I’ve only read one Kurt Vonnegut book before this one, Slaughter-House Five, though I’ve stayed
interested in his work ever since I’ve read that book. It’s probably been four
or five years since I read my first Vonnegut but the man is a fascinating
character in his own right (and no, I’m not making reference to Kilgore Trout
but the reference is there if you want it). Several months ago I went to a
bookstore with the intent of buying another Vonnegut book. This is my kind of
writer and I owe it to myself to explore his oeuvre. I couldn’t pick out a
single book and after arriving at a shortlist of three books, I asked my wife
to pick. She singled out Galapagos
and, here we are, a few months later with a review about humanity’s destruction
and rebirth as a new species.
Simply put, Galapagos
is an evolutionary journey recounted from the point of view of a million years
in our future. There and then, the ghost of a man from the 20th
century is telling the story of the crisis which befell humanity in 1986 and
how unusual circumstances made the Galapagos Islands the hotbed of evolution
for a second time in the history of the world. It’s on one of its volcanic islands
that the last survivors of humanity find themselves the originators of the next
step in human evolution.
