Thanks for the suggestion!

When I was young, I just thought it was funny. Now, it's almost scary how spot-on Vonnegut was!

ohhh, the BOOK


nevermind

I read B of C a bunch, and think it's excellent. I never heard anything against it, from any Black authors or activists. It pointedly attacks white racists, though language use might put it with Twain's 'Huck Finn' as negatively linguistically dated.

My favorite Trout story in it was 'The Dancing Fool', where the CT homeowner brains Zog with the golf-club. And the funny vignette where Durling Heath told Trout 'Stop bloody hounding me!'

Sirens of Titan, Mother Night, Jailbird, Rosewater, Schlachthoff Funf, Bluebeard, Hocus Pocus, & Timequake were all fantastic books, worth many re-reads.

"P.S. Who really runs this crazy country These creeps sure don't" -- Selena Deal, 'God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater'

But I should reread BoC.

and I also have a fondness for 'Timequake', which I notice a lot of Vonnegutites seem to dislike.

The proto-fascist PJ Farmer actually penned a Kilgore Trout book 'Venus on the Half Shell', where he purposefully misconstrued Vonnegut's 'free will' argument. TQ says 'prove you have free will, use it to fix things and help people'.

I can't pick a favorite, but in his old style books, love (in 'Sirens') the chain of command of the Martian army, and the actual objective (Salo's message).

And the part of the story when Boaz asked Unk 'I wonder where the gang has got to', followed by the author's statement that most of the gang was hanging in a meatmarket in Basel, Switzerland, at the time.

The best named scifi McGuffin ever.

This might sound 'off', but it's true, anyway. Some editions of Bluebeard don't have the chapter 35 - 36 info on the denizens of Happy Valley, at the end of WWII. Denizens listed from pp. 282 - 296, 1987 edition:

Canadian bombadier shot down over Hungarian oil field, concentration camp guard, Yugoslavian partisans, Sgt. Major in Moroccan Spahis, Scottish glider pilot from D - Day, Gurkha from Nepal, Ukranian machine gun squad who changed sides, concentration camp survivors, lunatic asylum releasees, farmers, Japanese Major, Gypsy queen, Slovak mortar squad, Estonians in German uniform, French collaborators, Polish slave laborers, Maori corporal from New Zealand field artillery who was captured in battle outside Tobruk, Libya. (And Bluebear Rabo is the Armenian American observer who painted the scene.)

I used to own it, but gave it away. Later I borrowed editions from the library to occasionally re-read, and saw that something I remembered from the narrative was missing. So I got the original '87 edition and wrote the info down.

Far too much to list in one reply, but the disconnect regarding racial language is particularly pointed in this thread.

I'm just saying, I believe if this book were even able to finc a publisher today, school boards and libraries would try to ban it.

The racial language would simply be the icing on the cake.


Terrific book. One of my favorites.


You should also try God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. It's kind of long, as Vonnegut books go, but there are some incredible insights about wealth and preservation of the wealthy class. Sad and disheartening to realize that he wrote it more than 4 decades ago and it's still every bit as true.

About the equivalent of Mother Night or Cat's Cradle.

All four of those, though, I like better than BoC.

Last edited Wed May 30, 2012, 08:42 PM - Edit history (1)

For some reason I was thinking that it was a thicker book than it is.

Just the idea that while we remain a pretty racist culture, we effectively ban words while obsessing on the topic. So being and thinking about racism is OK, but talking about it is not.

And every time this topic comes up I think of the guy that lost his job over, and consequently banned use of, the word niggardly.

My favorite Vonnegut Novel? Galapagos.

I posted upthread that 'Galapagos' is my favorite as well. Quintessential KV.

and I am 50 now, as Vonnegut was when he wrote it.

Just jumping through it now, it seems like a very strange book. Everything is sorta dark. People going crazy. Pollution. Violence. Hate. Desperation.

I must have read that book when I was 24 or so. I remember being in Utah and sorta diving into all the Vonnegut at the public library. I had read "Sirens of Titan" and "Welcome to the Monkey House" in college because I found Vonnegut in their science fiction section at the University of Minnesota. I found it to be bad science fiction, but skimming through it again in Utah I found "Sirens" to be both hilarious and profound somehow, so I started reading more Vonnegut, loving books like "Jailbird" and "God Bless you, Mr. Rosewater" and "Mother Night". I devoured all the Vonnegut at that time, and then quit my good paying job to work a series of low paying dead-end jobs while also running a bookstore.

Now as I read through this out of order, it seems strange. I think Vonnegut said he was emptying his mind of crap when he wrote the book, and now it seems to me somewhat that he sorta filled my youngish mind with crap in doing so. Curious. Like I was infected with a virus of bad ideas. If I re-read this book, will I be re-infected?

In the last Dean Koontz book I ever bought http://www.bookreporter.com/reviews/the-darkest-evening-of-the-year
"The Darkest Evening of the Year" Koontz names a serial killer "Billy Pilgrim" and then infers that such evil in the world is inspired or created by authors like Vonnegut. That pissed me off so much that I stopped buying and reading his books. It also seemed like he ran out of new or interesting ideas a long time ago anyway too (which is not a huge criticism since I still think some of his old ideas were pretty awesome).

But BOC ends with two pictures of tears. It seems like a story of meaninglessness and despair, as Vonnegut seems to serve as a Fomaoclast - a smasher of Foma. But foma are the things that make us brave and strong and happy. Taking them away leaves only despair, takes away hope, kills dreams. And "people who have no hopes, are easier to control"

The closing line of Deadeye Dick by Kurt Vonnegut. Truer words were never written by a human hand.

"Player Piano" was released the year I was born (1952) but it is astonishingly prescient about the future we face today.

It's about a future U.S. in which nearly everyone is either unemployed or doing janitorial work, road repair or other menial serf labor, except for a tiny number of corporate PhDs who push the buttons that run the supercomputers that run everything else. The president is a telegenic moron who smiles and waves at public ceremonies (GWB?). The subculture of the corporate elite in the book reminds me of the Bohemian Grove.

http://www.amazon.com/Player-Piano-Novel-Kurt-Vonnegut/dp/0385333781?tag=duckduckgo-d-20

It is the most traditionally constructed of his works. I like the experimental properties of Breakfast of champions and Slaughterhouse five, but Player Piano reads like a regular novel from a genius.

It would make an excellent movie. But the irony would be boggling.

and have it in the queue, got a couple to knock out before I start it. But I think I may move it up the list. All this KV talk has my mental juices flowing.

One of the ones I missed back in the day.

And yes, written around 1990 it is still eerily spot on about our current insane state of affairs with the wealthy, war, racism and the environment.