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Kurt Vonnegut’s masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five is “a desperate, painfully honest attempt to confront the monstrous crimes of the twentieth century” (Time). Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world’s great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous World War II firebombing of Dresden, the novel is the result of what Kurt Vonnegut described as a twenty-three-year struggle to write a book about what he had witnessed as an American prisoner of war. It combines historical fiction, science fiction, autobiography, and satire in an account of the life of Billy Pilgrim, a barber’s son turned draftee turned optometrist turned alien abductee. As Vonnegut had, Billy experiences the destruction of Dresden as a POW. Unlike Vonnegut, he experiences time travel, or coming “unstuck in time.” An instant bestseller, Slaughterhouse-Five made Kurt Vonnegut a cult hero in American literature, a reputation that only strengthened over time, despite his being banned and censored by some libraries and schools for content and language. But it was precisely those elements of Vonnegut’s writing—the political edginess, the genre-bending inventiveness, the frank violence, the transgressive wit—that have inspired generations of readers not just to look differently at the world around them but to find the confidence to say something about it. Authors as wide-ranging as Norman Mailer, John Irving, Michael Crichton, Tim O’Brien, Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Strout, David Sedaris, Jennifer Egan, and J. K. Rowling have all found inspiration in Vonnegut’s words. Jonathan Safran Foer has described Vonnegut as “the kind of writer who made people—young people especially—want to write.” George Saunders has declared Vonnegut to be “the great, urgent, passionate American writer of our century, who offers us . . . a model of the kind of compassionate thinking that might yet save us from ourselves.” More than fifty years after its initial publication at the height of the Vietnam War, Vonnegut’s portrayal of political disillusionment, PTSD, and postwar anxiety feels as relevant, darkly humorous, and profoundly affecting as ever, an enduring beacon through our own era’s uncertainties.
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1 released bookCritical Insights is a 9-book series first released in 1968 with contributions by Kurt Vonnegut, Rodica Mihăilă, and 6 others.
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I think I went into this book not knowing what to expect. I've finished it, and I'm still not quite sure what I read. It's one of those books that makes me either think I'm too shallow to get the point, or perhaps I get the point but I'm too jaded (or emotionally guarded) to feel it. Perhaps I actually expected too much or too less than what the book was willing to give, and in some form of ironic justice I'm inexplicably disappointed that I didn't get whatever I expected.
All I know is that this book moved me in some way. I cannot say what way it was. Maybe I need to read it again. Maybe it'll come to me in an hour or a day or a week. I'm not sure I want it to, because there's something incredibly powerful there. It's a little frightening.
Like other books by Vonnegut focusing on the war, the humor in this book hits a little differently. As opposed to some of his other books which read to me like humor with bits of serious deep-cutting insight, this doesn't have the same baseline levity. It feels more like a long tragedy with bits of gallows humor paced throughout. Even the more fantastical parts of the story feel more eerie, perhaps because we know we're going to come back to the real world some day to finish living out the rest of the tragedy.
Some of this perspective no doubt comes because this is something like the fifth Vonnegut book I've read (after Galápagos, Breakfast of Champions, Player Piano, Mother Night, The Sirens of Titan) so I have certain expectations that you may not have if you're new to the author. It gave me a similar feeling to reading Mother Night (probably because they both deal with real-life tragedy of WWII), but for some reason I wasn't prepared for that.
Based on what little I had heard about the book (perhaps everybody supposing that it was required reading and I must already have read it), I was expecting something like a gritty memoire. Instead, I got a combination of post-modern framing, fantastical interludes, and humor about tragedy that feels unique to Vonnegut.
Read this one in high school and realized I hadn't yet rated.