4/12/07
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. is dead, ladies and gentlemen. If you know who he is than you’ll join with me in feeling the Universe get just a little bit darker for the flickering out of a great American author. If you don’t know Vonnegut, I highly recommend popping down to the library and picking a book of his at random. Might I suggest Cat’s Cradle, Breakfast of Champions, and Slaughterhouse-Five for starters? Breakfast and Slaughterhouse were both made into exceedingly strange and wonderful films, and Cat’s Cradle is rumored to be in the works. Vonnegut kicked-off last night in Manhattan at 84 years old, apparently from injuries to his brain related to a recent fall.
I don’t know how many of you have ever read a Kurt Vonnegut Jr. book, but there are a whole lot worse ways to spend a few hours. I say “a few hours” because that’s likely all the time it will take you to read one of the odd-looking little smoking man’s novels; they’re notoriously short and very quick reads. His stories can best be described as…well just fucking bizarre is the best way to put it, and they’re touching, sad and spectacular. Often writing in a non-linear, bare-bones manner, Vonnegut was the king of bringing a sort of quiet desperation and fatalism to his characters, be it through the futility of humankind, madness of war, or being squashed by runaway technology. ‘Course, it wasn’t as if he didn’t have a great fond of inspiration for this sort of thing to draw from, given the tumultuous nature of his life.
Vonnegut fought in Germany in WWII and was a POW in Dresden when the allies firebombed it back to the Stone Age in 1945. Vonnegut would fold much of his experience there, including being forced to sift through the wreckage and stack bodies, for Slaughterhouse-Five, in which a man named Billy Pilgrim becomes “un-stuck” in time, bouncing back and forth between his time as a prisoner in Nazi Germany to his life on the planet Tralfamadore, where aliens instruct him on the pointlessness and illusion of human freedom.
The same year Vonnegut was fighting in the Battle of the Bulge, his mother was busy successfully committing suicide, a task Vonnegut would try less successfully in 1984 with pills and booze. Vonnegut was plagued by mental instability and breakdowns throughout his life, and several times announced he was finished with fiction writing, a statement which is now unquestioningly true. He inspired such current giants of the genre as Tom Wolfe and John Irving, two of my favorite authors who, along with Vonnegut, are much better writers than I will ever be.
Any man who shows up in his own novel (Breakfast of Champions, 1973) as a little piece of deux ex machina to say these words--
--is fucking tops in my opinion. Vonnegut also gets credit for one of the most perfect lines ever written, when at the beginning of Slaughterhouse-Five he declares the novel a failure, because “there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.” That’s fucking writing, dear readers.
The world is now one deep thinker shorter.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. is dead, ladies and gentlemen. If you know who he is than you’ll join with me in feeling the Universe get just a little bit darker for the flickering out of a great American author. If you don’t know Vonnegut, I highly recommend popping down to the library and picking a book of his at random. Might I suggest Cat’s Cradle, Breakfast of Champions, and Slaughterhouse-Five for starters? Breakfast and Slaughterhouse were both made into exceedingly strange and wonderful films, and Cat’s Cradle is rumored to be in the works. Vonnegut kicked-off last night in Manhattan at 84 years old, apparently from injuries to his brain related to a recent fall.Vonnegut fought in Germany in WWII and was a POW in Dresden when the allies firebombed it back to the Stone Age in 1945. Vonnegut would fold much of his experience there, including being forced to sift through the wreckage and stack bodies, for Slaughterhouse-Five, in which a man named Billy Pilgrim becomes “un-stuck” in time, bouncing back and forth between his time as a prisoner in Nazi Germany to his life on the planet Tralfamadore, where aliens instruct him on the pointlessness and illusion of human freedom.The same year Vonnegut was fighting in the Battle of the Bulge, his mother was busy successfully committing suicide, a task Vonnegut would try less successfully in 1984 with pills and booze. Vonnegut was plagued by mental instability and breakdowns throughout his life, and several times announced he was finished with fiction writing, a statement which is now unquestioningly true. He inspired such current giants of the genre as Tom Wolfe and John Irving, two of my favorite authors who, along with Vonnegut, are much better writers than I will ever be.
Any man who shows up in his own novel (Breakfast of Champions, 1973) as a little piece of deux ex machina to say these words--
“This is a very bad book you’re writing,” I said to myself.
“I know,” I said.
“You’re afraid you’ll kill yourself the way your mother did,” I said.
“I know,” I said.
--is fucking tops in my opinion. Vonnegut also gets credit for one of the most perfect lines ever written, when at the beginning of Slaughterhouse-Five he declares the novel a failure, because “there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.” That’s fucking writing, dear readers.
The world is now one deep thinker shorter. He will be missed.
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