Slaughterhouse-Five: A Novel (Modern Library 100 Best Novels)

This quick read makes even more terrifying sense read anew than it did when I first read it in 1984 when it was required reading. It was more humorous as well. Every human that loves or fears war should read it.

Vonnegut's most famous novel, and good, but not in his top five (Cat's Cradle, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, Mother Night, Jailbird and The Sirens of Titan [in no particular order]). Still a must read. Odd mixture of sf and WWII and contemporary life. The best line is in the introduction. Vonnegut recounts being asked at a party whether the book he was writing was an "anti-war" book. Vonnegut admitted it was. The questioner says, "You know what I always say to someone writing an anti-war book?" "No," Vonnegut says, "What do you say?" The questioner replies, "I ask, 'Why don't you write an anti-glacier book instead?'"

This was probably the best book on my required reading list in high school. I remembered it being easy to read on the surface, but full of dark and intriguing themes of war, human nature, trauma and time travel. It made me think, and it stuck with me. More than thirty years later, I read it again, and understand it on a deeper level.

TIME magazine ranked "Slaughterhouse-Five" twelfth on its list of the 100 best novels of the 20th Century ("Gone With the Wind" was eleventh, "Lolita", thirteenth). It is an important achievement by any standard, the most significant of Kurt Vonnegut's work. If a review is in order at this point in time (thirty-six years after its publication) it ought not deal with its merit, that's a given, but should address some aspect of the work that makes it relevant today. At a time when our country is war-logged, tired to death of the war in Afghanistan, "Slaughterhouse-Five" reminds us of all that is wrong with depending on the military to sort out the world's problems. Billy Pilgrim, the hapless World War II Chaplin's Assistant whose experiences toward the end of the war are at the center of Vonnegut's tale, could not have been less suited for active duty. Separated from his unit virtually from the time he reached the front at the Battle of the Bulge, he never got his bearings and soon came to grief. Hurting, in way over his head, Pilgrim wanted to be left to die, but couldn't manage even that. Roland Weary, a buddy, refused to leave him behind, and bullied him along. When captured, Weary and Pilgrim were in such sad shape that their captors published photographs of them "as heartening evidence of how miserably equipped the American Army often was." Vonnegut, whose actual World War II service provided much of the raw material for the book, never lets the reader forget the reasons for his antiwar views. These become most clear in the account of the aftermath of the bombing raid on Dresden, the centerpiece of the book. In gross violation of the rules of war, the raid was designed to immolate Dresden's civilian population in the course of burning the city to the ground. Winston Churchill is said to have approved the raid because he wanted to deal with Stalin at the upcoming Yalta Conference from a position of strength. The fact that adverse weather conditions delayed the planned attack until after Yalta did not persuade Churchill to back off. The great old city of Dresden, a place of no military value, one which the Red Cross considered an open city, i.e. one that would not be bombed, was wiped out. Billy Pilgrim was part of a small group of American prisoners who were housed (as Vonnegut had been) in a deep underground meat locker, Slaughterhouse-Five, away from the city center. It is where Pilgrim (and Vonnegut) spent the night of the bombing. "There were sounds like giant footsteps above. . . . There was a fire-storm out there. Dresden was one big flame. The one flame ate everything organic, everything that would burn. . . . When the Americans and their guards did come out [the next day], the sky was black with smoke. The sun was an angry little pinhead. Dresden was like the moon now, nothing but minerals. The stones were hot. Everybody else in the neighborhood was dead. So it goes." For practical purposes, this gut-wrenching account was for a great many Americans their first accurate look at what had happened to Dresden at the hands of our Eighth Air Force. "Slaughterhouse-Five" not only revealed the extent of the atrocity, it makes clear Vonnegut's contempt for our government's efforts to conceal it from us. As Vonnegut writes "Even then [back in the days fairly soon after the War] I was supposedly writing a book about Dresden. It wasn't a famous air raid back then in America. Not many Americans knew how much worse it had been than Hiroshima, for instance. I didn't know that either. There hadn't been that much publicity." See the End Note. Vonnegut uses the phrase "so it goes" to emphasize the finality of death. It appears at least 84 times in the book including the one quoted above. The editors of the 2009 Dial Press trade paper edition missed a great chance to use it to good purpose in the brief biographical note on the book's back cover. It ends: "Mr. Vonnegut passed away in April 2007." If Vonnegut had been alive to compose that note, he would have added "so it goes." End Note. Midway through Chapter 9 of "Slaughterhouse-Five" the narrator, alter ego for the author, states "the thing was, though, there was almost nothing in the 27 volumes [of the "Official History of the Army Air Force in World War Two"] about the Dresden raid, even though it was a howling success." So true. The account of operations for the night of February13-14 simply says "461 B17s are dispatched to hit the marshaling yard at Dresden (311)." The number in parenthesis apparently refers to the number of targets destroyed in the marshaling yard-- a place where"railway [cars] are shunted and made up into trains and where engines, carriages, etc. are kept when not in use." Contrast that with the account of operations in the Pacific on August 6, 1945: "The world's first atomic attack takes place. . . . At 0915 hours (0815 hours Japan time) the atomic bomb is released over Hiroshima from 31,600 feet (9,632 meters), it explodes 50 seconds later. 80+% of the city's buildings are destroyed and over 71,000 people (Japanese figures say from 70,000 to 80,000) are killed."

While reading this I felt like the author really wanted to write about his experience as a POW in Germany and surviving the fire bombing in Dresden…but he could recall virtually none of it so he decided to throw in an alien storyline, and then that way he’d have himself a full on novel instead of just a short story. I’m not a fan of sci-fi so I hated all the alien parts. Besides it just not being my own personal taste, it also felt like he didn’t spend enough time on the big moments in the story, which only added more weight to feeling like he couldn’t remember enough from that time to write a book about his experiences.

First off if you’re picking this up without any prior knowledge, I highly recommend you purchase this book without seeking any more. Go in blind, completely, like I did. Naive is the word I would use to describe myself before I picked up this book. Stumbled upon a YouTube video at 3 am struggling from a bout of insomnia with this book as its subject. Now I do enjoy World War 2 as well as the science fiction genre, so when I saw a book combined those elements I was hooked. I only watched about two minutes of the video before ordering it and happily dozing off. Seemingly the excitement of a new book helped to stave off the insomnia. The next day (shout out Prime) I jumped right in. Immediately I realized it isn’t all that those first two minutes led me to believe. It was much more. I found myself rereading lines and even busting out a highlighter. Then sticky notes. I started writing in the margins. I finished the book two days later, now having read it front to back three times… I ordered it not even a week before writing this review. I have been reviewing, discussing, and even just pondering (complete with a forlorn stare and chin rub) the themes and ideas from this book. I’m not one to tell you what you will take away from this book, because I genuinely believe it will be different between everyone. What I can tell you is that this book resonated with me more than any book has. I’m sure you can get a summary of the book from another review or in the product description to make a rational decision OR you can just trust me. TL;DR: You have always purchased this book, you always will purchase this book, and you are always purchasing this book. Plus at the very least it will kill your boredom. So it goes.

It was an awesome book, I enjoyed it a lot.

I came to this book and the author after reading "The Universe versus Alex Woods", which if you've read it you will know, talks about Vonnegut's work A LOT. I'd never read any Vonnegut before and wasn't sure what to expect - or if it would be too surreal for me (which is what I'd heard about it). I read Slaughterhouse Five in a single sitting, unable to put it down, even when my dinner was burning in the oven. It's a long, long time since I've encountered a book which is so full of individualism, so full of soul, so full of laughter and so full of tragedy and pathos and yet so readable. Yes, there are odd moments - I couldn't work out whether the Tralfamadorians were manufactured by Billy Pilgrim or if it could be supposed by the reader that he really had time-travelled to another planet. I suspect that readers who consider this a work of science fiction would argue that it underminds the work if a reader were to say that this book is merely a history and Billy's belief that he has time-travelled to another planet to live in a zoo with a Hollywood actress, is just his way of his traumatic experiences during war time and after (including encountering Rosewater in the hospital for the mentally ill) of working themselves out. I've got to say,however, I did veer to the side of it being just such a history (delightful though the episodes on Tralfamador were). Particularly during Rosewater's and Billy's stint in the hospital when they are reading a lot of Kilgore Trout's dubious works: "They had both found life meaningless, partly because of what they had seen in war. Rosewater, for instance, had shot a fourteen-year-old fireman, mistaking him for a German soldier. So it goes. And Billy had seen the greatest massacre in European history, which was the fire-bombing of Dresden. So it goes. So they were trying to re-invent themselves and their universe. Science-fiction was a big help." It can be no accident, surely, that one of Trout's books deals exclusively with a couple who are taken by flying saucer to a strange planet and placed in a zoo. Still, the simple answer is, I don't know how to read it really and don't know enough about what I suspect is rather a large area of study to answer my own question. What I do know is that I LOVED my introduction to Vonnegut. I loved the effortless way it was written. I loved Billy as a character. In fact I loved all the characters (and non-characters - Billy's Green Beret son for example). I loved the way the author couldn't resist interfering in his own work and adding little asides in here and there. Brilliant. Just Brilliant.

This was, and still is, the first Vonnegut book I've read and it's left me wanting more (although the reviews of like every book from him is soo mixed, which is a bit of a deterrent). The story is written in a very interesting way, jumping around but without it being annoying or confusing. The characters are at times very funny, and it's pretty impressive how he could write about such heavy subjects and keep the seriousness of it while this making it soo much lighter. So it goes...

戦争体験をもとにした物語で、時間が前後したり宇宙人が出てきたりと不思議な展開が多いのですが、結局は戦争の悲惨さや人間の弱さを強く感じました。

Good quality, fast delivery, but I haven’t read it yet.