One bird said to Billy Pilgrim, "Poo-tee-weet?"
Some Brief Brouhaha about Books
Slaughterhouse-Five or, The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death by Kurt Vonnegut
"Listen: Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time."
Slaughterhouse-Five is one of my favorite books ever. It is at once hilarious, bizarre, poignant, and sad. The novel tells the story of Billy Pilgrim, who travels back and forth in time, from his present life as an optometrist to his past at the bombing of Dresden to his future on the planet Tralfamadore.
Billy learns much from his travels, especially from the Tralfamadorians, who teach him that time is not linear, and so everything that has happened and will happen is simply constantly happening. And Vonnegut structures the book to conform with the Tralfamadorian sense of time. So while novel jumps back and forth between time periods, everything – every passage and every image – in Slaughterhouse-Five connects with other images throughout the book. All of the scenes are “brief, urgent messages” – all the more so because of the urgency of the Vietnam War – and when taken as a whole, the novel shows the intense personal impact that war has on people who live though it. The Tralfamadorians explain that in a book, “There isn't any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep."
I read Slaughterhouse-Five for a class I took in Scotland called "Literature and War," and from the opening lines, I knew that I had stumbled upon something special. Slaughterhouse-Five is a book I can read over and over, and I gain new insight every time. I think that this novel truly shows the power of literature and of language.
And it has the best last line of any novel ever.
Previous Book Posts: A Prayer for Owen Meany
"The dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments.”
Kurt Vonnegut1922 - 2007
So it goes.
offered up to the world by CoachDub @ 11:52 AM
6 comments
6 Comments:
My father (who had been in the Army during Vietnam) had always told me it was his favorite book, and that I needed to read it.
So finally, one day last year, I suddenly felt the urge to read it. I went to Borders and bough a copy. Finished it a day later. I fell totally in love with that book, and never felt closer to my dad.
Vonnegut is one of my favorite authors; I took a course on him last semester.
I read Slaughterhouse-Five around the same time I read Stranger in a Strange Land, when I was in about ninth grade. I think that, at the time, I was too young and inexperienced to fully grasp what either of those novels meant. However, Cat's Cradle and Player Piano are two of my favorite novels, and I have a soft spot for Harrison Bergeron.
cat's cradle is a slam-dunk. slaughterhouse-five is also great. breakfast of champions, terrible. some of his other books are in between.
Given my advanced age, Vonnegut was one of my favorites from day one. He was the artist-in-residence at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop the year before I went there for my senior year in 1966.
On another, and totally unrelated, topic, today is the birthday in 1947 of my younger sister, Ann (mother of Christie) and Dave Letterman.
Letterman's not the only big name turning 60 this year. Hillary Clinton, Billy Crystal, Arnold Schwarzenegger, O.J. Simpson, Stephen King, Steven Spielberg, David Bowie, Elton John, Burton Cummings, Ken Dryden, Farrah Fawcett, Rob Reiner and James Woods all hit the milestone in 2007.
So there you go!
James Woods is only 60...
I always thought he was older than that.
Go figure.
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