I have been shamefully neglecting this blog. I fell into easy ways, just posting up my stuff on Facebook when I felt like it, not including photos or links or anything ..... but now people on Facebook are starting to complain that I am clogging up their news feeds. So I thought I'd better try and reinstate the blog habit.
But I wanted to write about Kurt. I am reading again this book:
It's just great.
If you know Mr. Vonnegut at all, it is probably from 'Slaughterhouse Five', which gained a lot of popularity in the seventies and was made into a film. It is fiction, but it includes his real world memories of being involved (he was a soldier, and taken prisoner by the Germans) in the aftermath of the firebombing of Dresden in Germany, one of the worst single Second World War atrocities against mostly civilians, after that of Hiroshima. We did it. Not the Nazis, not the Soviet hordes. We took the decision to bomb and burn a mainly unprotected mediaeval city back to the bedrock. And yet the book is full of humour and fantasy and science fiction themes, and he is not judgemental. 'So it goes', is his verdict. 'And so on', is another damning indictment. 'Poo-tee-weet' - you'll have to look that up.
Every single book I've read of Vonnegut's is a new departure. 'Cat's cradle', 'Mother Night', 'Sirens of Titan', 'Bluebeard' ..... And yet, contrariwise, there are common elements. He often introduces himself into the narrative - 'Look at me', he says. 'This is a book I'm writing, of the nature of books, and here I am commenting on it. Don't be fooled, it's all fiction!' Apart, of course from the items he includes from his own life. His mother's suicide, his relationship with his sister ...... they don't intrude, but they sidle on from the wings.
'Breakfast of Champions' is perhaps his best work in this vein. The protagonist is Dwayne Hoover, who is going insane, but don't let that put you off. The book charts the course of Dwayne on his way, all unknown, to meet Kilgore Trout at an arts festival; Trout is a science fiction writer invented by Vonnegut - and he describes many of the novels that this fictional writer has written. Fictional fiction, if you will. (I like in particular the one about the alien race that communicates by tapdancing and farting.) There are unsettling passages but much that is humorous and complete flight of fantasy .... not least when Vonnegut himself enters the narrative and interacts with his own characters. With hilarious consequences.
Did I tell you that a recurring theme of Vonnegut's is that, at our centre, we each have an unwavering band of light? No? Good.
[ncidentally, the character of Kilgore Trout was so persuasive that another scifi writer (Philip Jose Farmer) wrote a novella called 'Venus on the half shell' under the Trout pseudonym that is so rare that fans now pay hundreds of dollars for an early copy. That's a lie. About the money, I mean - the rest is true.]
Oh dear, I am out of practice at ending blog pieces. Well ... shall I say that his writing is easy to read, and you won't realise that he has smuggled some wonderfully original idea past you until you turn the page and then say; "Hang on ....... !"
Oh, and the pages of this book are splattered with bold line drawings that he did. He went through a phase. Don't we all.
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