ecl@mtgzy.UUCP (e.c.leeper) (03/19/86)
GALAPAGOS by Kurt Vonnegut
Delacorte Press, 1985, $16.95.
A book review by Evelyn C. Leeper
I really enjoyed this book. The fact that I read it in the Galapagos
has nothing to do with it. :-)
GALAPAGOS is the story of the "beginning of the human race" in 1986,
told a million years in the future by a ghost who has seen it all. It
starts in Guayaquil, Ecuador's major port and largest city. The BAHIA DE
DARWIN is about to set sail on "The Nature Cruise of the Century" to the
Galapagos Islands. Originally scheduled to carry the great (or at least the
famous) personages of our time, it has been reduced by financial crisis,
economic collapse, and threats of war to carrying ten passengers and a
captain to fulfill their destiny as the ancestors of the "human race." The
"human race" in this book is a race of fur-covered seal-like descendents of
what we think of as the human race (which the narrator refers to as the
"big-brains").
The picture of Guayaquil gradually sinking into chaos as the world
situation degenerates is well drawn. Vonnegut has traveled to Guayaquil and
the Galapagos and it shows. (One minor quibble--the Galapagos has no
vampire finches such as he describes. On islands populated mostly by birds
and reptiles, what would they feed off? Vonnegut is certainly allowed this
literary license; I just feel obliged to point out that it IS literary
license.)
Anyway, our cast of characters includes a drunken captain, a middle-
aged widow, a slick con artist, a Japanese couple, a millionaire, his
daughter and her seeing-eye dog, and six Kanka-Bono girls who speak no
English or Spanish. How they come together and how they produce "the human
race" is reminiscent of Stapledon's LAST AND FIRST MEN, though considerably
shorter. (I realize I have listed more than the ten passengers I mentioned
earlier. They don't all make it to the ship; Vonnegut tells you this from
the start.) The device of the first-person ghostly narrator has an
interesting effect in that, although the attitude of the narrator is clear,
Vonnegut's opinions are not so clear. Does he believe (as the narrator
does) that the "big-brains" were stupid and useless and an evolutionary
dead-end? Or does he have the narrator present these ideas in such a manner
that the reader is supposed to see how wrong they are? How you interpret
GALAPAGOS will depend in large part on how you perceive mankind, technology,
and progress. Read it and decide for yourself.
Evelyn C. Leeper
...ihnp4!mtgzz!ecl
(or ihnp4!mtgzy!ecl)
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