Laura's review
Cat's Cradle
by Kurt Vonnegut
Laura's review
Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
Laura's review
rating:
To begin with, did I like the book? I certainly did, as it was entertaining, delightfully light-hearted and irreverent, with an interestingly outlandish plot and equally absurd characters.
How about the quality of the writing? Call me a purist, but the use of fabricated dialects and invented vocabulary left a bad taste in my mouth. On the up-side, Vonnegut’s use of poetry as comic relief was novel and amusing, and his self-mocking aphorisms are definitely quotable. I took pause to think of how fun it would be make up a religion in a work of fiction, and liked the idea immensely. In the midst of this novel, I also asked if there were too many things going on, and if there weren’t enough ideas for multiple books. I wondered why I was bothered here and not when reading Palahniuk, whose writing is similar but with more repetition and rhetorical tricks to tie a story together. I particularly began to worry around chapter 105, at which point I feared that Vonnegut was on the ...more
How about the quality of the writing? Call me a purist, but the use of fabricated dialects and invented vocabulary left a bad taste in my mouth. On the up-side, Vonnegut’s use of poetry as comic relief was novel and amusing, and his self-mocking aphorisms are definitely quotable. I took pause to think of how fun it would be make up a religion in a work of fiction, and liked the idea immensely. In the midst of this novel, I also asked if there were too many things going on, and if there weren’t enough ideas for multiple books. I wondered why I was bothered here and not when reading Palahniuk, whose writing is similar but with more repetition and rhetorical tricks to tie a story together. I particularly began to worry around chapter 105, at which point I feared that Vonnegut was on the ...more
