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drjerry's review
3.0
I predict that these novels will not age well.
My own history with Vonnegut's writing is long. Slaughterhouse 5 is one of the first novels that I read during my adult life that was not assigned reading. That was almost thirty years ago, and I loved it. It left a deep impression on me, and over the course of the next couple years consumed most of the books Vonnegut wrote up through the 1980s. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater was one of my favorites.
The availability of the works that I loved so much in my youth now in Library of America's anthology seemed a good prompt to revisit those. If anything, it has shown me how far my own aesthetic sensibilities have evolved in the intervening years.
Vonnegut came into his prime as a writer during the 1960s when so much of the cultural, artistic, and literary landscape was roiling and he has come to be viewed as a voice of that era. The language is very direct and full of direct references to touchstones of that era or other boundary-pushing writers such as Jacqueline Susann or William Burroughs. In my estimate Vonnegut's most memorable contribution is the ability to craft metaphors, delivered in deadpan narrative, that are humorous to the point approaching grotesque and serve to draw into relief some aspect of human failing, hypocrisy, cruelty, or folly. In my early twenties I found this hilarious and irresistible. Now, not so much.
Another review of this volume captures a lot of what I felt. Re-reading God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater was probably the biggest letdown. What I remember as a page-turner that had me laughing out loud every few pages struck me now as an overly simplistic indictment of American capitalism rendered in a lazily constructed narrative populated with caricatures instead of characters. Cat's Cradle was more interesting in its premise but I could not escape the feeling that the superficial character development was not a failure of Vonnegut's strength as a writer but rather a result of his arrogant conviction of his own world view. Even if I might level some of the same criticisms against Slaughterhouse 5, this one did stand out against the others in this volume for its craftsmanship. Whether its main plot device -- that the hero, Billy Pilgrim, experiences time in discontinuous, randomly ordered segments instead of a continuous, linear flow -- is the result of a head injury suffered in a plane crash or whether he was really captured by an alien race and "freed" from three dimensional existence, it resonates as a poignant metaphor for what it must be like to live with the post-traumatic stress of having witnessed one of the largest single civilian massacres of the second World War.
My own history with Vonnegut's writing is long. Slaughterhouse 5 is one of the first novels that I read during my adult life that was not assigned reading. That was almost thirty years ago, and I loved it. It left a deep impression on me, and over the course of the next couple years consumed most of the books Vonnegut wrote up through the 1980s. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater was one of my favorites.
The availability of the works that I loved so much in my youth now in Library of America's anthology seemed a good prompt to revisit those. If anything, it has shown me how far my own aesthetic sensibilities have evolved in the intervening years.
Vonnegut came into his prime as a writer during the 1960s when so much of the cultural, artistic, and literary landscape was roiling and he has come to be viewed as a voice of that era. The language is very direct and full of direct references to touchstones of that era or other boundary-pushing writers such as Jacqueline Susann or William Burroughs. In my estimate Vonnegut's most memorable contribution is the ability to craft metaphors, delivered in deadpan narrative, that are humorous to the point approaching grotesque and serve to draw into relief some aspect of human failing, hypocrisy, cruelty, or folly. In my early twenties I found this hilarious and irresistible. Now, not so much.
Another review of this volume captures a lot of what I felt. Re-reading God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater was probably the biggest letdown. What I remember as a page-turner that had me laughing out loud every few pages struck me now as an overly simplistic indictment of American capitalism rendered in a lazily constructed narrative populated with caricatures instead of characters. Cat's Cradle was more interesting in its premise but I could not escape the feeling that the superficial character development was not a failure of Vonnegut's strength as a writer but rather a result of his arrogant conviction of his own world view. Even if I might level some of the same criticisms against Slaughterhouse 5, this one did stand out against the others in this volume for its craftsmanship. Whether its main plot device -- that the hero, Billy Pilgrim, experiences time in discontinuous, randomly ordered segments instead of a continuous, linear flow -- is the result of a head injury suffered in a plane crash or whether he was really captured by an alien race and "freed" from three dimensional existence, it resonates as a poignant metaphor for what it must be like to live with the post-traumatic stress of having witnessed one of the largest single civilian massacres of the second World War.
mochitoazuki's review
5.0
My library didn't have individual Kurt Vonnegut novels so I initially decided to put off reading his work. I happened to search again but I was genuinely interested in reading his work and I found this mega compilation of some of his most famous works. I figured that reading this book would be killing several birds with one stone. I read through Cat's Cradle, I thought it was okay. I read later on that Cat's Cradle may not have been the best book for a Vonnegut newbie to start off with. I liked it enough to continue reading to at least the next book. I read God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and fell in love with it. I loved the nobility of a rich man, shedding the pretentious layers that come with money and power to help the poor in Rosewater county. Now slowly growing accustomed to Vonnegut's writing style, I was eager to read Slaughterhouse-Five because of all of the reviews, but found myself underwhelmed. Maybe it's one of the things when something gets so much hype you expect the world out of it and then you ended up expecting perhaps too much. I shrugged at the end and kept it moving to Breakfast of Champions. Within the first few pages I knew I was going to love this book and my intuition did not disappoint me. It ended up becoming my favorite Vonnegut novel, and made me eager to want to read even more of his works. One thing I will add was that I LOVED the re-occurring characters that appeared throughout the five stories. It felt like an extension of something bigger than the novel itself. It allows a real world experience, characters that appear in several novels lets the reader believe these characters are actual people, living lives outside of the confinements of the story Kurt Vonnegut introduced them in. The book ends with some enjoyable short stories and what I found was the best part of the entire book. It was Kurt's autobiographical account of his experience in World War II and the negative emotions he battled with afterwards. Here is a man who has seen the worst of mankind and still wishes and believes in the best of them. That is beauty and purity at its finest. I wish I got to have the Vonnegut experience while he was still alive, but I appreciate him and his work nonetheless. God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut.
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