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Loading... Bagombo Snuff Boxby Kurt Vonnegut
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. I really enjoyed these short stories. These aren't sconce fiction except for one or two stories. It demonstates Vonnegut's mastery of storytelling. He could make a rock sound intersting. I love his introductions and epilogues. It really delves into the root of all of his stories and demonstates he doesn't take himself too seriously. These are the stories he had written before and during his first major novel, player piano. Many of the characters, plots and settings are revisited in depth in his later works. It's nice to read them here in their infancy. This book is more for the already established Vonnegut fan for that reason specifically. Fab lines:It proves that the short story, because of its phsiological and psychological effects on a human being, is more closely related to Buddhist styles of meditation than it is to any other form of narrative entertainment...a Buddhist cat-napReading a novel, War and Peace for example, is no Catnap. Because a novel is so long, reading one is like being married forever to somebody nobody knows or cares about. (  ) shadowofthewind | Sep 8, 2009 |  9.0  Listener42 | Sep 1, 2008 | The St. Nick story was excellent. ( ) dvf1976 | Apr 22, 2008 | Reading Vonnegut's short stories is so intoxicating to me, because I almost always pick them up thinking I'll only read a few...then I read them all at once. The stories collected in this volume are not all that different from the ones found in Welcome to the Monkey House, which is to say that they are all, at the very least, up to snuff (no pun intended). What sets these apart is the notion that these are representative of a time when fiction like this had a real fan base and authors of such stories could make a real living. This context makes the somewhat cheesier stories, like "Find Me a Dream," artifacts of their time rather than merely schmaltzy tales. But then there are the real knockouts, like "2BR02B," which are vintage Vonnegut through and through, with characters and endings reminiscent of O. Henry that hit you like a ton of bricks. He may have been doing it for the money, but these stories are, for the most part, worthy members of the Vonnegut canon. dczapka | Apr 1, 2008 | If you enjoyed "Welcome to the Monkey House" then read this immediately. Very solid, and in the typical Vonnegut fashion, quite entertaining. (  ) bonanzajellybean | Jun 21, 2007 |  no reviews | add a review
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Later greatness glimmers here: the offbeat sci-fi of "Thanasphere" (in which an astronaut encounters dead souls in space) and the hero's bogus adventures in alien lands in "Bagombo Snuff Box" look forward to Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, as do the war stories "Souvenir," "Der Arme Dolmetscher," and "The Cruise of The Jolly Roger," which incorporate and amplify Vonnegut's actual war experiences. There's authentic midcentury news here, even in the gentle Saturday Evening Post social satire of "The No-Talent Kid," "Ambitious Sophomore," and "The Boy Who Hated Girls," which pretty much nail the high-school marching band experience. The pieces are peppered with odd, true observations and neat little turns of phrase: one incompetent kid in Lincoln High's band marches "flappingly, like a mother flamingo pretending to be injured, luring alligators from her nest."
You can't miss the ironic humor and the humane, death-haunted melancholy of the young war veteran and tyro writer. This collection beats his first novel, Player Piano, and anticipates the masterpiece Cat's Cradle, whose tiny chapters resemble short stories. Young Vonnegut is derivative, mostly of Saki and O. Henry, partly because he couldn't think of endings, and their switcheroos offered a handy model. But from the start, Vonnegut's idiosyncratic voice is unmistakable. --Tim Appelo
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:15 -0400)
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