All of which leads to the conundrum of attempting to review an audiobook. I jumped at the chance to write about John Malkovich reading “Breakfast of Champions,” Kurt Vonnegut’s 1973 novel, because I am a fan of both men, but as soon as I began listening, the problem became clear. What, exactly, am I reviewing? Vonnegut’s book or Malkovich’s reading of Vonnegut’s book? These questions then led me down the rabbit hole of thinking about the nature of reading and the relationship between author and reader, resulting in the obvious point with which I began.

Rabbit holes were a specialty of Vonnegut’s, and “Breakfast of Champions” is no exception. Written as a kind of 50th-birthday present to himself, as Vonnegut says in the preface (or as Malko­vich says Vonnegut says in the preface), the book delves deeply into some of Vonnegut’s pet themes: futility, derangement and a worldview that is, in general, pessimistic — but funny. It’s a gonzo jaunt across a demented Earth-ish landscape on which the fictitious Bermuda Ern, the “great green sea eagle,” has gone extinct, along with every other animal on the planet. Our hero, Kilgore Trout, an unheralded science fiction writer, is catapulted to global fame for his once-obscure stories published as filler in pornography magazines, as well as for his notion that mirrors are “leaks,” or portals to other universes. Trout’s champion in “Breakfast of Champions” is Dwayne Hoover, a prosperous car dealer who is slowly going mad. The affair is populated with denizens of other Vonnegut novels, as well as Vonnegut himself, who drops in from his own universe near the end of the book to confront his creations and ponder the nature of creation itself. Also: There are many cartoonish illustrations by the ­author.