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  • Hocus Pocus

  • Written by: Kurt Vonnegut
  • Narrated by: LJ Ganser
  • Length: 8 hrs and 40 mins
  • 4.0 out of 5 stars (37 ratings)

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Hocus Pocus

Written by: Kurt Vonnegut
Narrated by: LJ Ganser
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Publisher's Summary

Eugene Debs Hartke (named after the famous early 20th century Socialist working class leader) describes an odyssey from college professor to prison inmate to prison warden back again to prisoner in another of Vonnegut's bitter satirical explorations of how and where (and why) the American dream begins to die. Employing his characteristic narrative device - a retrospective diary in which the protagonist retraces his life at its end, a desperate and disconnected series of events here in Hocus Pocus show Vonnegut with his mask off and his rhetorical devices unshielded.

Debs (and Vonnegut) see academia just as imprisoning as the corrupt penal system and they regard politics as the furnishing and marketing of lies. Debs, already disillusioned by circumstance, quickly tracks his way toward resignation and then fury. As warden and prisoner, Debs (and the reader) come to understand that the roles are interchangeable; as a professor jailed for "radical" statements in the classroom reported by a reactionary student, he comes to see the folly of all regulation.

The "hocus pocus" of the novel's title does not describe only the jolting reversals and seemingly motiveless circumstance which attend Debs' disillusion and suffering, but also describe the political, social, and economic system of a country built upon can't, and upon the franchising of lies. At 68, Vonnegut had not only abandoned the sentiment and cracked optimism manifest in Slaughterhouse-Five, he had abandoned any belief in the system or faith for its recovery. This novel is another in a long series of farewells to the farmland funeral rites of childhood.

©1990 Kurt Vonnegut (P)2015 Audible Inc.

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I found the racism to be challenging

I'm going to preface this review with acknowledging the generational difference in social understanding of what sensitivity can be towards racism, sexist, bigotry and patriarchal stances.

Technical was great: Well read, editted and recorded.

I've liked getting into Kurts writing recently, and have torn through a bunch of his stuff enjoying his intelligent flow and humorously casual exposition of social and emotional complexity. So perhaps I'm guilty of bringing my own present day views along with holding him on a bit of recently found literary pedestal as a representative of progressive rationality. This work was hard to witness and difficult ro realize it tarnished my opinion.

While listening to to this, I struggled with my previous love of Vonnegut works (like slaughter house, sirens of titan and breakfast of champions) while I listened to him glorify in ethnic slurs while extolling his own virtues of never swearing as his ethical high water mark. He's as clever as always be with delivery, but he sounds like the unrepentant celebrant of archaic forms of social labelling and hate speech. I found this ridden with triggering racism and brought into glaring focus the missed social opportunities to lean away from the narrative of hate speech and labels. This might have changed the lense that I view his work through. While I'm not going to let it wipe out my enjoyment of his psychotic and enthralling style of story telling, this may be the last of his that I seek out for a while. But then again, Einstein sounds like a racist too. Who am I to judge those from different times with the tools they had available? But I have those better tools now, and this was across my line. Glad to what where he stands, and sad I know I'm no longer on board with it.

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Kurt Vonnegut, we miss you

As “Slaughterhouse Five” was Kurt Vonnegut’s WWII novel, this is his Vietnam War novel. It is immensely critical of the Establishment, especially in its treatment of criminals and the disadvantaged.

The “Contemporary “ parts of the story are set In the late 1990s , and I believed they were clever parody of current events.

The book was published in 1990. That’s how good Vonnegut is.

I was pleased to read another tale of Tralfamadore.

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