Review: Kurt Vonnegut

So far this is the year of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., as I’ve read two since the beginning of the year (that’s .5 books/week). I am amazed. The most eloquent arguments against war pale in comparison to his bleak novels. Other writings can help me explain why I am against war; his novels help me feel why I am against it.

Cat’s Cradle

Cat’s Cradle, written in 1963, holds a lot of similarities to the movie Dr. Strangelove. It is account of what happens when immeasurable power is held by a few, perhaps unworthy, people. The scientist Dr. Felix Hoenikker has invented Ice-9, a type of water which acts as a seed crystal, causing regular water to freeze at room temperature. When he accidentally kills himself with it, his children split the Ice-9 he created among themselves. The narrator meets these children while he is in the process of writing a biography of Dr. Hoenikker, and begins to learn about the strange manipulations they’ve made to gain power in their lives.

The first sentence in The Books of Bokonon is this: “All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.”
My Bokonist warning is this: Anyone unable to understand how a useful religion can be founded on lies will not understand this book either. So be it.

This book gives me a lot to mull over. On the one hand, the apocalyptic novel is depressing and bleak. On the other hand, it is so surreal that it is hard to let it get you down. I feel bad to be stealing a quote I found on Wikipedia of all places, but I think it really sums it up. Theodore Sturgeon wrote in his review, “this is an annoying book and you must read it. And you better take it lightly, because if you don’t you’ll go off weeping and shoot yourself.” Vonnegut did a great job convincing me that when you look closely enough, the world is an incredibly broken place.

Slaughterhouse-Five

Slaughterhouse-Five, published in 1969, is the quirky story of Billy Pilgrim, World War II veteran and POW who had been captured by aliens and now spends his life flashing from one point of his life to another. It is a fragmented novel, circling around the firebombing of Dresden. Less sci-fi than philosophy and satire, it focuses on themes of the existence of free will and the banality of evil. “Worst” of all, the entirety of the book illustrates how Americans – the ‘good guys’ of the war – had performed the same senseless acts of violence as the Germans did. Because of this and other explicit sections of the book, this has been banned and challenged in many arenas. It is an uncomfortable read – but it needs to be.

Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer.

So it goes.

I didn’t realize until I was reading up on the background to this book that this was an early public acknowledgement of the fact that homosexuals were targeted during the Holocaust. Vonnegut was very heavily censored for this, as is always the case. It is amazing to me when I discover things I thought were public knowledge were actually matters of debate in previous times. This website has some moving personal testimony.

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