Galapagos
Big-brained, not oversized
Aesthetically-oriented, I continue to find myself, this time pulled into “a madcap genealogical adventure” as the New York Times Book Review so proclaims. The version I procured of Galapagos presents a cover featuring Kurt Vonnegut’s heralded name in bold, orange serif text, followed by a rattlesnake of identical hue, crudely outlined and detailed in black to bridge the gap from author to title, scrawled how an SOS on a deserted island may appear, all dropped upon a light–washed, seafoam green background.
Just as Hotel Splendide, Ludwig Bemelmans’ work of my previous review, presented itself in such alluring fashion, so too does Galapagos, both setting tones for the palettes of which their stories should be imagined.
Divided into “Book 1: The Thing Was” and “Book 2: And The Thing Became,” the division of Galapagos respectively describes moments before and multi-decades after the supposed fall of man. Book 1 is fluid, cyclical; it technically takes place over the course of a single day yet is rife with allusions to key characters’ pasts and near-futures. Book 2 is linear, permanent; it tends to spring 20 years ahead at the start of a new paragraph with no preface, the reader being prompted to accept this sudden time warp which, to be fair, Vonnegut has employed from page 1.
Less goes on in the quotidian sense throughout book 2, simply the dawn of a new world on fictional Santa Rosalia Island in the Galapagos where nothing is completely developed except the original settlers themselves, having avoided an infertility pandemic with their arguably fortunate location. These pioneers, in their drastically decreased pace of life, are a microscopic portion of the life happening in book 1.
The orbit of main characters, both pioneers and those predisposed to perish, rotates in terms of prominence and frequency of mention in part because death (its timeliness often up for debate and prefaced with ★) plays a crucial role in determining relevance. An underlying sense of nihilism and apocalypse in regards to the “Nature Cruise of the Century” leave some characters, like first passenger Mary Hepburn, in a frenetic flurry and others, like pseudonymous con man James Wait, in blissful ignorance, cool as can be despite control of the situation as absent as students in the summer.
Throughout the oft-ensuing chaos, there is a calming purity to Vonnegut’s voice, communicated through headless seaman Leon Trout, that makes the most outlandish of occurrences as believable as day and night. He travels objectively, assessing both the good and bad, self-aggrandizing and deprecating, providing the reader with a scope of how social and physical norms shift from years 1986 to 1,001,986.
This purity is not without an overwhelming sense of irony, each commentary teeming with language suggesting its contrary in Trout’s matter-of-fact manner. “Big brains, oversized brains” are often the stem of yesteryear issues, and a decrease of such mental capacity won’t allow the masses to be overridden by opinion or fall victim to the “main business of life: evidence.”
And yet he remarks on society’s awareness of these nefarious neurons, noting the “mystifying enthusiasm a million years ago for turning over as many human activities as possible to machinery” as likely “yet another acknowledgement by people that their brains were no damn good…such copious and irresponsible generators of suggestions as to what might be done with life.”
Trout’s brain, one of stature that remained rational despite its size, goes from complex to primal in book 2 as he assesses James Wait ★, slated to be the new world Adam to Mary Hepburn’s Eve and “some kind of male ape, evidently… [who] may have domesticated fire…used tools.” Trout knows this to be true without needing to suppose; he has lived such a long life that the blue tunnel of the Afterlife has materialized 4 times in his line of sight. He has arguably seen too much.
Such are the nuances that herald Vonnegut as a classic American author. While there are key figures and plot-pushers from Galapagos left unmentioned in this piece, it is Vonnegut’s voice, through sculpture of story and delivery by Leon Trout, that beseeched the most attention. Without its humanistic approachability and dystopian amusement, no one in Trout’s million years on earth is portrayed for future generations of readers like you and I with such candor, colorful criticism and true empathy. He is as objective as a headless narrator can be.
Little did we know!