Slaughterhouse-Five: A Novel (original 1969; edition 1999)

Classic, WWII, Dresden, satire ( )

A few months ago I had listened to Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. A side story in this book is about a character who survives the Dresden firebombing. The book gave just enough information that I wanted to learn more about that period of history. I have to say, that I was sadly ignorant about the huge loss of life and total destruction of a European cultural center. Was I asleep in history that day?? To learn more about Dresden, I picked up Slaughterhouse Five. I don't think I'm going out on a limb to say that Kurt Vonnegut is brilliant, but bizarre. An interesting anti-war book. What I enjoyed the most was his introduction. Vonnegut was a POW during WWII and was sent to Dresden to do menial labor in a factory. He always intended to write a book about Dresden. When he told the wife of a friend who also survived the firebombing, she was angry because she thought Vonnegut would write yet another book that glorified war. Vonnegut dedicated this book to her, and wrote a clasic that instead depicts the horrors of war. At some points this book is poignantly funny, but overall, very sad. And so it goes.
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Kurt Vonnegut has a tendency to write very sparsely, with prose that is very "bare bones" and straight to the point, which I don't like at all. I like an author who can weave a sentence and blow me away with just one of them. However; the collection of short stories in this book are so tremendously awful and wonderfully terrible that his writing style doesn't hinder it one bit. In fact, I think it even bolsters it. The mood throughout this book is very cold and desolate - a perfect distopia, really - and I can't say any of these stories could be made better. They're chilling, vexing, and exceptionally thought-provoking. A+. ( )

The writing style is quite sparse and matter of fact. Vonnegut describes terrible and fantastical things in an observational, objective way, which has the effect of making the events more extraordinary. There is much bleakness in this work, humour, and an undercurrent of sadness. We feel Billy Pilgrim’s helplessness as he is carried along by the forces of war, death and destruction. He is a powerless man observing what is happening to him. He seems equally powerless in his civilian life, carried along by his marriage, career and family as if it is all happening to someone else. I thought that the theme of war and time-travel were linked. It’s as if Vonnegut was saying – you can no more stop the march of war than the passage of time. War has always been and will always be. It’s a wonderful book; short, bleak, darkly humorous and strange. ( )

I'm not really sure what to say about this, or what I really think of it. It was...unique. It was a quick and essentially enjoyable read, about a difficult subject. It's just hard to really sum up thoughts about it though. It was worth reading, I'd probably recommend it to others, I'm just not entirely sure why. I am pretty sure some of it went a bit over my head. I suppose sometime in the future I'll have to reread it and see if it sinks in any better. ( )