So it goes.

[rebness]

 You know, after a few months of incredibly annoying and difficult reads (I'm looking at you, Cloud Atlas), I was feeling a little jaded. This was when I asked a colleague for any recommendations and she loaned me Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut.

Vonnegut has always been one of those authors I knew I'd like based on reputation and brief articles I had read by him alone, but somehow I had just never got around to reading him and now I’m kicking myself for only paying his work attention after his death. Anyway, Slaughterhouse Five is ostensibly about the bombing of Dresden during the Second World War, a massacre I knew very little about.

The entire novel read like a post-traumatic attempt to gather the threads of what happened back together, like a stunned non-reaction to killing on a grand scale. I don't know. I expected pages and pages about the bombing of Dresden, tales of mothers clutching their babies and dying and fear and fire, but instead it all just happened so quickly and the survivors stand there agape gazing at "the moon's surface". There was no need for emotive language, because what, as Vonnegut himself wrote, could be said about such a thing? It was just so well done, so effective. 

It’s hard to sum up any real plot or to review such a disjointed novel, but I loved that it was as mild as it was cynical, Vonnegut’s gentle humour lending more weight to the dark things he covered than it would have if he had simply ranted.

Case in point: On one page, a character is asked to describe what the war was like. His reply is a drawing of a headstone with a little cherub that reads Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt. I read that as I was going home on the metro and it was so simple, so silly with the little smiley face on the cherub, but it brought heat to my eyes and to my alarm, I realised I wanted to cry. Vonnegut said that it would make a great epitaph for himself – I wonder if that will be on his grave.

Just a really good, really interesting read. I’m definitely going to read it again.

Comments

[scrr.livejournal.com]

Yes, yes, yes! Glad you like it!
I also recommend his Cat's Cradle. Ang liked it too!

Those books, even with the huge amount of bizarreness in them, are True. With capital "T".

[rebness.livejournal.com]

Considering my film and literary tastes, I should probably just defer to you and Ang for recommendations from now on, I think... ;)

Consider Cat's Cradle added to the list.

I think you're right. There's a veracity to his work that can't be obscured by the stranger aspects of the story (the biodome, anyone?)

[saffronlie.livejournal.com]

LOL I read Vonnegut when I was like 14 or something, it was one of my early introductions to meta fiction. But that's because I'm l337.

[rebness.livejournal.com]

WELL I went to France when I was eleven.

I hated it. :;-(

[saffronlie.livejournal.com]

I've been to the moon.

[rebness.livejournal.com]

And back, oh snap.

[saffronlie.livejournal.com]

YA RLY.

[pandorasblog]

I want to buy you two and put you in my house to entertain me.

Yes!

[wickedmanifesto.livejournal.com]

I love love love Vonnegut...he sneaks so much by you with his seeming incoherence...one of my favorites is Hocus Pocus. His last book, A Man Without a Country...reads more like the ramblings of a very old man who can't focus on one topic longer than a page...but his ramblings remained, up to the end, full of a sad hilarity and wisdom. He was quite a man.