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Slaughterhouse-Five (Paperback)
by Kurt Vonnegut
| Category:
Fiction |
| Market price: ¥ 108.00
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¥ 98.00
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| MSL Pointer Review:
A great introduction to Vonnegut, this immortal work will make his name forever large in the pantheon of great writers. |
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Author: Kurt Vonnegut
Publisher: Laurel
Pub. in: November, 1991
ISBN: 0440180295
Pages: 224
Measurements: 6.9 x 4.3 x 0.6 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00449
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- MSL Picks -
Kurt Vonnegut may arguably be one of the most important, preeminent writers of the twentieth century. In Slaughterhouse-Five, he shows us the ever-changing, mercurial life of Billy Pilgrim, who traverses the different epochs of his existence in an attempt to amass the answers to life. Billy witnesses the harrowing depredation of Dresden, Germany. Then he marries into a wealthy family, and finds success as an optometrist later in life. He has a son. He sees his own death many times. Through these various haphazard jump-cuts, we are rendered a portrait of a man with many questions and few answers. A man who tries to make sense out of this enigma we call "human experience."
Among some of Billy's escapades is his edifying sojourn on the planet Tralfamadore - a series of dreams, hallucinations, occurences? - where the Tralfamadorians, who are endowed with the ability to see things in the fourth dimension, try to teach Billy things that an inchoate life form such as a human being cannot possibly comprehend. (e.g., That there is no real "death" in death, that we all continue to exist in the past, present and future, and are made up of all our memories and actions, and ergo cannot, and for this reason, will not, ever truly cease to exist.) These observations and simplified cogent reflections are what make this Vonnegut book the classic that it is today.
At its core an anti-war novel, but embedded with deeper and richer textures as well. I almost look at Slaughterhouse-Five as an unoffical manual to deal - or cope - with the seemingly gratuitous, wanton events which continue to exist and reoccur in our life-abounding planet's history . A novel that endures as a time capsule, Slaughterhouse-Five is an overwhelming achievement in American letters.
(By quoting an American reviewer)
Target readers:
General readers
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Kurt Vonnegut is a master of contemporary American Literature. His black humor, satiric voice, and incomparable imagination first captured America's attention in The Siren's of Titan in 1959 and established him as 'a true artist' with Cat's Cradle in 1963. He is, as Graham Greene has declared, 'one of the best living American writers.
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From the Publisher:
Slaughterhous-Five is one of the world's great anti-war books. Centering on the infamous fire-bombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim's odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we are afraid to know.
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Publishers Weekly (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-10 00:00>
"Listen: Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time." So begins Vonnegut's absurdist 1969 classic. Hawke rises to the occasion of performing this sliced-and-diced narrative, which is part sci-fi and partially based on Vonnegut's experience as a American prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany during the firebombing of 1945 that killed thousands of civilians. Billy travels in time and space, stopping here and there throughout his life, including his long visit to the planet Tralfamador, where he is mated with a porn star. Hawke adopts a confidential, whisper-like tone for his reading. Listening to him is like listening to someone tell you a story in the back of a bus - the perfect pitch for this book. After the novel ends, Vonnegut himself speaks for a short while about his survival of the Dresden firestorm and describes and names the man who inspired this story. Tacked on to the very end of this audio smorgasbord is music, a dance single that uses a vintage recording of Vonnegut reading from the book. Though Hawke's reading is excellent, one cannot help but wish Vonnegut himself had read the entire text. |
Jesse Van Sant (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-10 00:00>
I really enjoyed Slaughterhouse-Five from beginning to end. When I started reading it I didn't know much about Kurt Vonnegut besides the fact that Slaughterhouse-Five appeared on the Modern Library's list of best novels; I guess I sort of expected a gritty anti-war book that, although peppered with some funny moments, would lead inevitably to a sobering conclusion. Instead I found a truly original story, told casually through the detached, defeated eyes of someone floating through war without really caring if he lives or dies, hardly understanding a thing going on around him, not really wanting to understand. He's alive, and that's fine. He's dead, and that's fine too. So it goes. Pretty much everything is fine. As Vonnegut himself says of Billy Pilgrim, "he was unenthusiastic about living."
But why is Billy the way he is? It's true that Vonnegut was himself present for the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, that he was one of the few survivors of the attack which killed more people than the atomic bomb at Hiroshima, that he survived only because he, like Billy Pilgrim, was locked up in an underground slaughterhouse as a POW. And in the auto- biographical first chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut writes that "there would always be wars," and, even if there were no more wars, "there would still be plain old death." Can we therefore assume that Vonnegut believes the attitude we should take toward death and war is the same detached resignation displayed by Billy Pilgrim? I don't think so.
As noted by critic William Rodney Allen, "despite its mask of Tralfamadorian indifference, Slaughterhouse-Five conveys at times an almost childlike sense of shock that the world is such a violent place." More likely, then, Billy Pilgrim is simply another war-torn casualty, someone who cares so deeply about the indignity of the senseless death all around him that he is no longer able to care. Perhaps suffering from something like post-traumatic-stress disorder, he is forced to create an elaborate metaphysical scheme to explain what he has seen because, as Vonnegut writes, "there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre." Thus, although Billy Pilgrim survived, he is nevertheless haunted by "a great big secret somewhere inside," a secret that Allen described as "the awareness of the horrors of war and the certainty of death," an awareness that could not be covered up by the frantic materialism of postwar America.
In fact, according to Allen, when Billy Pilgrim is hunted and killed by the paranoid sadist Paul Lazzaro, someone Pilgrim had met decades earlier during the war, the experience can be seen as "an emblem of the fact that a soldier can never really escape his war experiences, that they will always `track him down' even years later." Ultimately, then, I agree with Allen: " Slaughterhouse-Five is built on the paradox that it appears to offer acceptance and even indifference as responses to the horrors of the twentieth century, when in fact it is a moving lament over those horrors, a piercing wail of grief over the millions of dead in World War II." |
An American reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-10 00:00>
Superficially, this book is a simple story about an American, Billy Pilgrim, who is captured by German forces and housed in a slaughterhouse in Dresden. There, he witnesses the horrible firebombing of the city by Allied forces. Eventually he returns home and marries and takes over the family optometry business.
A secondary stream flows underneath this basic story. Billy Pilgrim is purportedly able to travel through time. He is also abducted by aliens and kept in their zoo with a young starlet as his "mate".
Vonnegut's prose is simple, clear, and powerful. It is all plain English, and he doesn't make any effort to dress up the story with anything pretensions. Reading his work is refreshing because he never talks down to the reader, he just tells the story. (In this sense, he is a lot like Nabokov but with a smidgen less zest.)
Delve deeper into the meaning of the story, though, and you will find that the story is as deep as you want to go. Billy Pilgrim is obviously "shell-shocked" and suffering internally, though from all outward appearances he seems to be fine. In his own mind he thinks himself fine, though his frequent flashbacks to his past and his imaginary alien abduction tell otherwise. So what exactly is going on with Billy?
If all this is happening to Billy, what is Vonnegut trying to say? What are the demons that haunt him, the author? Vonnegut, too, was at the Dresden firebombing, and in a very real sense this book is his attempt at self-therapy. How much of Vonnegut is reflected in Billy?
The aliens are presented not as time travelers, but as beings that simply "are". They, as well as Billy, see time as a solid mass which can be examined in any order. Therefore, to them, wars are inevitable, as too are happy times. The key, they tell Billy, is to look at the happy times rather than dwell on the sad times. However, the realness of the aliens is certainly in doubt. Perhaps Billy created the aliens, or picked up the idea from a book, in order to help him cope with his internal pain.
The book has a strong anti-war message, but it doesn't beat you over the head with it. The most repeated phrase is "So it goes" which is a way to accept a preordained fate as it comes, but perhaps we don't have to accept that fate is preordained, that we have free-will to choose our fate. The aliens would scoff at this, but if Vonnegut meant for this to be an anti-war novel, then he must believe that we can control our fate enough to avoid war.
The book is a great read. It is easy enough for young students and meaningful enough for older folks. 5 stars, easily. |
Lavinia Whately (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-10 00:00>
I think young people may have trouble understanding this book, which is about the experience of life. Told with great compassion, Vonnegut, in fact and in fiction both, is a mature man looking back on the tragedies he saw in his youth. Being "unstuck in time" can be seen as a metaphor for intrusive post-traumatic memories, and dissociated dreams, both of which happen to someone who has undergone great trauma. Vonnegut had the horror of his mother committing suicide when he was home on leave in WWII, and going from there to being a prisoner of war, seeing his friends shot and being forced to dig for rotting bodies in Dresden. |
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