Backlisted - Galapágos by Kurt Vonnegut

Episode Date: September 12, 2023

In this episode we are delighted to welcome 2023 Booker Prize Winner Shehan Karunatilaka to discuss Kurt Vonnegut’s eleventh novel, Galapágos. First published in 1985, it is one of his most radical, intricate and humorous works, a Darwinian satire narrated by a ghost from a million years in the future. As Lorrie Moore wrote about it at the time, Vonnegut’s ‘grumbly and idiomatic voice has always been his own, unfakeable and childlike, and his humanity, persisting as it does through his pessimism.’ We talk about where Galapágos book stands in Vonnegut’s long career, its continuing relevance to a world even more dominated by technology and the climate emergency, and whether with the two novels the followed (Bluebeard and Hocus Pocus) it represented a return to form. We discuss Vonnegut's second career as a quotable talk show guest and ponder the seeming mismatch between his enduring popularity with readers and his less stable critical reputation. Shehan also offers us frank and fascinating insights into the influence that this book and ‘Uncle Kurt’s work in general has had on his own work, particularly the Booker winner The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, also narrated by a ghost. * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm *If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast which gives new life to old books. It's November 1986 and you find us sitting at a hotel bar in the port of Guayaquil in Ecuador. Down from us, there sits a balding, bespectacled man, with skin the colour of pie crust in a cheap cafeteria, and a garish blue and white and purple tourist shirt with the price tag still attached. A large portrait of Charles Darwin looms over the bar, his beard as lush as a Christmas wreath. The young barman points out the tag, and the embarrassed tourist reaches to pluck it off, but then, for reasons of his own,

fails to do so. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, where people crowdfund the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, the author of The Year of Reading Dangerously, and we are joined today, making his first appearance on Backlisted, Shahan Karinati-Lakha. Hi. Hello. Hi, Shahan. Shahan is one of Sri Lanka's most celebrated writers.

Published in 2011, his first novel, Chinaman, won both the ESC Prize for South Asian Literature and the Commonwealth Book Prize, and was declared the second best book about cricket of all time by Wisden. Better luck next time, Shahan. Silver medal, silver medal. Presumably Wisden is the best book about cricket. Is that the point?

In 2022, his second novel, The Seven Moons of Marley Almeida, won the Booker Prize for Fiction and was described by the New European as part ghost story, part whodunit, part political satire. More on that theme later. As well as writing fiction,

Sheehan has worked as an advertising copywriter and written features for, among others, Guardian, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, National Geographic, and, wait a minute, Wisden, as well as writing song and playing bass in several Sri Lankan bands, including Independence Square and Power Cut and the Brass Monkey Band. And furthermore, he has, there's no need to confess it. It says here he has confessed it. He has proud of a lifelong obsession with the band, The Police.

It does feel like a confession. The bass player and lead singer, Sting, has done some things to test my faith over the years. And yeah, but yeah, no, I am proud of it. Yeah, well, that's good because there's going to be more of it later, isn't there, Andy? Long-time listeners will enjoy what I have up my sleeve. You have your quiz face on. I can see that. Yeah.

The book that Jehan has chosen for us to discuss is the great Kurt Vonnegut's 11th novel, Galapagos, first published in 1985 by Delacorte Press in the US and Jonathan Cape in the UK. Summarising the plot of this, one of Vonnegut's most intricate and ambitious books is not for the faint-hearted. It is narrated by Leon Trotsky Trout, plot of this, one of Vonnegut's most intricate and ambitious books, is not for the faint-hearted.

It is narrated by Leon Trotsky Trout, son of the Vonnegut regular and hack sci-fi writer Kilgore Trout. But Leon is a ghost relating the story from one million years in the future when human beings have evolved into mostly aquatic creatures with much smaller brains, fins instead of arms, and short nubbins instead of fingers. How we got ourselves into this altered state is the burden of Vonnegut's dazzling satire. He follows through many narrative twists, turns, and surprises the fate of a small group of 1980s humans who are stranded on an isolated Galapagos island. Unbeknown to them, the rest of the planet has been stricken by a virus which renders humans infertile, and shortly after that, extinct. But not quite extinct.

It is out of this small, deeply imperfect collection of specimens that the human race is able to renew itself. Galapagos isn't the most famous of Vonnegut's novels, but in its dark, Darwinian satire he has created a fable that seems to get more prescient with every passing year and that relevance is just one of the things we're here with Shahan to discuss now as you listeners will probably be aware Kurt Vonnegut was not merely one of the most celebrated writers of the late 20th century. He was also one of the most conspicuous. His public profile was high.

He carved out a second career, much like someone like James Baldwin, in fact, as a regular on talk shows and on the speaking circuit. And indeed, he was very brilliant at speaking and very brilliant at going out there and giving good Vonnegut, as he once said. But we all felt when preparing this episode that we didn't want to rely

on Uncle Kurt's avuncular charm as a public speaker. So there isn't very much audio here because what we want to talk about and what we all feel perhaps isn't remarked upon enough is Vonnegut's status as a writer. So I can direct you and will direct you via our website to various clips you'll be able to listen to of Vonnegut talking about his work, thanks to the internet, and a couple of interviews that are really terrific, but it didn't seem right to exert them and deny you the full thing. So I'll point you to some things during the course of the episode, and we'll put all the links on our website.

But therefore, let's start our discussion as we usually do on Batlist, and I'll ask you, Harm, when did you first read either Galapagos, this particular novel, or become aware of Kurt Vonnegut's writing? So it wasn't love at first sight or first read, unlike it was with The Bullies. It was a very slow thing over two decades. So I remember I read Slaughterhouse-Five in college. It was one of the more pleasant books that i had to read

and um i think all my 20s i had a few of these books on my shelf so cat's cradle firehands of titan mother night you know you have to when you're reading habits uh you know you eat your broccoli as well as your your meat so that the fun he was the fun side and then i would be reading something related to whatever i was writing and or something that'll make me a better writer and all of that. So Kurt was in the fun camp. But I don't think he was my favorite writer or I just enjoyed him. I think he was when researching Seven Moons. Again, this was a fun book while I was researching

murders and slaughter in Sri Lanka. But then I think, you know, it's interesting you say that his celebrity and how he became this talk show guest and so on. If you look at his career, it's before Slaughterhouse and after Slaughterhouse, isn't it? Yeah. And there were some fine novels written before Slaughterhouse

and you can see him warming up to this great work. But then after that and it could be and I'm conscious of this that after the book I've just been wandering around talking and chatting

and I haven't been not quite talk shows but I haven't been writing but you know a couple of duds there I think Slapstick came out during that time and

I really think Galopagus whenever it came in 85 right Galopagus followed by Bluebeard, followed by Hocus Pocus. That was a golden, that was a great streak. I mean, this is why I like The Police. Five albums, five tight albums. Most bands, they have that golden streak, you know.

Stevie Wonder, maybe in the 70s and all that. Thank you for making me reread this. I've been busy talking about my own book all the time. It's great to find something that you love. And I can see lots of bits in it. And I'm kind of a bit worried about how I thought I hit my tracks. But, you know, this ghost who's telling the story. I mean, this ghost is obviously, obviously,

he can go into people's heads, which is a skill my guy didn't have a million years into the future. There's also then there's a headless seed, which I thought, oh, that's also a bit too familiar. And also, I think his worldview of inserting himself into the story. So definitely when I reread that and then I revisited Bluebeard and I mean, we can get to his other books later. But Bluebeard also, if you remember, he was a Rabo Karabaki and this abstract expressionist painter. And again, I can see seven moons there. What's in the potato barn?

And there's this big reveal of a photograph picture that reveals everything thematically. And yeah, so I think I was reading him for fun, but obviously I should have put him in the other category. Don't worry, Shahan, we won't ask you where you get your ideas from on this podcast. I love your acknowledgments in which Vonnegut and Cormac McCarthy and George Saunders are all sort of formally acknowledged at the beginning and a lot of other writers too amongst people. Yes.

I thought that was a very honest way of flagging up. Potential lawsuits. Yeah. It was Homer. I like the idea of Vonnegut as being not unlike Sting in being someone whose artistry is perhaps obscured by their public persona. That's an intro.

I wasn't expecting us to go there so quickly. But okay. I would like to say very quickly, I'm very reassured to hear you say that, Shahan. I hadn't read Vonnegut since I was at university, before you suggested we read Galapagos. And I'll ask John in a minute, but I can only say my response to Galapagos

has been similarly, you know, I'm glad I didn't read this book in 1985 or 1986. There are reasons why, which I'm sure we'll talk about. But this to me seems so much greater a novel than it was considered to be at the time. And we'll talk about some of the reviews it received at the time,

partly because I think Vonnegut was perceived as being in that long twilight of his career. You know, it was very hard for him to be reviewed neutrally without people bringing to their reviews what their ideas about Vonnegut were and who he was perceived to be, partly indeed encouraged by Vonnegut himself. A fascinating man hiding in plain sight a lot of the time, I think. John, when did you last read Kurt Vonnegut? When I was at Waterstones, that was when I read Bluebeard when it came out. But previous to that, it had been, you know, Sort of House Five, like everybody does as a student.

And I remember really, really enjoying Bluebeard. And, you know, Rachel, my wife, did publicity for that book. And always said of all the authors she ever dealt with. Kurt was her favourite. She just said he was, although he was, you know, this was not long after he attempted suicide. He was not without his demons. She just said he was just avuncular. He was incredibly kind. He was incredibly funny.

You know, he had that incredible ability to sort of puncture any situation with a gag. What I felt reading this from the moment I started reading it was that I'm in the hands of a master. I'm in the hands of somebody who is absolutely, I had trust. They're going to take me to the most insane places, but I completely trust them to do it. And I have to say, without blowing smoke, Sheehan, that was one of the things I felt very strongly about Seven Moons as well.

There's that immediate, and if there is some kind of Uncle Kurt kind of flavour in there, that ability, you know, he was so good on narrative. He was so defiantly in favour of stories needing to move along. I do now feel I want to go back and reread the whole of Bonnegut. Oh, that's wonderful. I'm glad. So well done on the plot summary, because I tell now, I've been reading it around the house. Mark and Nat, my wonderful publishers, and I said, you should read this, you should read this.

What's it about? And I try and start, and midway I'm telling them, I can see their eyes glazing over. And yeah, there's a computer, there's the Mandrax. And yeah, I don't get to the Kankabono girls yet. And so it's very hard to explain. But yeah, you are in the hands of a master. But I was wondering one thing.

Is it possible to spoil this book? Because everything is revealed, right? Even the characters who are going to die. We have an asterisk or a star. Hey, this guy's going

to die. Don't worry about him. It's the ultimate anti-spoiler book. He tells you with an asterisk when the characters are going to die.

So you're reading it always with the fore knowledge of what's going to happen afterwards. And the final, you know that one of the main characters in the book, Mary Hepburn, is

going to die, and she's going to die because she's been eaten by a shark. That happens very early on in your introduction to the character, and it's not until the last amazing last few pages of the novel that you discover exactly how that happens and why it happens i would say shahan that's one of the um particular miracles that vonnegut wrought yeah is how do you tell a story that is all spoilers

that is so gripping how does he do it he does it again and again even while his critics are saying ah you know he kind of meanders around and it kind of doesn't stick to the point and it he doesn't develop his themes well that presumes that those people knew what his themes were to start with and one of the things I found so astonishing about reading this is if this were published now, here in the cursed year 2023, it would be perceived as incredibly on point about the challenges the human race is currently facing. Yeah, he has the global economic crisis leading to starvation a pandemic where and so that's depopulation so everyone goes in further though the the nuts and bolts aren't really

explained though i don't know if you need to and then then world war three effectively uh with ecuador declaring war on peru yeah but also tech bros and climate change climate change and tech bros right yeah and tech bros it's it yeah. And tech bros. It's all in there. This kind of living life through machines instead of face-to-face. He gives experimental fiction a good name. The AI character, or the computer character, Mandrax. I mean, it would have been science fiction in 86. It's not very terribly impressive when you look at it now, right?

It produces a few quotes and translates. We have the Babelfish now, don't we? Called Babelfish indeed, yeah. Oh, of course it is. Okay, so Babelfish is an invention of the author Douglas Adams, of whom I was and remain a huge fan.

Shahan, you are a great fan of Douglas. And John, you have just achieved a number one book in the UK with a new volume of Douglas's writing. So it seems totally appropriate to mention Douglas in relation to Kurt Vonnegut. And I wanted to say, Shahan, I remember when I was a child listening to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on the radio, tuning into a show on Radio 4 in the UK, where Douglas chose half an hour of his favourite music and writing and radio and what have you. And what can remember the one thing i can remember at the age of 12 is that was the first time i ever heard the name kurt vonnegut because douglas chose and read

the section from slaughterhouse five the backwards section from slaughterhouse five so john and i was speculating whether douglas's later adventures out in the galapagos islands last chance to see in the mid to late 80s were perhaps prompted by vonnegut setting a book in galapagos and was perhaps mandrax slightly inspired by Douglas's invention of a thing called the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? We won't ever know, but there was a trading of concepts and ideas there. And we should say that Mandrax, it's a computer which has been developed by a brilliant young Japanese designer.

And what it does is, unlike the Babelfish, which was translated because you plugged a fish into your ear and it was able to translate, but it can translate constantly. And it also feeds back quotes. It pumps quotes. So it is very like a kind of a smartphone. And it's, yeah. So, Sheehan, so Kurt Vonnegut has, and Douglas Adams, I suppose.

So did they ever, they were friends? They knew each other? I think they did meet. Yes, I think they did meet. I find it hard to believe they didn't. Well, we know Douglas Adams read Kurt Vonnegut voraciously, and I find it hard to believe Kurt Vonnegut did not read the best-selling author, Douglas Adams. It seems impossible to me that he didn't.

But I wonder whether, you know, Sheehan, if I could ask you, this sense of Galapagos and Douglas' work with, say, the Babelfish, did it give you a frisson when you read it here in the 21st century? Was it part of the thing that made you think, wow, this guy was not what I thought he was? You're talking about Kurt Boninger? I am, yeah. I don't think I was ever surprised. I just think you're right. I used him initially because when I was writing Chinaman, my first, I wanted to get in the head of a, yeah, a drunk old man, which a lot easier these days, but you know, and I hung out with uncles and thought cricket. But one thing I did, Carl Muller and Kurt Vonnegut were who I read. I read it

particularly for that, the way a drunk tells you a story will ramble here and there and if you stay the course 17 minutes later we'll get to the point they made initially so I knew you know

Kurt Monegut was brilliant and he had ideas and plots but they would go all over the show and some of them wouldn't quite land

I thought Galopagos was a culmination of everything and it's certainly my favorite of his you know we can debate

what was his greatest and I think his philosophy i think it's much it's quite overt there and it's quite well formed so it wasn't a surprise to me but i just and then i said like i said the the streak because hocus pocus also um i mean that's about a prison break and there's a lot of socialist themes in there but there's also also a number. There's a number again, like 42 of his kills and all the women he slept with and all the people he killed, which was equal. And there's a little puzzle going on.

82, I think was the figure. So I always notice similarities. And I have to, if I may, I do a bit of math as well in my severed boots. And I have to, if I may, I do a bit of math as well in my severed bones. And if I may, let me put it out there. It was because

now there's the blue tunnel. These are also things that I recognize. The blue tunnel that Leon Trout has to go through. And if he misses it, he's got to wait

a million years for his next one. Now, I remember in the throes of the booker, my email was clogged up and I was very, they said, no, I'm going to answer every single one. If I do one every two minutes,

I'm going to nail, you know, 30 in the next hour. And I answered one that day. It took me one hour, 45 minutes. But it was someone questioning the math of seven moons. They go, hey, come on, the seven moon

thing, it's a MacGuffin, right? Because, you know, the dead leopard has been around for seven moons, dead atheists, they're wandering around.

So the seven moons thing, it's just a plot device. And I was outraged because I based it on Sri Lankan folklore, which, you know, after

seven days, you have the ritual, sort of a blessing so the spirit can go to the blue tunnel or towards the light., you have the ritual, sort of a blessing, so the spirit can go to the blue tunnel or towards the light. And you have another one in three months. That's 90 days. So I kind of did a bit of math.

I said, okay, seven and 90, 13 sevens and 90, so that's 91. What's the next number in the sequence? Now, I won't bore you with the math, but there is Xs and Ys in it. But the next number in the sequence is 16,000 moons, right? Which is 45 years. And that's exactly, it makes sense.

All the gross sensory, 45 years is roughly the time since Independence 2 and Story Set. But then I just, in doing this, I cranked the numbers. And so it took me like, yeah, one and a half, 45 minutes to explain this to this person. It was very satisfying. I said, oh, thank you. That was the response after all that work I cranked the numbers

again if you crank the next time you miss your 45 years the next one comes to 1.2 billion so you come back

in a million years so basically I'm saying Vonnegut's universe of Kilgore Trout meeting his son twice and then saying you do

come back for a million is compatible with the severed moons theory so that's yeah Vonnegut's universe of Kilgore Trout meeting his son twice and then saying you do a comeback for me is compatible with the severed moon steering so that's I just want to show the real man

we've proved that that's excellent getting your head around a million years could have been a hundred years a thousand years but of course

it becomes evident why it has to be a million years and I've never met Kurt Vonnegut or Douglas Ellis but I think Kurt Vonnegut or Douglas Ellis, but I think Kurt Vonnegut would think this was a happy ending. Would you consider this a happy ending?

Because I think I do. But are we getting to the ending too fast? Well, no, Kurt would approve of us doing the ending near the beginning. The question of whether or not it's a happy ending, which is an excellent question, is of a piece with the continuing question about boniger that was asked when he was writing and it seems to be still being asked now is he an optimist or is he a misanthrope yeah is he is he is he uh quietism seems to be this particular word that has stuck to his critical reputation. Is he despairing of the human race or is he saying, you know, despite the flaws in the human race,

there are moments of perfection in which we live, we continue to live, which will recur. So I, I'm saying to your question shahan i don't know i don't know if it's a happy ending i don't know i'm gonna i'll take a stab there is something about language that really matters to him and it it's it's a theme all the way through the book obviously because the mandrax is is extensively takes the responsibility of language away from the human subject because it can translate. that there is a there are some um kankabono uh indigenous indians who become part of the story who the mandrakes can't translate and so when leon is told to go after he's i mean we're gonna we'll have the blurb after we talk about the ending that's yeah we're gonna do the blurb in a moment everyone so what happens is leon has been in vietnam and and been involved in a massacre um a sort of my life

type massacre and he is told by the american government he will be rehomed but he has to shut up about it and he resists that um but he gets a second chance of going to sweden and for people who haven't read the book the end of the book is basically saying but i don't speak sweden absolutely i know i know i feel the words dying on my lips but they just say you can learn but i think this height i think there's something about human beings and language it's that it's yeah they still even when their brains shrink and they've got fins, they've still got, they've still got language

because language is about connection. Language is about, about society. I'm glad we've cleared that up. So I do, I think it is kind of as hopeful as Vonnegut gets.

Let's put it that way. So now it's peppered with these quotes, these non-secretaries which i suppose yeah you could work harder to see whether if it's some of them fit fairly obviously but he starts the book with a quote by anne frank which echoed i think almost word to word what you just said in spite of everything i still believe people are really good at heart so he starts there and i do think it's his heart really that we we warm to, isn't it? Despite all this absurdity, you know, there is despair, but there is warmth there as well.

And I know what I got out of it was it's not survival of the fittest. It's survival of the luckiest, those who survive just survive. And it's just blind chance and could be a case for maybe the stupid survive. I want to come back to your question, is it a happy ending, Shahan? By asking you, does the use of that quote from Anne Frank represent a happy beginning?

Does he mean it or doesn't he mean it or both? Classic Vonnegut, right? Does he mean it? doesn't he mean it or both? Classic Vonnegut, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Does he mean it? Does he not mean it? When he's talking to his dad, Kilgore, at the edge of the Blue Tunnel,

there is a moment where if he goes into the Blue Tunnel, he'll spare himself a million years of being a ghost. And he reminds himself how much his dad annoys him. That's the first thing. And then his dad says to him, you know, you should come out. He said, I'm learning so much about it. He doesn't want to go. I'm learning so much about what life is really like, how it really works, what it's really all about. I said, don't lie to me.

He said, did I ever lie to you? No, sir. I said, then don't lie to me. He said, are you lie to you? No, sir, I said. Then don't lie to me, he said. Are you a god now? No, he said to me. I'm still nothing but your father, Leon, but don't lie to me. For all your eavesdropping, you've accumulated nothing but information. You might as well be a collector of baseball cards or bottle caps. For the sense you could make of all the information you have now, you might as well just be Mandrax. Just five more years, daddy, dad, father, pa.

I said, not nearly enough time for you to learn what you hope to learn. And that, my boy, is why I gave you my word of honor. If you send me away now, I won't be back for a million years. And he went, he then goes on. And then I think he says somewhere in here, he says that it's the Anne Frank quote, what he actually has learned, what he believes, and it's the Anne Frank quote from what he actually has learned, what he believes in

is the Anne Frank quote from the beginning of the book. So it's built in. It's built in, yeah. Because always, whichever character, all their motivations, and you've got sociopathic characters,

the Macintoshes and maybe the tech bro, Zenji, and you've got psychopaths James Wade but everything and even Mary who's sort of the

benevolent character he always attributes them to some misfiring of their big brains even the ship's crew who become part actors and the soldier who really saves humanity

this paranoid schizophrenic soldier who does it. He always attributes it to something that the brain told them to do. Doesn't talk about heart or emotion. And so maybe, and I think, yeah, he says, is that the fatal flaw in human evolution are big brains that led us to do all of this. Have you got a bit to read us about the big brain, Shahan? And what we're going to do is,

Nikki, we're going to hear an extract from the writer and then I'm going to do the blurb because I feel this is taking on its own Von Augustian structure. Okay, the villain of the story, and there's plenty of villains in the story, but I think the villain is the human big brain. I think that's the case he's making. So I excerpted a few bits from about the big brain and I'll read what the different characters had to say. So okay, the first one. Just about every adult human being back then had a brain weighing about three kilograms. There was no end to the evil schemes that a thought machine that oversized couldn't imagine and execute.

So I raise this question, although there is nobody around to answer it. Can it be doubted that a 3-kilogram brain were once nearly fatal defects in the evolution of the human race? And then he goes on to break down what the brains are capable of. That, in my opinion,

was the most diabolical aspect of those old-time big brains. They would tell their owners, in effect, here's a crazy thing we could actually do, probably, but we would never do it, of course. It's just fun to think about. And then, as though in trances, the people would really do it, have slaves fight each other to death in the Colosseum or burn people alive in the public square for holding opinions which were nuclearly unpopular or build factories whose only purpose was to kill people in industrial quantities or to blow up whole cities and on and on. Why so many of us knocked up? And this is the explanation. I think this is me. I think this is what led me to

using him as my prototype for the drunken uncle. Why so many of us knocked up major chunks of our brains from alcohol from time to time remains an interesting mystery. It may be that we were trying

to give evolution a shove in the right direction, in the direction of smaller brains. So this is a fantastic justification. But also what Vonnegut does, very typically, I think, is he subjects the theory of evolution to his own skepticism. He's not presenting evolution to you as a fact. He's presenting evolution to you as a theory

by a young Englishman called Charles Darwin and saying, well, if it's true, why don't we follow some of the logical paths from it? And if we follow the logical paths from it, we end up somewhere absurd. That seems to me a very, you know, a Vonnegut trait. Push an idea beyond its extreme to reveal the flaws in the idea but not disprove it leon has this a million year year kind of perspective right

so when he's talking about a lot of animals and like the iguana or the dog dogs have still never learned to they've not evolved to to swim underwater and catch fish and the iguana you know they he just writes about the iguana in real life the children the creature could be more than a meter long and look as fierceome as a Chinese dragon. Actually, though, it was no more dangerous to lifeforms of any sort, with the exception of seaweed, than a liverwurst. Here is what its life is like in the present day, which is exactly what its life was like a million years ago.

It has no enemies, so it sits in one place, staring into the middle distance at nothing, wanting nothing, worried about nothing, until it is hungry. It then waddles down to the ocean and swims slowly, not all that ably, until it is a few meters from shore. Then it dives, like a submarine, joke, and stuffs itself with seaweed, which is at that time indigestible. The seaweed is going to have to be cooked before it is digestible. So the marine iguana pops to the surface, swims ashore, sits on the lava in the sunshine again. It is using itself for a covered stew pot, getting hotter and hotter while the

sunshine cooks the seaweed. It continues to stare into the middle distance at nothing as before but with this difference. It now spits up increasingly hot salt water from time to time during the million years i've spent in these islands the law of natural selection has found no way to improve or for that matter to worsen this particular survival scheme so i just it's a very very funny So good. That idea of the human being being floored by the big brain, I was looking, guys, for what critical writing there was on that subject,

and I stumbled upon an essay, which I just want to read you, one paragraph of, by Corian Anderson. Just like, Shehan, you to comment on this. Vonnegut's narrator never explicitly mentions, yet nonetheless echoes the thesis of the Hungarian-born British writer Arthur Kerstler, in which Kerstler argues that, quote, evolution has been compared to a labyrinth of blind alleys,

and there is nothing very strange or improbable in the assumption that man's native equipment, though superior to that of any other living species, nevertheless contains some built-in error or deficiency which predisposes him towards self-destruction. That's exactly it. Firstly, I wondered, is the science adding up? And I'm not sure it quite does with how he populates the final island and how the insemination and all of that. And then the subsequent evolution. I was trying to like work it out,

but then I thought, he doesn't explain the financial crisis for World War III particularly elegantly. And maybe that's not the point. They are a bit McGuffin-y. He's just celebrating the absurdity. But he certainly believes that. And you see that in other books as well,

that he's trying to explain the motives and the actions of the motives and the actions of the powerful and the rich and cannot, yeah, cannot come up with anything other than, I mean, I think I was trying to do that with the book Seven Moons as well.

And my theory was there, there are spirits sitting on everyone's shoulders whispering these terrible ideas. Now, similarly, she's saying the big brain offers that up. And I've been asked this question

a lot about the use of second person in Seven Moons. And I always say it's the voice in your head. The voice in your head talking to you. It talks to me in the second person and maybe that's true of others.

And that Buddhism and mindfulness. And I see a lot of, I think as a college student, as a young man reading this stuff, I can see a lot of i think as a college student as a young man reading this stuff i can see a lot of parallels with buddhism and not the way it's practiced currently in myanmar or sri lanka but uh you know the tenets of buddhism and one of the ideas and we find it now mindfulness everyone's got their apps plugged in um but the penalty is who is the you is it the you whispering your thoughts origin originating your thoughts? Or are you the person listening to those thoughts?

And I think I can see parallels there with the big brain produces these thoughts. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It just seemed to me that that example of what Douglas Adams called the interconnectedness of all things with that Arthur Kersler quote is not merely synchronicity. I'm going somewhere with this. Do you know which book of Arthur Kersler's he makes that observation, which is so similar to Vonnegut? Anyone? I'm going to Vonnegut. Anyone. I'm going to say Ghost in the Machine. It is the Ghost in the Machine.

Not because I'm an Arthur Koestler scholar, but because of reasons that will come apparent. The Ghost in the Machine is the fourth album by popular British beat Conway the Prince. Yes.

I could not believe that, Shehan. What are the chances that that should be a similar expression of philosophical worldview for this podcast, which was referencing Douglas Adams,

the interconnectedness of all things, which is in itself an idea derived from Kurt Vonnegut. Because everything is happening at once. What a beautiful thing that is.

And this seems like a good moment to hear a word from our sponsors. Okay, well, as we're at the halfway point of this podcast, it seems a good moment to introduce it with the blurb from this book. I've got a copy of the first edition of Galapagos,

the British first edition, which was published by Jonathan Cape. And it's got a very long jacket copy, actually. And John and Shehan, you'll be pleased to know, some plucky editor also takes a stab at a plot summary here, which I'm not going to read the whole of, because I think it's like three paragraphs long. I'm just going to read the third paragraph into the fourth and the fourth paragraph I will ask you to both comment on because I think

the fourth paragraph is where the heart of the matter is. So here we go from the third paragraph. In a sense, it probably was Mary Hepburn's brain more than anything else which saved mankind from extinction but captain von kleist took none too kindly to her playing fast and loose with his sperm in her ad hoc artificial insemination program who isn't standing in the bookshop going i have to read this how was mary to know there was a calculable chance that von kleist carried a strain of huntington's career in his genes, a hereditary disease of the brain which might have passed on to the humans of the next million years, a propensity in the male to murder his mate sometime in midlife. The good captain never mentioned it. As chance would have it, von Kleist was not a carrier, but it was a close ecological

shave. I mean, that's paragraph three. And here's paragraph four. At the heart of the gripping dottiness of this unforgettably entertaining novel are vital messages for our species. Not since Charles Darwin have the Galapagos Islands thrown up such thought-provoking morsels for our three-kilogram brains to ingest. Amongst the flightless cormorants, larcenous frigatebirds, and of course the blue-footed boobies, we witnessed the law of natural selection in action,

as it has certainly not acted before. Kurt Vonnegut has never been funnier or more serious. That's pretty good. Those blurbs were long in those days weren't they yeah yeah and that was only half yeah

okay so they go heads on into um revealing some more spoilers thematically I don't disagree with it

what did you think it was something I think the blurb is fundamentally all in the last line the blurb is all

leading up to the statement Kurt Vonnegut has never been funnier or more serious because by 1985 you thought you knew what you were getting with a Kurt Vonnegut novel. And anyone who didn't already like Kurt Vonnegut wasn't going to read it. And anyone who did still like Kurt Vonnegut, 16 years after Slaughterhouse-Five, had perhaps had to work their way through other novels, which they had been told were not as great as Slaughterhouse-Five. So as you were saying, Shahan, Galapagos is kind of published

when his reputation is at a low ebb. And yet, how do they sell the book? Well, they can only sell the book by saying, if you like Kurt Vonnegut, here's a really good Kurt Vonnegut novel. Did any of those books that I mentioned restore his, at least his credibility? I mean, his popular appeal was always there. So Bluebeard, Hocus Pocus,

and then I think Timequake was a return to form. But did he never recover from that shadow? And clearly with you, if you never went back after Slaughterhouse-Five, was that the general consensus? What he said about slapstick, he said, look, it's perfectly possible it was a bad book. In this Paris Review interview in 1976, he said, what was unusual about the reviews was

that they wanted people to admit now that I'd never been any good. The reviewer from the Sunday Times actually asked critics who'd praised me in the past to now admit in public how wrong they'd been and he said well you know his publisher tries to reassure him so I think there was a sense in which his his his reputation by the early 80s was was um and I think it was to some extent restored by those three or four last books I mean mean, there was certainly, he did, you know, he was very popular. I remember, you know, Waterstone's events with him

that were absolute sellouts. But I think Vonnegut anyway occupies a different place. I think because he's been read in schools and he has that crossover between, like Douglas Adams, between science fiction and popular fiction. He's not seen merely as a literary writer. And I think that's why, I mean, his reputation, I imagine all his books are still in print. And he is still read by young people.

I think there may have been a kind of the usual thing, the tall poppy thing when he got to mid-career and he writes a couple of bad books and everybody writes them off. But I think there's evidence that he's around for the long haul. I don't hear people saying who reads Kurt Vonnegut anymore. I think a lot of people do. No, I think it's very telling for what it's worth that we have made episodes of Batlisted about Kurt Vonnegut, but also Ray Bradbury, Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon.

But we have not made episodes of Backlisted because people generally don't choose their work by about Don DeLillo, Saul Bellow, John Updike, or Philip Roth. Although one of those is about to change in the near future, but I'm not going to reveal which one. But nevertheless, you know, the writers we discover, and Vonnegut seems to me like a classic example of this, the writers we discover when we are wet

cement, when we are teenagers, lodge in our brains. Even if we don't get it straight away, Shahan, like you and I were saying, we read him when we were teenagers, but something stayed there that when we went back, some seed was planted that when we went back, we went, oh, this guy, this guy has this to say. now to critical opprobrium or dismissal. Well, this is not a dated novel. I mean, it could easily be, but it isn't. No, not at all. If anything, the technology isn't quite as menacing as, yeah, but it should be.

Everything else is bang on the money. But you've heard that theory about um the music you listen to when you're 14 or the music you fall in love with when you're 14 that's what stays with you for life so yeah police every breath you take the singles that a cassette a pirated cassette in colombo found its way to me yeah and um yeah at the time you're listening to rick astley or whatever's popular. So this was like quite anarchic to listen to this band that had been broken up 10 years ago or whatever. But yes, a 14.

And I think, yeah, that is true of, I mean, I was slightly older when I read Slaughterhouse. But you're right, it's taught in schools. Is it still taught in schools? Has it survived all the bands? Yeah. in schools is it still thought in schools has it survived all the bands and yeah um yeah i mean shahan you you raised a really interesting point earlier when you said the career is kind of um divided into pre and post slaughterhouse and to some extent vonnegut himself would agree with you and i just wanted to read you, this is really interesting.

I would really like to hear your thoughts on this. This is a brief excerpt from a profile that Martin Amis wrote of Kurt Vonnegut in 1983. It was published by The Observer. And indeed, there is a review of Galapagos by Martin Amis, which is very interesting, in which he says, the first half of the book really works. I'm not so sure about the second half, which is kind of taking the slaughterhouse, pre and post slaughterhouse theory and applying it to this one novel. But I just want to read you this. I, and you know, we are, we like Martin Amis here. And I applaud Martin Amis for saying this. He writes a profile of Vonnegut and he sets it up by saying, I'm a huge Vonnegut fan, but I don't like his later books as much as his earlier books.

How am I going to talk to him about this when I meet him? Okay. And I'm going to read you the very beginning of this piece and the very end of this piece, and then we'll have a chat about it. So it begins in this way. Inveterately regressive, ever the playful infantilist, Kurt Vonnegut recently shuffled his career into a report card, signed it and tacked it to his study wall. The report was chronological, grading his work from A to D. This is what it looked like. Play a piano, A. The Sirens of Titan, A. Mother Night, A. Cat's Cradle, A+.

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, A. Slaughterhouse-Five, A+. Breakfast of Champions, C. Slapstick, D. Jailbird, A. This is written before those other novels, right? And Amis writes, the burden of the report seems clear enough. Kurt started confidently, went from strength to strength for a good long spell, then passed into a trough of lassitude and uncertainty, but now shows signs of rallying. The graph charted by the American literary establishment, viewed by Vonnegut as at best a flock of cue card readers, at worst a squad of

jailers, torturers, and funeral directors, would be even starker and much less auspicious. Their report would probably go something like this, B minus, B, B minus, A, A minus, B minus, B, D, C. A, A-, B-, B, D, C. You know, he was never much loved in his era by the literary establishment. And Amis puts to him the idea that he has, you know, since Slaughterhouse-Five, withdrawn slightly, tried less hard. And here's how this piece ends.

Until 1969, Vonnegut was, in his own words, a trafficker in climaxes and thrills and characterization and wonderful dialogue and suspense and confrontations. Now he is... what, exactly? The later Vonnegut novels are deserts, punctuated by the odd paradisal oasis. Those good moments are simply reversions to his earlier manner, which is why it is more fun to reread an old Vonnegut novel than it is to tackle a new one.

I switched on the tape recorder and backed myself into the big question. Of all the writers I have met, Vonnegut gives off the mildest prickle of amour-propre, but no writer likes to be asked if he has lost his way. He heard me out with a few uh-huh and then said, American literary careers are very short. I had very low expectations. I always thought if I could ever get something down about Dresden, that would be it. And after Slaughterhouse-Five, I've already done much more than I ever expected to do with my life. Now, since I don't have to do anything anymore, I've gotten more personal, freer to be idiosyncratic.

It's like the history of jazz. Musicians reach the point where they play the goddamn things with the mouse piece upside down and stuff the tube with toilet paper and fuck around and make all the crazy sounds they can. An honest and accurate answer. I wondered out loud whether a sense of futility had anything to do with it, with the rejection of melody, phrasing, structure, control, with the rejection of art. There was Dresden, said Vonnegut, a beautiful city, full of museums and zoos, man at his greatest. And when we came up from the bunker, the city was gone. The raid didn't shorten the war by half a second, didn't weaken a German defense or attack anywhere, didn't free a single person from a death camp. Only one person benefited. And who was that,

I asked. Me, said Vonnegut. I got several dollars for each person killed imagine that's amazing yeah it's amazing great writing so famously kurt vonnegut survived the he went off to the second world war he uh survived the bombing of dresden and then he was by the Allied forces. And then he watched many of his friends die in the Battle of the Bulge. And then he was sent out to clear up the debris in Dresden, a city that, as he said, he had seen on the train coming in looked like Florence. And when he came out from that bunker from the disused slaughterhouse, it looked like the moon. And he was employed to clear away the bodies of German civilians while German soldiers watched over them.

And then he came back and spent the rest of his life attempting to deal with that in fiction and in a novel, in Slaughterhouse-Five. Here's a clip of him describing what that experience was like and then his daughters, his two daughters, take on it. It was a great adventure of my life and certainly something to talk about.

Indeed, I was there. The neighborhood dogs, when I grew up, had far greater influence on what I am today than the mere firebombing of Dresden. I think Kurt, yeah, he's full of it. He's seen too much, you know, and he's just living through Dresden. I think Kurt, yeah, he's full of it. He's seen too much, you know, and he's just living through Dresden and his sister

dying and all his friends and seen too much anyway. No. Did he really say that? You should see when he laughs at the most inappropriate times, but it seems right somehow. I think maybe this is his way.

I think one thing we learned from Uncle Kurt is the tempering power of laughter. I think in all this, the idea you have to just laugh at the absurdity. So it goes. And shrug and smile and go on.

And maybe this is why it appealed to me because I saw a lot of that in the Sri Lankan sensibility. We didn't say those words, but we shrug off every catastrophe. And there is a smile which may be masking things, but also there's optimism there. He was fond of saying that he preferred laughter to crying because there was less cleaning up

to do afterwards uh you know you you might as well laugh because if you don't laugh the alternative is it's not going to get you anywhere um i've got a book here called the writer's crusade i don't know if either of you have come across this by by Tom Roston. This was published a couple of years ago. Very interesting book about the relationship between Vonnegut and PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. And Vonnegut was at pains to spend his whole life saying, if you call me a victim of PTSD, you rob me of the artistry of my work. And the book takes a kind of neutral position and says, that's true. But if you speak to veterans of the Second World War or Vietnam or

Korea or Iraq, they recognize Slaughterhouse-Five in particular as the testimony of somebody suffering from ptsd who is always there in dresden even when they're not there you know they're always living through that moment over and over again and john that idea about time in vonnegut you know that idea that that that time is something. Unstuck in time is the famous phrase about Billy Pilgrim, of course. You know, the idea that you're not in the place you think you are. And wherever you are, try and catch it because it will be gone in a moment. I think, you know, this book in particular, I think amos is a little harsh i think there's there's much more going on in this book than you know monica just throwing stuff at the wall i i think the idea of of time

and a million years and um and the you know the the the things the most important thing that we're all having to to grapple with at the moment which is the planet is being destroyed by yeah by human greed and growth and there is a connection there with this this ever-expanding human brain we have a belief that the more connections that must be a good thing there's a lovely thing that he says this could be this could be murdoch or it could be this is andrew mcintosh but it could also be elon musk or it could be, this is Andrew McIntosh, but it could also be Elon Musk, or it could be any of the tech bros or the billionaires. McIntosh was barefoot, wearing nothing but a pair of khaki shorts whose fly was unbuttoned and under which he wore no underwear so that his penis was no more secret than the pendulum on a grandfather clock. secret than the pendulum on a grandfather clock. Yes, and I pause to marvel now how little interested this man was in reproduction, in being a huge success biologically. Despite his exhibitionist sexuality and his mania for claiming as his own property as many of the planet's life support

systems as possible, the most famous amassers of survival schemes back then typically had very few children. There were exceptions, of course. Those who did reproduce a lot, though, and who might be thought to want so much property for the comfort of their descendants, commonly made psychological cripples of their own children. Their heirs were more often than not zombies, easily fleeced by men and women as greedy as the person who'd left them much too much of everything a human animal could ever want. Andrew McIntosh didn't even care if he himself lived or died, as evidenced by his enthusiasms for skydiving and the racing of high-performance motor vehicles and so on, like Branson. So I have

to say that human brains back then had become such copious and irresponsible generators of suggestions as to what might be done with life, that they made acting for the benefit of future generations seem one of many arbitrary games which might be played by narrow enthusiasts like poker or polo or the bond market or the writing of science fiction novels. More and more people back then, and not just Andrew McIntosh, had found ensuring the survival of the human race a total bore. It's a lot more fun, so to speak, to hit and hit a tennis ball. I mean, that's brilliant, I think.

We're living in that world even more than we were 30 years ago when I think I... Shahan, what about that idea that after writing about Dresden and making the great artistic statement that he had wanted to make you know we're fond of saying on this podcast it's all one book the work of a great writer is all one book you know it seems to me having read this book a it isn't directionless in the way it was criticized for being and b it's kurt vonnegut yeah you know it's

kurt vonnegut riffing on a theme or what more than one theme on ideas you know i wanted to ask you as a novelist yourself with an eye on structure and craft and how do you strike a balance between how do you strike a balance between making sure the cabinet is well made, but also making sure it retains energy and, you know, a spark? Well, I think Laurie Moore's review at the time, I think in the New York Times, it compares the novel to an architelego, a series of small islands. And he's a terrific nature writer as well. There's bits of nature, there's parables,

there's childhood reminiscences, history that's invented history and real history. But at the center, it's the confessions of a soldier. And so, yeah, I relate to this with novels

with many moving parts. This should be a shambles. And I think that also him dispensing with suspense is also but it's it's more of a how it happened uh so you know i would have done this you know like a slasher horror there's you know the nine last people on on the planet which one's going to survive and one by one the person you think's going to survive isn't and there's a final i mean there is a final girl but there's final girls there's there's about five of them yeah yeah and i didn't feel that even though it has these different forms that it takes there was a beating heart and you're

constantly reminded of it even though you're given the ending midway through but this was something we were conscious of when we're editing seven moons that there were so many moving parts that readers could get lost and that so therefore we had a fairly strict structure of this a detective story of a the only difference being the corpse is the detective in my book but but you had to have this he has seven moons to solve his own murder um and so i think that's and i think it works brilliantly in this one as well and that gives it jeopardy yes the seven moons that structure

it builds in a kind of yes and there's a reason so these ramblings that you feel don't feel they're ramblings and you think yeah they're going to

come back to the point and I think you trust it with Kurt as well I agree yeah I agree you said a great thing about science fiction

which I love you said you know the problem with science fiction, it's much more fun to hear someone tell the story of the book than to read the story itself. Uh, okay. Yeah.

That's the, that's the great genius of what, what Vonnegut is at his best does is you can never quite second guess what, what this book is going to be, where it's going to go. He's always throwing in new characters. He's always throwing you off centre. When you think you've got it, and it's like you were saying

before, when you think you've got it, he'll destabilise you. And I don't think the end, as you say, whether or not it is a happy ending or not a happy ending, you wouldn't expect Vonnegut to make anything that easy. Well, listen, we're getting near to the end and it would be a shame if there weren't a quiz

on this episode. So, I'm going to ask Nick, will you join us, please, for this quiz? Relaxantly. Yeah, I know. Valkyrie, don't worry. I won't prolong the agony. So we're playing a game called Slap Sting. Slap Sting.

I'm going to ask each of my fellow panelists to identify the following titles is this the title of a kurt vonnegut short story or a song by the police fantastic okay is it okay so so let's start with you uh shahan police Song or Vonnegut Short Story, Out Brief Candle. Out Brief Candle, that has to be Vonnegut. It is Vonnegut. Congratulations. That's excellent. John Mitchinson, here's your

one. Truth Hits Everybody. Is that a police song or a short story by Kurt Vonnegut? It's Vonnegut, gotta be. It's a song by the police, I'm afraid. Of the first album, yeah. That's right. From the first album, that's right.

Nikki, here's one for you. Every little thing she does is magic. Oh, hell no. Kurt Vonnegut short story or song by the police? Too kind, Andy. Too kind. It's by the police. It is a song by the police.

So at the end of round one, it's Nikkiy and Shahan tied one-on-one. John, still everything to play for, John. I'm enjoying this a bit more now, Andy. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. So Shahan, okay. Is this round two of Slap Sting, is this a police song or a Vonnegut short story,

Bombs Away? The police song of the third album. Written by Stuart Copeland. Correct. There are no bonus points for this, but well done. Yeah. Okay.

And for a bonus point, Shahan, what was the, the drummer made some excellent solo records under the, under what name in the same period? Clark Kent, spelt with J.

Clark Kent, that is correct. Very good. Very good. Very good, Shahan. So John, is this a Vonnegut short story

or a police song? Jenny. I'm going to go Vonnegut short story. You are right. It is a Vonnegut short story. Roxanne, Nicky. Roxanne.

Is that a Vonnegut short story? Or a police song? Imagine if it was both. That would be great. It's a police song, Andy story? Or a police song? Imagine if it was both. That would be great. It's a police song, Andy. It is a police song. Okay, one last round of this. I reckon we've got it.

Okay. Okay. You are in the lead because you got a bonus point. So, you know. Okay. I do like to show off. Yeah.

Not my knowledge of Vonnegut. Is this a Vonnegut short story or a police song. Requiem for Zeitgeist. A Vonnegut story. It is a Vonnegut story. Congratulations. That's excellent. That could be a police song.

Couldn't it? Requiem for Zeitgeist. Something on the last album, maybe. Sting off one of his loot records. It sounds like. Indeed. Okay. Johnny. off one of his loot records. I don't think it sounds like those. Okay,

Johnny, here we go. Right. Is this the title of a Vonnegut short story or police song? Oh my God. That is a police song.

It is a police song. Of Synchronicity. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I'm going to stop showing off.

Yeah. I'm going to. We love it and nikki finally for you is this police song or a vonnegut short story i mean at this point it doesn't matter does it i mean to do do do da da da which is that which is that it's a police song it's also the title of a vonnegut short story. No, it isn't really. No, it isn't. If only it were. Okay, well, I declare Sheehan the winner because he

got the most right. So congratulations, Sheehan. Oh, thank you. I'm sorry. Sorry, Nicky. Nicky did terribly well. Oh, well, I tried my best. It was very hard. Okay, good. So I'm afraid that's where we're going to have to leave our furry future selves behind

huge thanks to shahan for giving us the chance to discuss uncle kurt at very long last and to nicky birch for crossbreeding the various strains of our recordings into the fittest possible track what do you want to try that again? I'll try it again I'm afraid that's where we're going to have to leave our future furry selves Huge thanks to Sheehan for giving us the chance to discuss Uncle Kurt at last

and to Nicky Birch for crossbreeding the various strains of our voice recordings into the fittest possible... Oh no, it doesn't work, sorry I'll have to change that. Let me do it one more time. I'm afraid that's where we're going to have to...

I'm afraid that was where we'll have to leave our future furry selves. Huge thanks to Shihan for giving us the chance to discuss and Kurt at long last and to Nicky Birch for crossbreeding the various strains of our voices into the fittest possible recording. And if you want show notes with clips, links and suggestions for further reading for this show and the 194 that we've already recorded, and I can't help noting that if you divide 194 by four, you get 42.

Brilliant. I mean, actually, I know you don't. Let's just assume you do. Let's just assume you do. Something close, anyway. Anyway, you can find all those episodes at our website at backlisted.fm. If you want to buy the books discussed, visit our shop at bookshop.org and choose Backlisted as

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backlisted. your subscription will bring other benefits if you subscribe at the lot listener level for about the price of a rum and coke in the bar of the hotel el dorado you'll get two extra exclusive podcasts every month we call it lock listed because it began in the wenlock tavern just before lockdown and it features the three of us talking and recommending the books, films and music we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight. People who subscribe at this level get their names read out, accompanied by lashings of thanks and praise. So thank you to Simon Bracken, thank you to Toby Dickinson, thank you to Nancy Sinnott, thank you to Rob Brown, former guest

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lot listener, if you're not a lot listener, I've been reading a book this week, which i think is the best novel that i have read new novel that i have read since uh gwendolyn riley's my phantoms and if you want to find out what that is i will be talking about that on the next lot listed i'm already excited about talking about it it feels like a a great great uh discovery i'm not going to put it anywhere else either until I've expressed it on Locklisted

so I have a bit of space to stretch out and read from it and talk about it. But hopefully you'll join us for that. Shahan, is there anything you would like to add? Thank you so much for getting us to read Vonnegut again, for choosing this particular novel. Is there anything you would like to add about this book or uncle kurt that we haven't covered in our chat no it was an absolute pleasure guys thank you i uh good to go back and i it's a good it's a book that does lend itself to rereadings

especially with the helpful asterisks and and the short paragraph so i i would just say um see the report card, uncle Kurt's report card only went, uh, to jailbird. It didn't, it didn't cover this golden. I would offer straight A's and I would urge everyone,

um, latter day Kurt, Bonnie Gertz, Hocus Pocus, Bluebeard, and the one that started off Galopagus, um, fantastic books.

Borderline A plus for me. I think it's a, I think it's an extremely, um, useful novel. I think actually if people who are reading climate, you know, so-called climate fiction now should pick up Galapagos because it's hard to imagine anybody keeping all the balls that he keeps up in this novel uh in in such a beautiful funny humorous and and um you know i i think uh like like leon trout i i'm gonna stand with the uh the epigraph in spite of everything i still believe people are really good at heart i honestly i do think

that's what that book is that book is full of it i think he was saying we are spirits in the material world. That's just my guess. I don't know. We can't go further than that. Beautiful. All right. Brilliant. Goodbye.

I'm here all week. Listen, thanks, John. Thanks, John, Nicky. Thanks so much. We'll see you next time, everybody. Bye, everybody. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

On an average, 324,000 new babies are born into the world every day. 10,000 persons on an average will have starved to death or died from malnutrition. So it goes. They were all being killed with their families. So it goes. He tore himself to pieces, throwing up and throwing up. So it goes. And every day, my government gives me a count of corpses.

So it goes. Who were tried and shot. So it goes. The champagne was dead. So it goes. count of corpses. So it goes. Tried and shot. So it goes. Champagne was dead. So it goes. So it goes. So it goes. So it goes.