Goodreads | Slaughterhouse-Five

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Christina rated it:

(review of isbn 0385333846)

04/14/08

bookshelves: 2008, recommended, school

Read in April, 2008

recommended to Christina by: audrey

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. tells the story of a man named Billy Pilgrim who time-travels frequently. During the Second World War he was captured and sent to Dresden to work in a malt syrup factory before the city was bombed.

“There was a big number over the door of the building. The number was five. Before the Americans could go inside, their only English-speaking guard told them to memorize their simple address, in case they got lost in the big city. There address was this: �...more

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Chris rated it:

(review of isbn 0440180295)

01/09/08

Read in January, 2008

recommended to Chris by: a foolish teacher
recommends it for: pretentious hacks

There is a fine line between doggerel and dogshit. Vonnegut boldly straddles that blurry line with Slaughterhouse-Five, resulting in what can only be classified as doggerelshit. Unimpressive.

I first had the misfortune of reading this in 8th grade, back in 1991, back in those serene days before Nirvana hit it big and a prescription for prozac was all the proof needed to show one was compelling, on my English teacher's recommendation. Upon completion SH5, my teacher was at a loss as to how I ...more There is a fine line between doggerel and dogshit. Vonnegut boldly straddles that blurry line with Slaughterhouse-Five, resulting in what can only be classified as doggerelshit. Unimpressive.

I first had the misfortune of reading this in 8th grade, back in 1991, back in those serene days before Nirvana hit it big and a prescription for prozac was all the proof needed to show one was compelling, on my English teacher's recommendation. Upon completion SH5, my teacher was at a loss as to how I couldn’t enjoy such a masterpiece, and that’s when I made a stunning realization, a new day had truly dawned in my life as I suddenly grasped the significance of her statement; my teacher was illiterate….. Yup, hopelessly lost was she, her praise for this garbage clearly spelled it out to me, she was probably in endless teacher-to-teacher tête-à-têtes, where baseless lip-service was paid to this grand work without end. Duped, I immediately made it my life goal to seek out every last POS which is forever lauded for no particular reason and call it out for the truly trite crap that it is.

SH5 is just one of many such works, overrated books of the world which unjustly sit upon a pedestal for reasons I will never fully understand; moronic balderdash like The Bell Jar, On The Road, and The Book of Mormon. Perhaps you might think that statement is false, that this story fully encompasses the universal disillusionment of an entire generation and speaks volumes for some sensible reformation before society as we know it collapses upon itself, driven by the forces of man’s disgusting nature. Perhaps you might also consider that if the phrases “so it goes” and “and so on” were removed from the story it would be five pages long. I know, it’s a riveting statement how everything from pivotal events down to the mundane can be satirically downplayed as equally insignificant in the light of the story at large by brushing them off with a quick dash of ‘so it goes’. Awesome. Probably would have meant something too, if it was employed once or twice, but when appearing five times a page for the duration of the story, it has no impact, much like the banality of the author stumbling in his home and irreparably damaging that turnip-like thing he considered a brain, resulting in a truly commonplace and ordinarily bland cessation of his trivial existence. So it goes.

So, the story. The narrator explains that he wants to pen an anti-war book about the bombing of Dresden in WWII. The yarn he spins revolves around the bumblefluckery of a tool named Billy Pilgrim, who becomes unstuck in time while in the big one. The story hops around describing several events; Pilgrim’s capture by German forces leading to his meeting the narrator and which results in their spending some quality time in Dresden for the big event as POWs, his abduction by Tralfamadorians (extra-terrestrials that live in 4 dimensions and can freely visit any point in time) where he’s exhibited in a zoo and mated with a former blue movie star, his marriage to a fattie and the field of optometry, and other plodding boredom, which I intended to mention but no longer care to. There are really two things in this book that don’t suck completely, Paul Lazzaro, the wop that tells Pilgrim he will have him killed and follows through, a hilarious song about the common mishaps in Polish oral sex (which I doubt Vonnegut wrote), and author Kilgore Trout is slightly amusing. Vonnegut also isn’t above totally ripping off the classics; Trout’s biggest fan is laid up with Pilgrim in a Veteran’s Hospital and mentions that all there is to know about life can be found in The Brothers Karamazov, and Lazzaro later recalls an episode in which he feeds a dog a steak filled with metal shavings, a trick employed by some snotty urchin in the Brothers K. Imitation truly is the greatest form of flattery, or the best indication of a man with nothing of his own to say.
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Kirstie rated it:

(review of isbn 0385333846)

02/15/08

Read in February, 2008

recommends it for: people dealing with trauma

I read this book first in 1999 when my grandfather passed away. It was a bit of a coincidence as his funeral occurred between a Primate Anatomy exam and a paper for my Experimental Fiction class on Slaughterhouse Five. I was frantically trying to remember the names of all kinds of bones when I picked this up in the other hand and tried to wrap my head around it.

Basically, Vonnegut has written the only Tralfamadorian novel I can think of. These beings, most undoubtedly inspired in Billy ...more I read this book first in 1999 when my grandfather passed away. It was a bit of a coincidence as his funeral occurred between a Primate Anatomy exam and a paper for my Experimental Fiction class on Slaughterhouse Five. I was frantically trying to remember the names of all kinds of bones when I picked this up in the other hand and tried to wrap my head around it.

Basically, Vonnegut has written the only Tralfamadorian novel I can think of. These beings, most undoubtedly inspired in Billy Pilgrim's head by the scattered science fiction plots of Kilgore Trout, experience time as a continuum that is constantly occurring...and when they look at time, even though in their version of history, the world is in a constant state of being destroyed for example, they choose to see the things that make them happy...the good moments.

What Billy learns from these creatures is that each traumatic event that has happened in his life fits very precisely into a state of meticulous nature. It has always happened and always will happen and so it goes (on and on and on). What Billy Pilgrim truly experiences over and over in his life is Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. He exists throughout his memories traveling back and forth with the knowledge of what will happen and how precise it all is. Dresden is bombed in every moment and his friend Derby is put in front of a firing squad. At every second, he is the only survivor of a plane wreck, he is getting married, and he is fighting a Children's Crusade. It's the only way he can look at the despair that has happened and make sense of it.

When my grandfather died and I read this, I felt as if it was just what I needed because I could escape back into time and remember the good memories of my grandfather...if they existed (even if in some fourth dimension) then he was just as dead as he was alive and eating peanut butter chocolate ice cream. At the same time my grandfather had a heart attack, I was watching him play cards with my grandma at the kitchen table. But which one to think of? Well, that was easy. Death can't be prevented and so it goes but you can always try to change which moment you live in. It's a little bit different than a memory and if you go far into it, you'll end up like Billy Pilgrim, which is to say, you will go insane because the rest of the world sees time as linear and counts seconds and minutes and hours.

Once and awhile, it doesn't hurt. I re-read this again on the plane rides home and back before and after my grandmother's funeral on Monday and last night. My grandma was a strong and intelligent woman and she always read everything she saw. My recent memories of my grandmother were of her at the holidays. She always had her mind but her physical condition had deteriorated and she was dependent on oxygen. It made me sad to think of her like this a bit.

It's really hard for me to think that my grandma is no more but then I tell myself...well, it's silly for me to keep crying on and on about this. My grandma is right now reading at 4am in her living room chair and I am a child creeping down the stairs hoping she's still up. She is telling me that one day I'll come around and like green onions. She is reminding me to keep my feet off of the davenport and about being "tickled" by something. She lives in a jungle of houseplants and watches musicals all of the time, always pointing out when some distant relative of mine appears briefly in The Greatest Show on Earth. My grandma can't be dead and be doing all of those things, can she? It doesn't make sense. She will always be alive in some moments just like I will always be seven and nine and twenty eight and perhaps past thirty and forty. So, she'll always be here.

I just wish I could dream about her.
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Robert rated it:

(review of isbn 0385333846)

07/03/08

bookshelves: 50-novels-in-one-year

Read in June, 2008

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

As posted at my blog:

I thought Slaughterhouse Five was an incredible read. Mr. Vonnegut’s style of writing is unique to say the least, but it’s a style that remains wholly readable. The novel primarily follows a fictional American veteran, Billy Pilgrim, who found himself a prisoner of war in Dresden during the time of its infamous bombing by the Americans in 1945. What makes Billy’s story unique...more As posted at my blog:

I thought Slaughterhouse Five was an incredible read. Mr. Vonnegut’s style of writing is unique to say the least, but it’s a style that remains wholly readable. The novel primarily follows a fictional American veteran, Billy Pilgrim, who found himself a prisoner of war in Dresden during the time of its infamous bombing by the Americans in 1945. What makes Billy’s story unique however, is that Billy, in the decades following the war, is abducted by an alien race - the Tralfamadorians, who introduce him to the fourth-dimension of time travel. Subsequently, Billy spends his time in the novel zipping back and forth to various times in his life, but primarily back and forth to the time when he was the prisoner of war.

It’s clear that Slaughterhouse Five is particularly personal to Mr. Vonnegut. Having himself been a POW in Dresden at the time of the bombing, this novel is to some extent biographical (and to some other extent cleansing of some inner ‘demons’?). Mr. Vonnegut uses the first chapter to explain this to the reader and for me, this was one of the most interesting chapters of the book (although some argue that this first chapter is also wholly fictional too).

Having been an eye-witness to the war, it is no surprise that Slaughterhouse Five is presented by Mr. Vonngut as being anti-war in nature and this is wholly apparent. I don’t want to spoil the story for anyone who hasn’t read the novel, by posting specific examples, but needless to say, once read, Slaughterhouse Five’s anti-war message is clear. I was surprised though that Mr Vonnegut’s ‘account’ of the bombing of Dresden was not quite as graphic as I’d imagined it would be. As a work that is so wholly anti-war, I would have expected Mr. Vonnegut to infuse his narrative with copious amounts of gory detail. Don’t get me wrong the ‘gory detail’ is there (the description of the ‘corpse mines’ is unforgettably powerful) but instead of endless gore, Mr Vonnegut provides the ‘graphical’ in less gory, but more powerful ways. For instance the reader is left in no doubt as to the extent of the devastation caused by the bombing of Dresden, with Billy comparing the bombed landscape to the surface of the moon, and the intesity of the firestorm illustrated through the presence of ‘dollops of melted glass’.

One thing that did give me a warm feeling in Slaughterhouse-Five (aside from the anti-war sentiment), was the Tralfamadorian concept that humans never actually die. Sure we go through the process of death, but as we have existed in the first place, we are perpetually alive at some point in time. It’s just a matter of utilising the Tralfamadorian’s fourth dimension and traveling to that time, where any and all of us, are well and truly alive and kicking. Nice!

Favourite Quote: “I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone. I get drunk, and I drive my wife away with a breath like mustard gas and roses. And then, speaking gravely and elegantly into the telephone, I ask the telephone operators to connect me with this friend or that one, from whom I have not heard in years”.

Favourite Scene: Billy Pilgrim watching a backward playing film about American planes bombing Germany. The narrative explained what happened in the backward playing version. Effectively the bombers ‘sucked up’ the destruction, returned to base unharmed, the bombs were dismantled and the minerals buried back in the ground “so they would never hurt anybody again”.

What this novel has taught me about writing: Don’t be afraid to mix things up. On paper a story which combines an eyewitness account of the bombing of Dresden, an alien race and time travel, makes it sound from the outset as though it’s going to be some bizarre tale full of disjointed confusion. However I never once found this novel to be in the slighest bit, disjointed or confusing. Mr. Vonnegut makes all the components work beautifully together. ...less

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Phill rated it:

(review of isbn 0844663662)

07/29/08

bookshelves: classic, cult, literary

I was not aware of Kurt Vonnegut when he passed away last year. I hadn’t read a single book of his, and that situation remained until a few weeks ago when, after watching a documentary on another fallen hero, Hunter S. Thompson, I decided to buy some of the books I had intended to a long time ago and never did. So in went Catch-22, South of No North, The Cheese Monkeys, and Slaughterhouse-Five. And out I walked looking like a ‘cult classic’ wannabe late to the party.

Slaughterhouse-Five i...more I was not aware of Kurt Vonnegut when he passed away last year. I hadn’t read a single book of his, and that situation remained until a few weeks ago when, after watching a documentary on another fallen hero, Hunter S. Thompson, I decided to buy some of the books I had intended to a long time ago and never did. So in went Catch-22, South of No North, The Cheese Monkeys, and Slaughterhouse-Five. And out I walked looking like a ‘cult classic’ wannabe late to the party.

Slaughterhouse-Five is the first of the four that I’ve read and I find that kind of sad, because now the others have such a high bar to flip towards that surely they’ll trip and stumble. But we’ll wait and see. In any case I, like just about every other person on the planet that has read Vonnegut it seems, found it wonderful. It’s told from the perspective of a man named Billy Pilgrim, who becomes ‘unstuck in time’ following an aeroplane crash in his late life. This leads to a narrative that jumps back and forth throughout a few major settings of his life: his brief experience as a chaplain’s aide in World War II, as a prisoner of war in a Dresden slaughterhouse (number five, giving its title to the book) during the famous firebombing, postwar with his fat, millionaire heiress wife, and as an elder man who spreads the word of his fatalist philosophy, developed as a result of his being kidnapped by an alien race.

As you may have guessed by that last item, there are a couple of science-fiction elements in the book, but not enough that it falls into the dreaded void that might have seen a lot of people ignore it out of their pig-minded refusal to read genre fiction. The literary mechanism of time travel can’t really be called science-fiction, as it there is no grand machine, and it is never known if it occurs only in Billy Pilgrim’s mind. The alien race that picks up Billy and helps him understand his time shifting is unavoidably going to be thought of as sci-fi, but they could just as easily have been a group of monks. So there’s really no reason to be a literature snob, there’s ideas like this in all genre fiction. <backs down off soapbox>

A major theme in the book is the concept of time and space as related to death. The aliens (Tralfamadorians) that help Billy (and display him in a zoo with a porno star, incidentally) can see in the fourth dimension, time, and therefore can visit any point of their life at any time. As a result of their unique sight, they believe that the body exists forever; when a body dies, it merely stops existing in that time and place, but continues to exist in other times and places where it was still alive. This fatalist worldview is something that Billy preaches later in life, which ends up amassing him a public profile that leads to his death at the hands of a revenge-loving fellow slaughterhouse refugee. The famous quote of ’so it goes’ is the standard response from the Tralfamadorians (and also the narrator) whenever death occurs.

Slaughterhouse-five has been called an anti-war book (in fact, the back cover claims it to be the most famous anti-war book every made, which I find hard to believe), but I think it is more of a comment on the human condition; the way that we operate in ways so perpendicular to what we know is what we want as a result of our modern environment. That it is mostly set in a warzone doesn’t really mean that it is anti-war, I think Vonnegut has used war as an extreme example of the silliness of humankind’s value system. Without sounding like a hippy, I’d recommend it to anyone who thinks that work is life, or that politics is life, or that religion is life. I found it brilliant as a piece of literature, brilliant as a story, and brilliant as a different view on the problem of modern life....less

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Shannon rated it:

(review of isbn 0385333846)

01/21/08

bookshelves: 2008, history, not-worth-it, sci-fi, time-travel

Read in January, 2008

Contains spoilers
Slaughterhouse-Five is about a man called Billy Pilgrim who time-travels frequently. He was in the Second World War and, captured, was sent to Dresden to work in a malt syrup factory before the city was bombed. He studied optometry and had a nervous breakdown. He married the daughter of a rich optometrist, and became rich as well. He was abducted by aliens called Tralfamadorians, who put him in a zoo with a young porn actress, Montana Wildhack, whom they also abd...more Contains spoilers
Slaughterhouse-Five is about a man called Billy Pilgrim who time-travels frequently. He was in the Second World War and, captured, was sent to Dresden to work in a malt syrup factory before the city was bombed. He studied optometry and had a nervous breakdown. He married the daughter of a rich optometrist, and became rich as well. He was abducted by aliens called Tralfamadorians, who put him in a zoo with a young porn actress, Montana Wildhack, whom they also abducted. He had a daughter called Barbara and a son called Robert. He was in a plane crash that killed everyone except him and the co-pilot. Rushing to the hospital in frantic worry, his wife Valencia dies in a car accident. He gets to meet his favourite author, an unsuccessful sci-fi writer called Kilgore Trout. "Slaughterhouse-Five" is the name of the building where the American POWs lived in in Dresden.

Because the narration jumps around as frequently as Billy does, you learn everything early on and then simply revisit it all. The fractured narrative is worse than watching ads in a commercial break, or those horrible pop songs where the scenes and costumes change every two seconds - it gives you a headache. It's extremely boring, and hollow, and unsatisfying.

I'm not a huge sci-fi fan, as you know. But I do like time-travel stories. Billy is nothing like Henry from The Time Traveler's Wife. For a start, not even a second seems to pass in "real" time while he is travelling - no one ever notices. It seems less like time-travelling than like reliving the past, present and future of your life, all at once, because it's his consciousness that does the travelling. What isn't clear, at all, is which is the real Billy? He moves so much, you have to wonder how he doesn't become completely dislodged from his own corporeal self and go mad.

The time-travelling predates the abduction-by-aliens, but the aliens themselves see the past, present and future simultaneously, and teach Billy their philosophy of not really caring about anything, since nothing can be changed etc. etc. Fatalism.

I think I hated this book, but not quite. Hate is a strong emotion and I don't think it brought that out in me. It wasn't even frustrating, nor even particularly confusing, though the repetition of the Tralfamadorian expression "so it goes" was so irritating I saw red a few times. The bits about the 100 American POWs being welcomed by the British POWs in a German prison camp was delightful, though boldly stereotyped, and I loved the excerpts from the work on American soldiers and prisoners-of-war by the American-turned-Nazi, forget his name, something Campbell. A lot of it - and it's a small, short book - could easily be skipped. The temptation was very strong.

In short, it's a very "postmodern" story, and like all things postmodern, it's impractical, disjointed, a bit wanky, tries too hard, is extremely out-dated and, at the end of the day, rather useless. Vonnegut is also very heavy-handed and bangs you on the head with his messages. It doesn't really inspire me to read more of Vonnegut's work. I guess he's a love-him-or-hate-him kind of story-teller....less

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Martine rated it:

(review of isbn 0385333846)

03/11/08

bookshelves: historical-fiction, modern-fiction, north-american, postmodern, science-fiction

Read in March, 2008

I have to admit to being somewhat baffled by the acclaim Slaughterhouse-5 has received over the years. Sure, the story is interesting, and it has a fascinating and mostly successful blend of tragedy and comic relief. And yes, I guess the fractured structure and time-travelling element must have been quite novel and original back in the day. But that doesn't excuse the book's flaws, of which there are rather a lot in my (seemingly unconventional) opinion. Take, for instance, Vonnegut's end...more I have to admit to being somewhat baffled by the acclaim Slaughterhouse-5 has received over the years. Sure, the story is interesting, and it has a fascinating and mostly successful blend of tragedy and comic relief. And yes, I guess the fractured structure and time-travelling element must have been quite novel and original back in the day. But that doesn't excuse the book's flaws, of which there are rather a lot in my (seemingly unconventional) opinion. Take, for instance, Vonnegut's endless repetition of the phrase 'So it goes.' Wikipedia informs me it crops up 106 times in the book. It felt like 300 times to me. About forty pages into the book, I was so fed up with the words 'So it goes' that I felt like hurling the book across the room, something I have not done since trying to read up on French semiotics back in the nineties. I got used to them eventually, but I never grew to like them. God, no.

I found some other nits to pick, too. Some of them were small and trivial, such as -- wait for it -- the hyphen in the book's title. Seriously, what is that hyphen doing there? There's no need for a hyphen there. Couldn't someone have removed it, like, 437 editions ago? And while I'm at it, couldn't some discerning editor have done something about the monotonous quality of Vonnegut's prose -- about the interminable repetition of short subject-verb-object sentences? Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying all authors should use Henry James- or Claire Messud-length sentences. I'm actually rather fond of minimalism, both in visual art and in writing. But Vonnegut's prose is so sparse and simplistic it's monotonous rather than minimalist, to the point where I frequently found myself wishing for a few longer sentences every now and then, or for an actual in-depth description of something. I hardly ever got them. As a result, there were times when I felt like I was reading a bare-bones outline of a story rather than the story itself. True, it was an interesting outline, but still, I think the story could have been told in more effective way. A less annoying way, too.

As for the plot, I liked it. I liked the little vignettes Vonnegut came up with and the colourful characters he created (the British officers being my particular favourites). I liked the fact that you're never quite sure whether Billy is suffering from dementia, brain damage or some kind of delayed post-traumatic stress disorder or whether there is some actual time-travelling going on. I even liked the jarring switches in perspective, although I think they could have been handled slightly more subtly. And I liked the book's anti-war message, although it seemed to be curiously weak and defeatist. In short, I liked the book, but it took some doing. I hope I'll be less annoyed by the two other Vonnegut books I have sitting on my shelves, Breakfast of Champions and Cat's Cradle.
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Michael rated it:

(review of isbn 0385333846)

02/29/08

Read in February, 2008

I bought this book back in December at the suggestion of a friend in inner-city Northeastern USA. I put it with the rest of my books and decided to read it later - like I always do. I finally sat down to read it about a month ago as a book to read for English class. The first chapter confused me a lot, but once I got passed that, it all started to make a bit more sense. I should probably read that first chapter again, maybe even the whole book, so that I may fully understand the novel, as it...more I bought this book back in December at the suggestion of a friend in inner-city Northeastern USA. I put it with the rest of my books and decided to read it later - like I always do. I finally sat down to read it about a month ago as a book to read for English class. The first chapter confused me a lot, but once I got passed that, it all started to make a bit more sense. I should probably read that first chapter again, maybe even the whole book, so that I may fully understand the novel, as it is leaving me quite solemn as it is.

I didn't realize I had finished it. Right before starting this review, I went over to my bookshelf to finish it, but I found that I had. I find this quite ...odd. I've never read a book and end up not remembering finishing it. This is not a mark against it; if anything, it is a plus. The book does not make any attempt at being outright dramatic, which is actually said near the end by the narrator (whom is first-person, but it reads as third-person for most of the text). I find this lovely and a breath of fresh air. Contemporary literature is all about action of some sort. They just can't describe the situation with solemnity.

To be honest, I had never heard of Tralfamadorians or the bombing of Dresden before I read this book, which I am quite ashamed of - especially the latter. Vonnegut really does a fantastic job with the surrealism of Billy Pilgrim's alien visits and time-traveling capabilities, weaving them to make the story all the more real (seems quite paradoxical, eh?) and tragic. There's a symmetry that is supposed to be drawn between the two, the bombing of Dresden and Pilgrim's alien and time-traveling adventures. They are both supposed to be seen as events that could never really happen to someone, events that nobody would believe in their right mind. Some may lose this. Some may think, "Is Vonnegut trying to make a mockery out of the bombing, or maybe try to detract from just hwo real it is?" or maybe not even get that there is a connection at all (which would be even worse).

I must admit, I laughed quite heartedly over the course of this book. I just good not help it. When it is said the Billy Pilgrim has an "enormous wang" and that's how it goes, I was hysterical for a few minutes. The straight-to-the-point "so it goes" that accompanies every tragedy is enough to make one laugh everytime and, if they, think about it long enough, cry. That's what makes this book so great. It is only upon careful consideration that one truly feels teh enormity of this. You read and all the events seem so distant, and he makes them so humourous, that you kind of forget that people are dying. People are living. People are being hanged. People are trying to make a living for their families by being a Nazi. In the first chapter, it is said mentioned that there is no evil character in this book and, strictly speaking, there isn't. However, if I may make a correction, there is an evil character: the one of man to man. This may not take an incarnate form in the book, but it's presence is felt and told from this book....less

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Dan rated it:

(review of isbn 0385333846)

06/24/08

I read this book on a bus ride from Chicago to Milwaukee. It was a lonely ride. Before I arrived at the bus station I had spent some time printing pictures of celebrities in a high-end office supply company's central headquarters in a skyscraper. I didn't want the pictures, but my friend insisted. I will admit that I did appreciate the view from whatever floor we were on. I paid eight dollars for a pack of cigarettes and sat on the stairs in the lobby and started reading.
I don't remember th...more I read this book on a bus ride from Chicago to Milwaukee. It was a lonely ride. Before I arrived at the bus station I had spent some time printing pictures of celebrities in a high-end office supply company's central headquarters in a skyscraper. I didn't want the pictures, but my friend insisted. I will admit that I did appreciate the view from whatever floor we were on. I paid eight dollars for a pack of cigarettes and sat on the stairs in the lobby and started reading.
I don't remember the name of the store where I bought the book from but it was somewhere in Chicago. I think the name of the place had something to do with eyes, which reminds me of a man I saw on the stairs in the lobby. He sang loud and walked from a door on one side of the room to the exit on the other side. He sang so loud that it was hard to ignore him and everyone he walked by, from one door to the other, he would slow his pace to a crawl and stare directly at their face and just keep on singing.
I had been in the strangest state of mind for hours. It felt like the buildings were bending inward on me and would eventually engulf me every time I went outside. I went outside and smoked a cigarette and I thought about pillars of salt and about plastic bags from grocery stores. I got on the bus and sat alone.
The only time that I remember looking up from the book is when the bus that I was reading in came within inches of hitting a large truck. The truck and the bus would have collided side to side and I remember thinking that I could touch the truck quite easily sans window. I stared at the truck driver as we sped away.
As the bus drove out of the city and the buildings loosened their grip, I was comforted by the fact that I was not the only one who had ever felt out of sorts about the ways in which the world operates. Detached, disassociated, and confused were three feelings that touched my heart as I read. It was comforting to find companionship, even in a book, but I found myself hoping that I was the only one feeling what I felt in the end.
My phone died by the time I reached Milwaukee. I walked from the bus stop under a bridge, passed some people, across some streets, under the sky, and in the middle of everything. I went to a bar that I had been to before and asked to use a pay phone. There were no pay phones. The bartender let me use his cell phone and I called my girlfriend for a ride. I had ignored her for most of my trip to Chicago which had unintentionally lasted several days longer than planned and she was upset but agreed nonetheless.
I ordered a cheap beer with what little money I had left (Chicago is expensive) and I finished the book. It was strange and captivating and enhanced the subtle surrealities of my state of consciousness and of my unexpected bus trip. I would recommend this book to people who want to appear smart/knowledgeable in conversations about books with other people, people who like to read, people who think everything is a liquid, and people who stare down as they walk by other people. ...less

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Trevor rated it:

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01/24/08

I've only just finished this, literally minutes ago - look I had no idea this was going to be nearly so good. When he died last year I read some of his short stories, which were okay, but nothing to write home about. This was something else.

A friend of mine I don't talk to any more by a strange form of mutual agreement / obligation (though, now I’ve worked out how this all works, perhaps we’ve found an alternative means of one way communication?) – was thinking of starting up a scie...more I've only just finished this, literally minutes ago - look I had no idea this was going to be nearly so good. When he died last year I read some of his short stories, which were okay, but nothing to write home about. This was something else.

A friend of mine I don't talk to any more by a strange form of mutual agreement / obligation (though, now I’ve worked out how this all works, perhaps we’ve found an alternative means of one way communication?) – was thinking of starting up a science fiction reading group for people who don’t read science fiction. Now, this is exactly the sort of book that would be great for that.

What I liked most about it was that the aliens did not have to be real – there was a bump on the head that could explain much. This is an interesting book and like many interesting books it can be read on many levels.

It is an anti-war story that is both confronting and stunningly well written. I really loved the time travel sequences – how the novel told itself in much the same way that it wanted to explain what fourth dimensional living would be like. The structure of the story is very interesting – brilliantly clever. There is also a lot of very black humour – my favourite kind.

Every time someone dies in the book – and it is about (in part) the bombing of Dresden, so there are plenty of opportunities for people to die – the narrator says, “so it goes”. If you had asked me before reading this if I would have thought this would work as a device I would have said that it definitely would not – that soon it would be a pain in the bum. But I would have been wrong. It was inspired – catching me in much the same way every time and making the deaths more ‘real’ each time. Even when I knew they were coming their iteration was a mantra and one that worked for me in that it did focus my attention. This, even though the stated intention was to do the opposite.

There is, of course, a logical flaw in the aliens seeing all times but making the same mistakes every time which isn’t really covered over by saying all times need to correspond to their inherent structure – but this is a novel and this was not a flaw that annoyed me enough to stop me reading.

This is a humorous book, it is a book that stops you reading and makes you think of the implications of what you are reading. It is a book that is not seeking bland ‘realism’ – at no time is the reader unaware that this is art, rather than ‘life’ (whatever that is) – but this is its power – this is what takes the breath away. What is artifice comments on the real and shows it to as again as new.

I really had not expected this book to be nearly as good as it was. It is one of those books I’ve always known was there, but thought it would be just another science fiction novel. This is anything but ‘just’ anything. A remarkable book I might force my daughters to read.
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Danielle rated it:

(review of isbn 0385333846)

03/13/08

bookshelves: fiction

Read in March, 2008

So it goes.
I was a huge Vonnegut fan in high school, and had been looking forward to reading his magnum opus. However, I was disappointed.
I think the message of this book is valuable, and it would have lost some of it's power being told in any other way. However, I came away with a bad taste in my mouth. It felt like if I were listening to a rap song full of offensive language and references. Maybe the message of the song is meaningful, and valuable, but because of the presentation, I just c...more So it goes.
I was a huge Vonnegut fan in high school, and had been looking forward to reading his magnum opus. However, I was disappointed.
I think the message of this book is valuable, and it would have lost some of it's power being told in any other way. However, I came away with a bad taste in my mouth. It felt like if I were listening to a rap song full of offensive language and references. Maybe the message of the song is meaningful, and valuable, but because of the presentation, I just can't appreciate what it's trying to say. I was so frequently offended by the content of this book, mainly the sex, some of the language, and the callousness toward human suffering, that trying to appreciate the larger picture was difficult for me.
Especially compared to other Vonnegut books, I felt like this was more the drunk ramblings of a dirty old man.
On the upside, though, some of that callousness is what makes the whole anti-war theme so poignant. I didn't enjoy the Holocaust museum, but it was a valuable experience. I definitely didn't enjoy this book, but in the future, I'll probably be more acutely aware of (and more quick to condemn) the kind of insensitive attitude toward life that permeated this book.
I'm not sure exactly what Vonnegut's intentions were, but for me, I saw a parallel between Billy Pilgrim's attempt to educate the world about the true nature of time, as imparted to him by the Tralfamadorians, and Vonnegut's attempt to convince the world of the true horrors of the Dresden fire bombing. At first, Billy couldn't talk about it at all, because the time wasn't ripe. Billy's hospital roommate alludes to the same being the case with Dresden when he says initially the US didn't even acknowledge the destruction of Dresden because of bleeding hearts who wouldn't understand it was necessary. By the time the truth came out, people didn't want to believe it. I think Billy's final scene of life is hopeful. Just as he eventually amasses devoted followers of his theory, Vonnegut is hopeful that eventually all the world will realize the utter futility of war, and it's the roommate warhawk general that will sound like the crackpot, rather than Billy Pilgrim.
I found Vonnegut's asides distracting, and thought the story would have been better off without the first-person narration. Also, the references to other Vonnegut characters (Elliot Rosewater, Kilgore Trout, etc.) threw me because I haven't read his other books recently enough to tell whether the stories actually fit together or not, so that was a little weird.
Anyway, if it weren't for the offensive material previously mentioned, I would probably read this book again in an attempt to better appreciate it. As it is, I'll leave it with the moral that war is pointless, and so it goes....less

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Jamie rated it:

(review of isbn 0385333846)

08/12/08

Read in October, 2006

The full title of this Kirk Vonnegut novel is, you may remember from the list of books you were supposed to get around to reading, Slaughterhouse-Five; or, The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death. I needed a break from pulp fantasy so I decided to tackle something more thought provoking.

This is pretty obviously an anti-war book. The protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, is the world's worst soldier and witnesses the firebombing of Dresdin, a town in Germany of questionable military importanc...more The full title of this Kirk Vonnegut novel is, you may remember from the list of books you were supposed to get around to reading, Slaughterhouse-Five; or, The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death. I needed a break from pulp fantasy so I decided to tackle something more thought provoking.

This is pretty obviously an anti-war book. The protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, is the world's worst soldier and witnesses the firebombing of Dresdin, a town in Germany of questionable military importance whose 130,000 mostly civilian inhabitants are obliterated in an Allied bombing towards the end of World War II. This event is the macabre centerpiece of Vonnegut's examination of war and how it obliterates lives and even free will.

The book's other catch is that Billy Pilgrim is supposedly a time traveler who inadvertently slides back and forth along the time line of his life. He also describes how he was abducted by aliens and taken to an intergalactic zoo where he's mated with a beautiful movie star. The aliens teach Pilgrim that time is just another dimension, and that every moment --past present and future-- is inevitable and can actually be seen if you know how to look. If someone dies at one point in time, he's still alive in all the others, so it's no big deal.

Vonnegut never directly addresses this issue, but it seems fairly evident to me that both the time travel and the alien view towards the same subject are just figments of Pilgrim's imagination that serve as coping mechanisms for what he saw in the war. If free will doesn't exist, tragedy isn't quite so tragic. If you can see the whole stretch of time in one's life laid out like a mountain range and visit any part of it whenever you want, death loses its bite. But like I said, it's left to the reader to decide.

So, good book if a bit weird with all the dancing back and forth along the plot line as Pilgrim time travels. It's thought provoking, Vonnegut is a lyrical writer, and it's definitely worth a read. But if I were to compare it to other things I've read, I think I've read at least one book that better communicates the horror of war, and another one that better captures the absurdity. Oh, and I've read a better time travel one, too. Still, this one manages to do all three, and that's something....less

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Robin rated it:

(review of isbn 0385333846)

04/28/08

bookshelves: 20th-century-literature

Read in April, 2008

I really struggled to get through the first three chapters or so, but as I got into the ebb and flow of Billy Pilgrim's flits through time it went quickly. It is a deceptively tightly woven piece of prose with no spare parts and repeating themes like a Greek chorus in what is apparently freewheeling stream of consciousness. Vonnegut had a gift for a turn of phrase and irony, and I especially liked the tightrope walk of how he piece by piece brought forward all the evidence that explained the roo...more I really struggled to get through the first three chapters or so, but as I got into the ebb and flow of Billy Pilgrim's flits through time it went quickly. It is a deceptively tightly woven piece of prose with no spare parts and repeating themes like a Greek chorus in what is apparently freewheeling stream of consciousness. Vonnegut had a gift for a turn of phrase and irony, and I especially liked the tightrope walk of how he piece by piece brought forward all the evidence that explained the roots of Billy Pilgrim's almost certain delusion of the Tralfamadorians and being loose in time, but leaves a thread of doubt.

Reading an anti-war novel set in events in what most consider the one justifiable war of the twentieth century is a little strange sandwiched between the present experience of the war in Iraq and my recent reading on the British aspects of the Napoleonic Wars. There is nothing glamorous in wars, however sound ideologically. Horrendous mistakes will always be made by the flawed individuals executing them, and they will always shed opaque shadows that license the worst of human inhumanity, and possibly worse, carelessness. Yet there are moments of courage and kindness verging on grandeur, too.

As with most well-written fiction it leaves open possibilities for thought. What was Vonnegut saying about life and how we experience it? Was he proposing that we should view it in moments, always present? A lived life and its individual moments certainly have a different perspective when viewed as a whole(and out of order)with all of the parts informing one another.

As for the firebombing of Dresden, what could Vonnegut say other than the facts? No one is adequate to the experience of the horrific on that kind of scale, and yet we can't help looking back with Lot's wife trying to attempt making it comprehensible. It can only turn us to salt. By the time I finished I realized Vonnegut wasn't saying life was absurd and meaningless; quite the contrary. Still all the best and worst of our moments remain equally alive and powerful, making it an almost impossible balancing act....less

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Tung rated it:

(review of isbn 0385333846)

01/09/08

bookshelves: classics

Read in January, 2007

During high school, I did what most well-read geeks did – read every one of Vonnegut’s works. As a tribute to his passing in 2007, I re-read one of his most acclaimed novels. Slaughterhouse-Five is a semi-autobiographical account of the bombing of Dresden during World War Two told through the life of fictional Billy Pilgrim, a chaplain’s assistant who gets captured by Germans and taken to Dresden right before the bombing. Billy suffers from a time-travel disorder after allegedly being a...more During high school, I did what most well-read geeks did – read every one of Vonnegut’s works. As a tribute to his passing in 2007, I re-read one of his most acclaimed novels. Slaughterhouse-Five is a semi-autobiographical account of the bombing of Dresden during World War Two told through the life of fictional Billy Pilgrim, a chaplain’s assistant who gets captured by Germans and taken to Dresden right before the bombing. Billy suffers from a time-travel disorder after allegedly being abducted by aliens from Tralfamadore, a fictional planet whose residents see in four dimensions, allowing Vonnegut to jump back and forth in time through Billy’s life. Billy’s account of war and the Dresden bombing show the horrors and absurdities that humans inflict upon each other during wartime, making this novel “one of the world’s great anti-war books” according to one of the book cover quotes. There are two types of people in this world: those who worship Vonnegut, and those who tire of his repetitive, self-referential prose. I am more the latter than the former. Halfway through this book, I couldn’t wait for it to end. Slaughterhouse-Five is the origin of one of Vonnegut’s most famous quotes (“So it goes.”). My conservative estimate puts that phrase’s appearance in this book at one gazillion times. I also found the Tralfamadorean plot an absurd construct – Vonnegut needn’t bring in aliens to examine a man’s life through different lenses in time (see The Known World to see how this can be done exquisitely). Vonnegut is known for encapsulating profound thoughts in short bursts of prose that make you ache with their clarity, and certainly those moments can be found in this book. But I also believe this book is overrated, and that it found such acclaim only because it was a clever anti-war book published in 1969 during the height of the anti-war movement. If you like Vonnegut, you’ve already read this. If you haven’t read any Vonnegut before, this is one of his more popular ones (also check out Cat’s Cradle or Breakfast of Champions), but you’ve been forewarned of its shortcomings....less

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Jessica rated it:

(review of isbn 0099800209)

10/15/07

Read in October, 2007

recommends it for: for the more literary-minded

On the plane to Baltimore last Thursday I finished Slaughterhouse V by Kurt Vonnegut. I think I may even have finished it while we were still on the runway. I don't even remember the takeoff, I was so engrossed. This is really a slim book, not so many pages at all, but it took me a good chunk of time to read it. I kept going back and rereading the striking bits, of which there are many. One of the lines I've even committed to memory. “The skyline was intricate and voluptuous and enchanted and ...more

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