Galápagos is one of Vonnegut's latter novels, a tortured humanist despair at how bad humanity is in making things right. While a typical work from the Author, it is a bit darker and grimmer than other stories to which it relates in painting a sad and pathetic portrait of the human race.
In this fight between the humanist and the moralist, the humanist wins by rejecting the fault not on people but on how nature shaped them. Galápagos tells the story of how Darwin's evolution proceeds to turn humankind into weird sea animals at the intersection between dolphins and apes, with a short timespan and the bliss of ignorance. The main change, which takes place over the course of a million year, consists in crippling our too-sophisticated brain, which is too complex to remain harmonious or even coherent with the feats of which it is able. As a result of our inability to cope with our brain powers, we unleash absurd chaos and senseless sufferings. Vonnegut is exploring which possibilities there are to overcome that.
The novel pursues this by following a small group of fairly random and disparate characters, none very likeable, most afflicted in one way or another, whose imminent death and thus withdrawal from the evolutionary process, is signaled by prepending an asterix to their name. The group itself is, by chance, the one that survives a strange mixture of a financial crisis (due to man's mistaken belief in the value of economical assets) and a natural catastrophe (a mysterious illness devouring women's eggs and making them infertiles). They will be the one to extend the human race into the "good" direction. Notably, other species do not evolve anymore.
This is Vonnegut's 11th novel, which I read during our PLMCN25 trip, mainly on our way back on 17 April (2025). It is connected to his broader universe through Ilium and Trout (although not Kilgore as the main character but his son Leon as a ghost recounting the tale), as well as Wait's son from Breakfast of champions [1]. It has numerous significant, smart and/or visionary details. For instance, it features the Mandarax, still a sci-fi gizmo by the time of writing, but nowadays a reality, in the form of a clever machine able to translate languages and offer advices on various topics such as medical diagnosis or the art of flower arrangement. This symbolizes the cold wisdom brought forward by technology, but devoid of humanity. Humanity, however, is itself symbolized by the too-big-brain of people at the time of the main story, which is the end of times for our civilization, and also the bulk of the story itself that is gradually revealed from details that are shared here and there as the narrative develops. This makes the "evolution" of the story as seemingly implacable than the evolution of species itself, which is the major theme with numerous and delightful inspections, such as the hereditary character of diseases, the process of natural selection, the struggle of species collectively as well as of individual specimens. Many details, such as the insemination on the island by plucking fingers, are gloomy. The many problems affecting various characters, of the violence of their demises, are powerful and unsettling. People are always painted as, more than miserable, suffering. As the narrator emphasizes, all the problems are caused by «the only true villain in my story: the oversized human brain».
The Galápagos islands symbolize Earth as a whole: a small place where we are stuck but could thrive, if it wouldn't be for our need to try everything that goes through our mind. It could have been other mystery islands, such as the Easter island, but the choice of this secluded place replete with a tremendous diversity of plants and fantastic animals found nowhere else in the world, which followed its own course in the development of species, was apt to set the décors of an evolutionary story. Blue footed boobies and their extraterrestrial mating dance make reality exede even Vonnegut's fiction, and what the prose he produces out of it is no short of miraculous.
Bringing Science and technology in his shielded paradise would wreck the place but the Author decides instead to disable the people there and leave them fully on their own. The beginning of their one-million year evolution is mainly from a group of savage (at all rates, cannibal) girls from a tribe with their own language and customs. This reminds of Cat's cradle local population of San Lorenzo, blessed in a way that more sophisticated people are not.
The story is written in air with the unsubstantial finger of a ghost, so air writing in air. It purports the uselessness of everything. A recurring theme is that nobody wrote Beethoven's ninth symphony, although Beethoven did, which therefore implies something of value is still to be found, somewhere, somehow. The fact that one person knew of, and appreciated Kilgore Trout—the narrator's father and reminiscence of Vonnegut himself—is also a manifestation of that. This makes for a very potent and characteristic Vonnegut piece, one that is bitter and acerb, but clear in its embrace of illusions and desilusion.