Last week I kicked off the 2013 literary challenge reading Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. Somehow it was my very first Vonnegut--I can't figure out why it took me so long to give him a try--and even though it wasn't the best novel I've read recently, I liked it enough that I'll probably check out some of his other books in the future. Slaughterhouse Five was inventive, thought-provoking, and often entertaining. On the other hand, Vonnegut delivered his message with a sledgehammer, and he dressed it up in a story so outlandish that I was tempted several times to put the book down.
For those of you unfamiliar with Slaughterhouse Five, it's about Billy Pilgrim, a young American GI in Germany during World War II who, owing to an alien abduction, experiences his life non-sequentially, bouncing randomly from the war to his childhood, his later years, and his time with the aliens of Tralfamadore, and back again. One of his core experiences was surviving the American firebombing of Dresden, sheltered in a slaughterhouse that had been repurposed into a POW camp.
Some books tell great stories, some books deliver powerful messages, and some books do both. For me, this was a message book: its plot was so farfetched and farcical that it felt grasping and awkward. Vonnegut dreamed up the whole alien abduction storyline to give himself a platform on which to opine about free will, but I caught myself rolling my eyes more than once. No question, this is purely a matter of taste: some people clearly love that kind of thing, chief among them book critics. Modern Library ranked Slaughterhouse Five as the 18th greatest English language novel of the 20th century. And I can see why they did it; I'm totally willing to concede to them on all matters related to literary merit. But enjoyment of a book is subjective and personal, and I enjoyed this book moderately. Just moderately.
Setting aside the absurdity of the plot, however, Vonnegut has an undeniable knack for sentences and phrases that stick in the mind. I appreciated two quotes in particular. The first passage comes in the first chapter, when the narrator is describing what he did before traveling to Europe to begin work on his book about Dresden:
The two little girls and I crossed the Delaware River where George Washington had crossed it, the next morning. We went to the New York World's Fair, saw what the past had been like, according to the Ford Motor Company and Walt Disney, saw what the future would be like, according to General Motors. And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.The second quote was about an ancillary character, a fellow prisoner of war who had been a hobo prior to the war:
Those boots were almost all he owned in this world. They were his home.I'm glad I read it and I did enjoy it well enough, but I won't be in a hurry to pick it up again soon. Three stars. So it goes.
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