Slaughterhouse 5

Title: Slaughterhouse 5
Author: Kurt Vonnegut
Published: 1969, this ed. 1991 by Vintage. I seem to have a LOT of books from Vintage.
Genre: War with heaps of dark comedy.
Pages: 157




I thought I'd like to read something cheerful and fun after Atonement. So maybe a book about WWII and the bombing of Dresden, thousands of civilians dying, wasn't the best of ideas.

There is humour and dark comedy in the life story of Billy Pilgrim, which is told chronologically very out of order. That's all right, though, as that's how Billy himself experiences it as well. His life is full of normal things -marriage, children, career, death- and not-so-normal things such as being a prisoner of war during the second World War and being beamed up onto a space ship and taken to a planet called Trafalmadore.

When I picked up the book I thought I'd give it a go, see what it's like, and decided to read a page or two. Then one paragraph more. And one more. And one more. Even though Billy's a bit of a fool, or maybe because of it, I wanted to keep on reading, to find out what happens to him. Reading this also made me read up on the bombing of Dresden. Finding out about history is never a bad thing, in my opinion.


So, even though it wasn't exactly the pick-me-up I was looking for, I really did like Slaughterhouse 5. I should have read it years ago, man.




"And then it developed that Campbell was not going to go unanswered after all. Poor old Derby, the doomed high school teacher, lumbered to his feet for what was probably the finest moment in his life. There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters. But old Derby was a character now."