A modern classic that I had never read. Vonnegut's riff on free will, anti-war, happenstance, fate, and the banality of middle-class America is an interesting read. If earthlings are the only creatures in the universe who exercise free will, how come they make such a mess of it and is it inevitable that they do so? The biggest mess has to be war and the destruction of millions and millions of lives. Maybe the only way to understand it, if it can be understood, is as an absurdity and maybe that's what Vonnegut is saying.

I read this book in Germany because it's about the bombing of Dresden, and I thought we were going to Dresden. We didn't make it, but the book was still a worthwhile read.

I have to admit that Kurt Vonnegut's cynical writing style does not enamor me the way it enamors a lot of other people who seem to think that cynical = smart. It annoyed me that he wrote, "So it goes," every time he mentioned someone dying. And yet, despite the flippant narrative style, the book is anything but flippant. In following the life of Billy Pilgrim, a World War II Veteran who somehow bumbled himself through to survival from the War, Vonnegut explores the inescapable mark, or damage, that war leaves on individuals and the world -- and most of all, the absolute senselessness of it all (even in a war that most people perceive as "justified.") The more fantastical elements (Billy's time travel and abduction by aliens) were easier to swallow than one might think, especially since you were really left to make your own judgment about whether these occurrences were "real" or not. Vivid, depressing, and sometimes beautiful. ( )

Vonnegut's meditation on war and the desctruction of Dresden. Painful and magical.

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1364667...

Rereading this classic, which combines the horrors of the 1945 bombing of Dresden with the sfnal captivity of the hero by the aliens of Tralfamadore. Having first come to Vonnegut via Cat's Cradle and The Sirens of Titan as a teenager, I wasn't really sure what to make of this. Coming to it again a quarter-century later, I have a much deeper appreciation of Vonnegut's savaging of the surrealism of war, and of how trauma throws the rest of your life into a weird perspective. But I also find his attitude to women much more annoying - at least, to the women in the main part of the story, the mothers of Billy Pilgrim's children, Valencia Merble and Montana Wildhack (and Pilgrim's daughter Barbara). Having said that, the sanest character in the book is probably Mary O'Hare from the ostensibly autobiographical foreword; and it must also be admitted that most of the male characters are pretty unpleasant too.

Anyway, I can't think of many other sf novels which take the Second World War as their subject, and this is probably the best in that rather small set. ( )

My first Vonnegut novel, but certainly not to be my last I think. I'm not sure how I managed to go just under twenty-five years without reading one of his books, but clearly that was just under twenty-five years wasted, wasn't it?