Critics! Reviews! D. J. Taylor!

Gah! Yesterday I bought the new Vonnegut book. It was quite expensive, but I love Kurt Vonnegut, and felt reasonably assured by the reviews I'd read.

But I've got to ask - why did no reviewer see fit to mention that most of the book is rehashed material? It's polished, and rewritten, but it's more of a 'The Best of Kurt Vonnegut' than a new book. I knew it was a short memoir, rather than a novel, but he's done stuff like this before, and it's *usually* worth it. I even had an indication, from the Guardian extract, that *some* of it was rehashed, but I can't for the life of me find a part of the book that I don't feel I've read before.

I suppose you can't expect critics to reread an author's every book before reviewing their new one, but nevertheless, I feel like every effort was made to dupe me. One quote on the back declares something like, "Thank goodness Vonnegut has broken his promise never to publish another book!" while another says, "Probably the closest thing we will ever get to a memoir."

Even the Guardian gave no hint that the story-graph experiment featured in their extract was first published as long ago as 'Palm Sunday', in the eighties. I know that most of the info surrounding a book on its release is marketing guff, and the majority of reviews are largely sycophantic, but I'm amazed that no one seems to have even suggested the idea that some of the book may be less than brand, spanking new. What a cover up!