key opens a library, a garden, and clues to at least two lovers' fates. In "Is Your Blood as Red as This?", an unlikely key opens the heart of a student at a puppeteering school. "'Sorry' Doesn't Sweeten Her Tea" involves a "house of locks", where doors can be closed only with a key - with surprising unobservable developments. And in "If a Book Is Locked There's Probably a Good Reason for That Don't You Think", a key keeps a mystical diary locked (for good reason).
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clever
- By jared rogerson on 03-15-18
By: Helen Oyeyemi
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Memories of My Melancholy Whores
- By: Gabriel García Márquez
- Narrated by: Thom Rivera
- Length: 3 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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On the eve of his 90th birthday, a bachelor decides to give himself a wild night of love with a virgin. As is his habit - he has purchased hundreds of women - he asks a madam for her assistance. The 14-year-old girl who is procured for him is enchanting, but exhausted as she is from caring for siblings and her job sewing buttons, she can do little but sleep. Yet with this sleeping beauty at his side, it is he who awakens to a romance he has never known. Tender, knowing, and slyly comic, Memories of My Melancholy Whores is an exquisite addition to a master's work.
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-the consolation you have when you can't have Love
- By Darwin8u on 09-16-21
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The Blood Doctor
- By: Barbara Vine
- Narrated by: Robert Powell
- Length: 15 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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The First Lord Nanther, expert in blood diseases, particularly the royal disease of Heamophilia, and favoured physician to Queen Victoria, clearly hoped to be the subject of an admiring posthumous biography. But when his great-grandson, Martin Nanther begins to research his life for a biography, the Martin comes to suspect that his great-grandfather’s old records conceal more than they reveal.
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clever, excellent storytelling
- By connie on 07-09-11
By: Barbara Vine
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a fool and his self respect are soon parted
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Vonnegut Imitating Vonnegut
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Deadeye Dick is Kurt Vonnegut's funny, chillingly satirical look at the death of innocence. Amid a true Vonnegutian host of horrors - a double murder, a fatal dose of radioactivity, a decapitation, an annihilation of a city by a neutron bomb - Rudy Waltz, aka Deadeye Dick, takes us along on a zany search for absolution and happiness. Here is a tale of crime and punishment that makes us rethink what we believe...and who we say we are.
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If I aimed at nothing..nothing is what I would hit
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Welcome to the Monkey House
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Welcome to the Monkey House is a collection of Kurt Vonnegut's shorter works. Originally printed in publications as diverse as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and The Atlantic Monthly, what these superb stories share is Vonnegut's audacious sense of humor and extraordinary range of creative vision.
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Classic Vonnegut
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Kurt Vonnegut's first novel spins the chilling tale of engineer Paul Proteus, who must find a way to live in a world dominated by a supercomputer and run completely by machines. Paul's rebellion is vintage Vonnegut – wildly funny, deadly serious, and terrifyingly close to reality.
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A Genuine 5-Stars
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Timequake
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According to Kurt Vonnegut's alter ego, the old science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, a global timequake will occur on February 13, 2001, at 2:27 p.m. It will be the moment when the universe suffers a crisis of conscience: Should it go on expanding indefinitely or collapse and make another great big BANG? For its own cosmic reasons, it decides to back up a decade to 1991, giving the world a 10-year case of deja vu, making everybody and everything do exactly what they'd done during the past decade.
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Arias only make hopeless situations worse
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a fool and his self respect are soon parted
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Vonnegut Imitating Vonnegut
- By Joe Kraus on 08-06-18
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Deadeye Dick
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Deadeye Dick is Kurt Vonnegut's funny, chillingly satirical look at the death of innocence. Amid a true Vonnegutian host of horrors - a double murder, a fatal dose of radioactivity, a decapitation, an annihilation of a city by a neutron bomb - Rudy Waltz, aka Deadeye Dick, takes us along on a zany search for absolution and happiness. Here is a tale of crime and punishment that makes us rethink what we believe...and who we say we are.
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If I aimed at nothing..nothing is what I would hit
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Classic Vonnegut
- By Michael Carrato on 08-17-06
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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- Narrated by: Christian Rummel
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Kurt Vonnegut's first novel spins the chilling tale of engineer Paul Proteus, who must find a way to live in a world dominated by a supercomputer and run completely by machines. Paul's rebellion is vintage Vonnegut – wildly funny, deadly serious, and terrifyingly close to reality.
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A Genuine 5-Stars
- By R.A. on 06-07-19
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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Arias only make hopeless situations worse
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The Sirens of Titan
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The richest, most depraved man on Earth, Malachi Constant, is offered a chance to take a space journey to distant worlds with a beautiful woman at his side. Of course, there's a catch to the invitation....
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Absolutely Outstanding
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Galapagos
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Galapagos takes the listener back one million years to AD 1986. A simple vacation cruise suddenly becomes an evolutionary journey. Thanks to an apocalypse, a small group of survivors stranded on the Galapagos Islands are about to become the progenitors of a brave, new, totally different human race. Kurt Vonnegut, America's master satirist, looks at our world and shows us all that is sadly, madly awry - and all that is worth saving.
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The survival of the human race is a total bore!
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Cat's Cradle is Vonnegut's satirical commentary on modern man and his madness. An apocalyptic tale of this planet's ultimate fate, it features a little person as the protagonist; a complete, original theology created by a calypso singer; and a vision of the future that is at once blackly fatalistic and hilariously funny.
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KV at his best.
- By Robert on 06-22-12
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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Mother Night
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American Howard W. Campbell, Jr., a spy during World War II, is now on trial in Israel as a Nazi war criminal. But is he really guilty? In this brilliant book rife with true gallows humor, Kurt Vonnegut turns black and white into a chilling shade of grey with a verdict that will haunt us all. Mother Night is a daring challenge to our moral sense.
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“We are what we pretend to be”
- By Robert on 09-04-12
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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Palm Sunday
- By: Kurt Vonnegut
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- Length: 9 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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In this self-portrait by an American genius, Kurt Vonnegut writes with beguiling wit and poignant wisdom about his favorite comedians, country music, a dead friend, a dead marriage, and various cockamamie aspects of his all-too-human journey through life. This is a work that resonates with Vonnegut's singular voice: the magic sound of a born storyteller mesmerizing us with truth.
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Incredible
- By Anonymous User on 11-17-20
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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Bluebeard
- The Autobiography of Rabo Karabekian (1916-1988)
- By: Kurt Vonnegut
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- Length: 7 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Meet Rabo Karabekian, a moderately successful surrealist painter who we meet late in life and see struggling (like all of Vonnegut's key characters) with the dregs of unresolved pain and the consequences of brutality. Loosely based on the legend of Bluebeard (best realized in Bela Bartok's one-act opera), the novel follows Karabekian through the last events in his life that is heavy with women, painting, artistic ambition, artistic fraudulence, and as of yet unknown consequence.
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Kurt Vonnegut explores the arts
- By Darwin8u on 12-28-17
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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Breakfast of Champions
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- Unabridged
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Breakfast of Champions (1973) provides frantic, scattershot satire and a collage of Vonnegut's obsessions. His recurring cast of characters and American landscape was perhaps the most controversial of his canon; it was felt by many at the time to be a disappointing successor to Slaughterhouse-Five, which had made Vonnegut's literary reputation.
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Kurt Was Right to Grade This a C
- By Dubi on 01-10-16
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
- By: Kurt Vonnegut
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- Unabridged
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Eliot Rosewater, a drunk volunteer fireman and president of the fabulously rich Rosewater Foundation, is about to attempt a noble experiment with human nature, with a little help from writer Kilgore Trout. The result is Kurt Vonnegut's funniest satire, an etched-in-acid portrayal of the greed, hypocrisy, and follies of the flesh we are all heir to.
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Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth.
- By Darwin8u on 03-27-14
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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A Man Without a Country
- By: Kurt Vonnegut
- Narrated by: Norman Dietz
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- Unabridged
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One of the greatest minds in American writing, Kurt Vonnegut shares his often hilarious and always insightful reflections on America, art, politics and life in general. No matter the subject, Vonnegut will have you considering perspectives you may never have regarded. On the creative process: "If you want to really hurt your parents...the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding."
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Good but uneven collection of essays
- By J. S. Koehler on 01-28-06
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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Slaughterhouse-Five
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Traumatized by the bombing of Dresden at the time he had been imprisoned, Pilgrim drifts through all events and history, sometimes deeply implicated, sometimes a witness. He is surrounded by Vonnegut's usual large cast of continuing characters (notably here the hack science fiction writer Kilgore Trout and the alien Tralfamadorians, who oversee his life and remind him constantly that there is no causation, no order, no motive to existence).
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Don't Quit Your Daytime Job, James
- By Keith on 11-20-15
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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Armageddon in Retrospect
- By: Kurt Vonnegut
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- Unabridged
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The New York Times best seller from the author of Slaughterhouse-Five—a “gripping” posthumous collection of Kurt Vonnegut’s previously unpublished work on the subject of war and peace. A fitting tribute to a literary legend and a profoundly humane humorist, Armageddon in Retrospect is a collection of 12 previously unpublished writings. Imbued with Vonnegut's trademark rueful humor and outraged moral sense.
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Vonnegut should get the nobel peace prize
- By CHARLES on 05-07-12
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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Fates Worse Than Death
- An Autobiographical Collage
- By: Kurt Vonnegut
- Narrated by: Richard Davidson
- Length: 7 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Kurt Vonnegut presents in Fates Worse than Death a veritable cornucopia of his thoughts on what could perhaps best be summed up as "anti-theology", a manifesto for atheism that details Vonnegut's drift from conventional religion, even a tract evidencing belief in the divine held within each individual self--the deity within each individual person present in a universe that otherwise lacks any real order.
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Vonnegut is profound
- By Sarah on 02-03-20
By: Kurt Vonnegut
What listeners say about Slapstick
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Rexwyn709
- 05-17-17
Not the best Kurt but, a must read
To anyone who loves Kurt V this is a required read and will be be a delight. To someone who is not familiar with his style/ work there are better starting points, and this book may be confusing. I'd recommend breakfast of champions or cats cradle before diving into this book. Overall good book and a very "Kurt" book.
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- Southwest Reader
- 11-24-22
Wisdom and wit beyond imagining
Bizarre and whimsical and dark and disturbing and transcendent and prescient and unfortunately. It's impossible to describe this book, but I hope those words capture its essence to some degree. Also as far as the performance goes -- just wonderful. I think his voice and delivery are perfect for a Vonnegut work. He sounds weary and wonderstruck in turn.
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- Amazon Customer
- 09-14-17
Not Vonnegut's best, still enjoyable
Known as one of Vonmegut's least favorite work. In his own thoughts and critics. The story is still uniquely Vonnegut with his sci-fi, satirical and humanist approach. The narration is top notch as well.
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- Dubi
- 01-27-22
Slap it all on and see what will Stick
In the summer of 1976, while I was doing my semester abroad in Germany, I read an excerpt in Playboy of Kurt Vonnegut's forthcoming novel, Slapstick. And loved it. I had only recently discovered Vonnegut via Slaughterhouse-Five, then read his entire back catalogue, endlessly quoted Between Time and Timbuktu after it aired on PBS, and even liked in that particular moment his first novel post-S-5, Breakfast of Champions.
These days, I periodically return to Vonnegut to re-"read" him in audio, under the presumption that his idiosyncratic style would be especially suited to this format. I'm constantly surprised by my reactions -- the books I loved best rarely hold up (other than the always great S-5) while the ones that didn't really grab me then I now love (Mr. Rosewater, Mother Night).
I especially find myself agreeing with Vonnegut's self-assessment of his post-S-5 novels. He gave Breakfast of Champions a C and Slapstick a D. In hindsight, we know that Vonnegut was having trouble adapting to the fame and pressure that followed the success of S-5, the mental health issues experienced by his son Mark (chronicled in The Eden Express and part of the inspiration of Breakfast of Champions), and the passing of his sister, which he cited as the driving force behind Slapstick.
The passages of Slapstick that are about the history of Wilbur and Eliza Swain, the oversized Neanderthaloid genius twin siblings, are still good. The rest of it, not so much. Part of the problem is the blizzard of metaphor and symbolism, none of it subtle (e.g. variable gravity, artificial extended families, the Hooligan). And the cynicism is just relentless -- a selling point to a 20-something idealist in the 70s, but no longer attractive to a thoroughly jaded 60-something in post-truth pandemic times.
Strangely, the pandemic that led to the post-apocalyptic setting of Slapstick has many parallels to Covid, particularly the Chinese connection, and Vonnegut's imagined apocalypse seems quite possible in the current climate, and yet it feels all wrong, at least to me. Maybe that's part of my discomfort. That and not really liking this narrator's take on Hi-Ho (although to be fair, the whole conceit really leaves him no margin for error).
John Updike reviewing Slapstick in The New Yorker in 1976 loved it, Roger Sale reviewing it in The New York Times hated it and had harsh words for Vonnegut fans like myself, calling us ignorant youth -- 45 years later, I think he was wrong about the ignorance, although we were youth, wasting it away, but not wasting it on Vonnegut, even if I can no longer see why I liked Slapstick at the time, other than the iconoclasm. But Vonnegut's own self-rating is the one that endures.
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- Jimmy John Kudrik
- 07-18-22
Vonnegut at his best?
So many clever ideas in this book, and so fun. Vintage Vonnegut. My only qualm is that the ending is a bit soft.
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- Anika
- 11-15-17
Great story
I really enjoyed this book. The narrator was excellent. I thought the story was great
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- Kenneth Powell
- 02-28-23
Vonnegut at his best
Terribly dark and horribly funny. Excellent part of his overall collection of brilliantly meta works!
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- Darwin8u
- 11-16-16
Lonely No More!
“And how did we
then face the odds,
of man's rude slapstick,
yes, and God's?
Quite at home and unafraid,
Thank-you,
in a game
our dreams remade.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slapstick, or Lonesome No More!
My 15-ear-old son broke the screen on his iPhone 6s. I'm letting him buy down the debt (to me) by reading 6 Vonnegut novels before the end of the year. Every book he reads, drops his big OWE down by $10, up to $60. He is still on the hook for the other $80. This is what happens when daddy is an absurdist, but rules like a fascist King. Hi ho.
So, I've decided to read a lot of the Vonnegut novels he's going to be reading before the end of the year too. It has been 30 years since I went on a huge Vonnegut tear. It seems in an era of Donald Trump I'm going to need as many absurdist tools on my belt as possible. What better way than a book about loneliness, incest (perhaps not, or technically yes, but also not), disease, the destruction of America, and the Church of Jesus Christ the Kidnapped.
There are other, stronger Vonneguts where I could have started, but I'm also trying to go through my Library of America Vonnegut: Novels 1976-1985. Plus, it is hard to avoid a book that uses the phrase “Why don't you take a flying f#@% at a rolling doughnut? Why don't you take a flying f#@% at the mooooooooooooon?” often and with literary abandon.
As far as the stars, the book itself probably only warrants a Vonnegut 3-star (except for the fact that the autobiographical introduction is so good, I'm tossing in another star because, well, I can).
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25 people found this helpful
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- no te metas con el furioso
- 01-20-17
Great but not the best
I am a much bigger fan of Breakfast, Slaughterhouse 5, and Cats Cradle. It's still a good story. Just didn't grab me till the end like the others.
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- Kortney Horn
- 08-04-22
Odd book
I love Vonnegut but this one seems a little meandering and arcane. Funny and poignant at times but kind of opaque and unnecessary.
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