Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. reads Slaughterhouse-five

5/5
this novel took my breath away. y’all really let me go 23 years without READING THIS?!

five stars across every board. i found it more sad than funny, though there’s definitely humor and satire here - Vonnegut does such an amazing job telling this story.

the time travel was so well written - no explanations, no questions, just the passage of and the eternity of time.

billy pilgrim plays the perfect everyman: he’s not particularly interesting or boring, he’s just acquiescent to everything that comes.

full of poignancy and darkness, SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE is a triumphant novel about american life - it just also happens to be about aliens.

if i had one (and i meant ONE) negative thing to say, it would be: damn there’s a lot of men show more in this book. the women are also kind of annoying. so… do with that what you will.

also… wouldn’t SLAUGHTERHOUSE VIBE be a great band name? vonnegut is a beast with titles. show less

Me ha gustado menos que la primera vez que lo leí, no sé muy bien por qué. Está claro que es un libro maravilloso, con esa manera de conjugar lo patético de la guerra con la ciencia-ficción, y con ese estilo tan característico de Vonnegut. Billy Pilgrim, en su infinita ridiculez, es un protagonista entrañable.

Las herramientas de Vonnegut (no linealidad, lenguaje coloquial, el autor dentro de la novela, esa repetición de "So it goes" cada vez que se menta la muerte") están más afiladas que nunca, y por eso creo que esta es la mejor de sus obras. Una lectura rápida, ágil, profunda y recomendable.

Three stars or four? I want to give this 3 or 3-1/2 for the writing, but will go with 4 stars for the powerful message. I started out not liking the writing style and that didn't change, but I can see how it would have been well received in its time. This quote from the book, in reference to the author Kilgore Trout, best describes my feelings on this novel: "His prose was frightful. Only his ideas were good."

I'm not sorry I read it. No, actually I'm glad I read it. However, I won't be reading anything else by Vonnegut.

A strange and intriguing book that I found very hard to rate: a mixture of wartime memoir and sci fi - occasionally harrowing, sometimes funny and other times thought-provoking.

PLOT
It is the episodic story of Billy Pilgrim, a small town American boy, who is a POW in the second world war, later becomes a successful optometrist and who occasionally and accidentally travels in time to other periods of his life, so he has "memories of the future". Oh, he also gets abducted by aliens, along with some furniture. "So it goes." (That is the catchphrase of the book, and I found rather annoying after the umpteenth time. It's used in Philip K Dick's "Ubik" (review here), which I assumed was a nod to Vonnegut, until I discovered both were show more published in the same year).

It starts with an old man reminiscing about his life. He is asked about the point of writing an anti-war book, "Why don't you write an anti-glacier book instead?" After that, it jumps about, much as Billy does, "Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time... he is in a constant state of stage fright".

The most thought-provoking bits for me were Billy's mother who tried "to construct a life that makes sense from things she found in gift shops", the bathos with which some war events were described (e.g. being executed for stealing a teapot), and the alien Tralfamadorian's multi-dimensional and multi-sexual world. For instance, they have five sexes, but their differences were in the fourth dimension and they couldn't imagine how time looks to Billy (they also told him that seven sexes were essential for human reproduction!).

MESSAGE
A main message is surprisingly positive: if we could only see or feel the fourth dimension, we would realise that "when a person dies he only appears to die. He is very much alive in the past".

SPOONS
Spoons are mentioned oddly often, as a description of how people lie (lovers or fallen soldiers). Then, near the end, actual spoons are briefly important. I have no idea whether this is significant.

UPDATE: Thanks to a comment from Matthias on his excellent review (read it here), I have, not an answer, but a great spoon reference in The Matrix:
"Do not try and bend the spoon, that's impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth: There is no spoon."
Spoon Boy

RELATED BOOKS
It has strong links with several other books: as it's Vonnegut, the "fictitious" sci fi writer, Kilgore Trout, gets several mentions.

The mode of time travel clearly influenced Octavia Butler's Kindred, review here,
and Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife, review here.

When he watches a WW2 film in reverse, it's very like Amis's Time's Arrow, review here.

For a more linguistic and philosophical take on the implications of Tralfamadorians living in all time, simultaneously, see the heptapods in Ted Chiang's The Story of Your Life, review here.

Also compare it with the Borges short story A Weary Man’s Utopia, which is in The Book of Sand, review here

It also left me wanting to read a Tralfamadorian book with its simultaneous threads, "no beginning, no middle, no end... What we love in our books are the depths of many marvellous moments seen all at one time", which is surely what Vonnegut was trying to create for mere human readers. show less

I know that classic novels are a matter of taste - some people love them, others will hate them. I'm guilty of the same, but whenever I choose to try an acclaimed novel, I WANT to like it. It has to be a classic/acclaimed/chosen to be turned into a movie or TV show, so it HAS to be good, right? And for many books, this absolutely rings true.

And perhaps if this was my first Vonnegut novel, I'd have been more patient with it. But I slogged through several other self-indulgent and rambling novels of his such as Timequake, or Slapstick. And not long into this book, I realized it was going to be full of what I hate about Vonnegut's writing/his worst traits as an author. The rambles. The short, choppy sentences. The meaningless nonsense where show more there should be some semblance of a plot.

So instead of wasting my time with a proper slog, I skimmed it. I skipped right to the ending, and I'm glad I didn't waste my time. This is one of these books that I feel is absolutely over-rated.

This is supposed to be one of these top-rated military classics. And though military isn't my preferred genre, I've read quality military novels, both modern and classic. Slaughterhouse 5 is not one of them.

I am so fucking disappointed. For how many times I've heard about this book, I wanted so badly to enjoy it, but Vonnegut makes himself and his writing so fucking unlikeable. show less

This is an extraordinarily good book. It is remarkable that it was published in 1969–nearly 60 years ago—and has held up so well. Its style still seems fresh and the themes remain relevant.

This book was very interesting and definitely spoke volumes about war and its effects on the human mind.

I knocked the rating down a couple stars because I found the writing to be a bit..."rambly" at times and the narrator annoyed me a little.