THE ASTROLOGICAL DIARY OF GOD

Kurt Vonnegut’s patchwork non-novels are the presumable inspiration for this alternately amusing and labored satire, cast in the form of a zodiacally structured commonplace-book and “narrated” by Zizo Yasuzawa, a retired Japanese kamikaze pilot, compulsive masturbator, self-proclaimed Lord of the Universe, and political prisoner harassed by a United Nations committee investigating paranormal phenomena. Fowler (Skepticism, Inc., not reviewed) tests the reader’s wits (and patience) rather cavalierly, but there are many engagingly goofy moments—climaxing, as it were (you’ll see), in a truly lunatic courtroom scene. Caveat lector, and then some.