Slaughterhouse-Five

Simeon

Rating: really liked it
There are some terrible reviews of SH5 floating around Goodreads, but one particularly awful sentiment is that Slaughterhouse-Five isn't anti-war.

This is usually based on the following quote.

"It had to be done," Rumfoord told Billy, speaking of the destruction of Dresden.
"I know," said Billy.
"That's war."
"I know. I'm not complaining"
"It must have been hell on the ground."
"It was," said Billy Pilgrim.
"Pity the men who had to do it."
"I do."
"You must have had mixed feelings, there on the ground."
"It was all right," said Billy. "Everything is all right, and everybody has to do exactly what he does. I learned that on Tralfamadore."

For context, Mr. Rumfoord is an old military historian described as "hateful and cruel" who wants to see weaklings like Billy exterminated.

On Tralfamadore, Billy was introduced to the revelation that all things happen exactly as they do, and that they will always happen that way, and that they will never happen any other way. Meaning, time is all at once. The aliens, incidentally, admit to destroying the universe in a comical accident fated far into the future, and they're very sorry, but so it goes. <- passive acceptance

The entire story up to this point has been about Billy, buffeted like a powerless pathetic leaf in a storm, pushed this way and that by forces entirely outside his tiny purview. He lays catatonically in a hospital bed after the plane crash and the death of his wife, and all the time traveling back and forth from Dresden where toddlers and families and old grannies and anti-war civilians were burned alive in a carefully organized inferno (so it goes), and Billy is about ready to agree to absolutely anything.

It can't be prevented. It can't be helped.

You're powerless, after a while. What hope have we, or anyone caught in the middle of a war, or even the poor soldiers who are nothing but pawns and children (hence the children's crusade), to influence these gigantic, global events?

Therefore, Billy agrees with the hateful, the cruel Mr. Rumfoord, who is revising his military history of WWII, having previously forgotten to mention the Dresden bombing. Women and children, not evaporated instantly, but melted slowly by chemicals and liquid flame, their leftovers, according to Billy, lying in the street like blackened logs, or in piles of families who died together in their little homes.


Incidentally, how can anything be pro-war or anti-war? Because being anti-war is a bit like being anti-conflict, anti-death, and anti-suffering. Is there a book that's pro these things? Is there a book that touches on the subject of war and is not against it?

We don't support wars, though we are sometimes forced to accept them. Anyone who thinks that the bombing of Dresden was necessary is delusional.

It's like saying, "yo, look how they bombed these innocents - that shit was wrong! Let's go bomb some innocents, too."

That's the sad truth of it.

Martine

Rating: really liked it
I have to admit to being somewhat baffled by the acclaim Slaughterhouse-5 has received over the years. Sure, the story is interesting. 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 a great many 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 three hundred 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 1990s. I got used to coming across the words every two pages or so 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 and frankly rather ridiculous, 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. Heaven forbid. 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 run-on sentence every now and then, or for an actual in-depth description of something. I hardly ever got either. 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. Granted, it was an interesting outline, larded with pleasing ideas and observations, but still, I think the story could have been told in a 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 in a slightly more subtle manner. And I liked the book's anti-war message, weak and defeatist though it seemed to be. 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.

Stephanie *Eff your feelings*

Rating: really liked it
I miss Kurt Vonnegut.

He hasn't been gone all that long. Of course he isn't gone, yet he is gone. He has always been alive and he will always be dead. So it goes.

Slaughterhouse-five is next to impossible to explain, let alone review, but here I am. And here I go.

What is it about?

It's about war.
It's about love and hate.
It's about post traumatic stress.
It's about sanity and insanity.
It's about aliens (not the illegal kind, the spacey kind).
It's about life.
It's about death.
so it goes.

"That's one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: Ignore the awful times and concentrate on the good ones."

This is how I live my life. This is how I get through the day. Most days I am successful, some days I'm not. Today is one of the "not" days. Like so many Americans these days, I feel I'm in a rut. Like so many Americans I don't understand why I am where I am. This was not the plan. This was not what I had in mind......

Oh poor me....boo hoo.

This book. This book got me thinking. So much about life sucks, true, but not many of us want to give up on it that easy. Why? because of the "good ones". And what makes "good ones" is our ability to create and enjoy creating.....at least I think so.

"Write it. Shoot it. Publish it. Crochet it, sauté it, whatever. MAKE."
— Joss Whedon

If you make something, a painting, a poem, a novel, a good meal, a person.....you continue to live even after death. I think that's what Mr. Vonnegut was getting at. Maybe.

At least that is how he has remained alive for me.

Sean Barrs

Rating: really liked it
Every so often you read a book, a book that takes everything you thought created an excellent novel and tears it to pieces; it then sets it on fire and throws it out the window in a display of pure individual brilliance. That is how I felt when I read this jumbled and absurd, yet fantastic, novel.

The book has no structure or at the very least a perceivable one: it’s all over the place. But, it works so well. It cements the book’s message and purpose underlining its meaning. Indeed, this book is an anti-war novel, which is asserted (in part) through its random and confusing organisation. The story is “jumbled and jangled” such as the meaning of war. It appears pointless to the reader, again alluding to the meaning of war. It also suggests that after the war a soldier’s life is in ruins and has no clear direction, which can be seen with the sad case of Billy Pilgrim. So it goes.

Billy Pilgrim is a poor tortured soul who after the fire-bombing of Dresden is in a state of flux. His mind cannot remain in the present and darts back and forth in time like the narrative. He was never the most assertive of men, and after the war became a shadow of his already meek self. The war has left him delusional, which is manifested by his abduction by aliens. This may or may not have happened. Vonnegut leaves it up to the reader to decide. What decision they make effects what genre the novel belongs to.

Is it science fiction?

If Billy was abducted by aliens then this is sci-fi, but if it is a figment of his imagination then this becomes something much deeper. It’s up to the reader how they interpret it, but I personally believe that he wasn’t abducted. I think he made it up, unconsciously, as a coping strategy for the effects of war, and that the author has used it as a tool to raise questions of the futility of free will, but more importantly to further establish the anti-war theme.

Vonnegut draws on a multitude of sources to establish this further, such as the presidential address of Truman. He ironically suggests that the A-bomb, whilst devastating, is no worse than ordinary war; he points out the fact that the fire-bombing of Dresden killed more than the nuking of Hiroshima. Through this he uses Billy Pilgrim’s life as a metaphor for what war for the effects of war on the human state.

So it goes.

Vonnegut himself is a character within the narrative as the life of Billy Pilgrim is, in part, an autobiographical statement. The narrator addresses the reader and informs them of this. He tells them that this all happened more or less. This establishes the black humour towards war and the inconsequential deaths of those that are in it. Hence the motif “so it goes” at each, and every, mention of death whether large or small. He ends the book on the line “poo-te-weet.” He even tells the reader he is going to do this, but at the same time demonstrates that there is nothing intelligible to be said about war.

I warn you, if you’ve not read this, it is one of the most bizarre books you will ever read. The main character time travels, in his mind, and has no real present state. The narrative initially appears random and completely confusing. But, once you reach the end you’ll see this book for what it is: the most individual, and unique, statement against war that will ever be written.

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Kirstie

Rating: really liked it
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.

Kenny

Rating: really liked it
“All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.”
SLAUGHTERHOUSE - FIVE ~~ Kurt Vonnegut


My junior year of college, I had a roommate, Don, his nickname was Har Don ~~ which he hated; Har Don loved Kurt Vonnegut ~~ no, he worshiped Kurt Vonnegut. It’s ironic since everything Har Don believed in was the antithesis of what Vonnegut stood for. Har Don insisted I read Vonnegut's SLAPSTICK. He told me it was the greatest novel ever written. I did, and it isn't. He insisted I was wrong. I wasn't. But, I was done with Vonnegut; there were authors I was craving to read and Vonnegut was not one of them.

Skip ahead to my joining Goodreads. Friends here, people whose opinions I truly respect, kept telling me I had to read SLAUGHTERHOUSE -- FIVE. So, I broke down, and picked up a copy. And? Well, it is hard to put into words how much I loved the world ~~ no worlds ~~ inhabited by Billy Pilgrim.

I can honestly say I have not read anything like SLAUGHTERHOUSE -- FIVE. That's a good thing. I had just finished NORWEGIAN WOOD and LIE WITH ME, two tales of young love gone wrong so I was looking to inhabit an entirely different world. SLAUGHTERHOUSE -- FIVE definitely was that world, or should I say worlds???



SLAUGHTERHOUSE -- FIVE is based on Vonnegut's experiences as a POW during the Allied bombing of Dresden in 1945. SLAUGHTERHOUSE -- FIVE is considered a modern literary masterpiece, as it should be. It propelled Vonnegut, who had been largely ignored by both critics and the public, to fame and literary acclaim. So it goes.

SLAUGHTERHOUSE -- FIVE follows Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes "unstuck in time," and brings together different periods of Billy's life ~~ his time as an ill-fated soldier, his post-war optometry career, and a foray in an extraterrestrial zoo where he served as an exhibit ~~ with humor and deep insight.

SLAUGHTERHOUSE -- FIVE was published on March 31, 1969 and became an instant and surprise hit. It spent sixteen weeks on the New York Times best seller list and went through five printings by July of 1969.



SLAUGHTERHOUSE -- FIVE has not been without controversy. The American Library Association listed the book as the 46th most banned or challenged book of the first decade of the 21st century. "It was banned from Oakland County, Michigan public schools in 1972. The circuit judge there accused the novel of being “depraved, immoral, psychotic, vulgar, and anti-Christian.” No wonder I loved it!

“My books are being thrown out of school libraries all over the country—because they’re supposedly obscene," Vonnegut told the Paris Review. "I’ve seen letters to small-town newspapers that put Slaughterhouse-Five in the same class with Deep Throat and Hustler magazine. How could anybody masturbate to Slaughterhouse-Five?” I'm starting to like this Vonnegut character!

"In 2011, Wesley Scroggins, an assistant professor at Missouri State University, called on the Republic, MO school board to ban SLAUGHTERHOUSE -- FIVE. He wrote in the local paper, 'This is a book that contains so much profane language, it would make a sailor blush with shame. The ‘f word’ is plastered on almost every other page. The content ranges from naked men and women in cages together so that others can watch them having sex to God telling people that they better not mess with his loser, bum of a son, named Jesus Christ.' The board eventually voted 4-0 to remove the novel from the high school curriculum and its library."

In response to this ban, the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library in Indianapolis gave away 150 free copies of SLAUGHTERHOUSE -- FIVE to Republic, Missouri students who wanted to read it. As a kid who was not allowed to give book reports in front of the class because my reading choices were "morally questionable" I now officially love the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library!



SLAUGHTERHOUSE -- FIVE is the strange tale of Billy Pilgrim. As i said previously, Billy becomes "unstuck" from the linear nature of time and takes us along on his journey. Billy Pilgrim is the anti-everyman while engaging in love, ethics, war, science, and aliens. SLAUGHTERHOUSE -- FIVE's main theme is man’s inhumanity to man throughout history.

SLAUGHTERHOUSE -- FIVE is not without its own heartfelt themes. It is most definitely an anti-war book. It is in many ways an anti-death book. It presents a philosophy questioning the purpose of life amidst determinism. Ayn Rand would have hated SLAUGHTERHOUSE -- FIVE ~~ yet another reason to love this book.

SLAUGHTERHOUSE -- FIVE is often insensitive and dark, and yet, you can't help but laugh at the world Vonnegut has created. SLAUGHTERHOUSE -- FIVE is full of contradictions that only serve to make Vonnegut's points.

SLAUGHTERHOUSE -- FIVE doesn't end with the death of Billy Pilgrim. That would far to simple an ending for something as brilliant as this; Billy lives on reliving this strange existence, learning and relearning the lessons of his life, unstuck from time.



So, have I revised my opinion of Vonnegut? Most definitely. Will I read more Vonnegut in the future? Yes, but selectively. Will I reread Slapstick? NEVER ...

Ahmad Sharabiani

Rating: really liked it
(Book 375 from 1001 books) - Slaughterhouse-Five = The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death, Kurt Vonnegut

Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death (1969) is a science fiction-infused anti-war novel by Kurt Vonnegut about the World War II experiences and journeys through time of Billy Pilgrim, from his time as an American soldier and chaplain's assistant, to postwar and early years.

It is generally recognized as Vonnegut's most influential and popular work. A central event is Pilgrim's surviving the Allies' firebombing of Dresden as a prisoner-of-war. This was an event in Vonnegut's own life, and the novel is considered semi-autobiographical.

تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز نوزدهم ماه می سال 2011میلادی

عنوانهای چاپ شده در ایران: «سلاخ‌خانه شماره پنج»؛ نویسنده: کورت ونه‌گات؛ انتشاراتیها: (روشنگران و مطالعات زنان)؛ تاریخ نخستین خوانش نوزدهم ماه می سال2011میلادی

عنوان: سلاخ خانه شماره پنج؛ نویسنده: کورت ونه گات؛ مترجم: علی اصغر بهرامی، تهران، روشنگران، 1372؛ در 263ص؛ چاپ دیگر 1380؛ چاپ بعدی سال1381؛ شابک 9646751490؛ چاپ ششم سال1389؛ موضوع: جنگ جهانگیر دوم - از سال 1939میلادی تا سال 1945میلادی از نویسندگان ایالات متحده آمریکا - سده 20م

کورت ونه گات: (زادروز: یازدهم ماه نوامبر سال 1922میلادی، ایندیاناپولیس، ایالت ایندیانا، درگذشت: روز یازدهم ماه آوریل سال 2007میلادی) در شهر «نیویورک، ایالت نیویورک»؛ ملیت: آمریکایی؛ پیشه: نویسنده از سال 1950میلادی تا سال 2005میلادی؛ همسران: «جین مری کاکس» از سال1945میلادی تا سال1971میلادی، «جیل کرمنتز از سال 1979میلادی تا سال 2007میلادی)، دارای چهار فرزند؛ والدین: «کورت وانگات سینیور، ادیت لیبر»؛

آثار: رمان‌ها: ‍«پیانوی خودنواز (1952میلادی)»، «آژیرهای هیولا (1959میلادی)»، «شب مادر (1961میلادی)»، «گهواره گربه (1963میلادی)»، «خدا شما را حفظ کند، آقای رزواتر (1965میلادی)»، «سلاخ‌خانه شماره پنج (1969میلادی)»، «صبحانه قهرمانان (1973میلادی)»، «اسلپ استیک (1976میلادی)»، «محبوس (1979میلادی)»، «مجمع الجزایر گالاپاگوس (1985میلادی)»، «ریش آبی (1987میلادی)»، «زمان لرزه (1997میلادی)»، «مرد بی‌وطن (2005میلادی)». مجموعه داستان‌ها: «قناری در خانه گربه (1961میلادی)»، «به خانه میمون خوش آمدید (1967میلادی)»، «انفیه ­دان باگومبو (1999میلادی)»، «خدا شما را حفظ کند، دکتر کورکیان (1999میلادی)»، «جوجو را نیگا (2009میلادی)». نمایش‌نامه: «تولدت مبارک وندا جون (1971میلادی)».؛

کورت وانگات جونیور، در رشته زیست‌ شیمی، از دانشگاه «کورنل» فارغ‌ التحصیل شدند، در ارتش نام‌نویسی کردند، و برای نبرد در جنگ جهانی دوم به «اروپا» اعزام شدند؛ ایشان خیلی زود به دست نیروهای «آلمانی» اسیر، و در «درسدن» زندانی شدند، پس از پایان جنگ و بازگشت به «ایالات متحده آمریکا»، در «دانشگاه شیکاگو» به تحصیل «مردم‌شناسی» پرداختند، و سپس به عنوان تبلیغات‌چی در شرکت «جنرال الکتریک» مشغول به کار شدند، تا سال1951میلادی که با نهایی شدن انتشار نخستین کتاب ایشان، «پیانوی خودکار»، آن کار را ترک کردند و تمام‌ وقت مشغول نویسندگی شدند؛ آثار ایشان ترکیبی از طنز سیاه، در مایه‌ های علمی‌ تخیلی ه­ستند؛

از آثار ایشان: «گهواره گربه»، «سلاخ‌خانه شماره پنج» و «صبحانه قهرمانان» بیشتر مورد ستایش قرار گرفته‌ اند.؛ در سال1999میلادی آستروئید یا سیارک 25399، را، برای بزرگداشت ایشان «ونه گات» نامیدند.؛

چکیده این داستان: «بیلی پیلگریم»، قهرمان داستان، در زمان خدمت خود در آرتش «آمریکا» در جنگ جهانگیر دوم، قابلیت حرکت در زمان را پیدا می‌کند، و از آن لحظه به‌ طور همزمان در زمین، و در یک سیاره ی دور، به نام «ترالفامادور»، زندگی خویش را پی می‌گیرد؛ او به فلسفه سرنوشت «ترالفامادور»ی ها باور پیدا می‌کند؛ آنها قادر به دیدن محیط خود در چهار بعد هستند؛ بنابراین از همه ی رخدادهای بگذشته و آینده باخبر هستند؛ واکنش او به رخدادهای ناخوشایندی که رخ می‌دهد، گفتن این جمله است: «بله! رسم روزگار چنین است.»؛

تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 31/05/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 07/05/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی

Vit Babenco

Rating: really liked it
Kurt Vonnegut always had his own unique attitude to society and history. Therefore Slaughterhouse-Five is a special story of man and his place in war and peace.

Shells were bursting in the treetops with terrific bangs showering down knives and needles and razorblades. Little lumps of lead in copper jackets were crisscrossing the woods under the shellbursts, zipping along much faster than sound.

War is a wonderful thing – it presents a man with a gift of madness. And madness is even a more wonderful thing – it allows a man to travel in time, to go through space to distant planets, to see things others can’t see.

‘Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, here we are… trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.’

So it goes… Then it stops…

Lyn

Rating: really liked it
A fun visit with cantankerous old Uncle Kurt.

Vonnegut is on a short list of my favorite authors and this is perhaps his most famous work. Not his best, but most recognizable. Billy Pilgrim is also one of his best characters.

(Kilgore Trout is his best).

I liked it as I like everything I have read of him. The recurring themes and characters, use of repetition for emphasis and comic relief, his irreverence and postmodern lack of sensitivity shine bright as ever here.

Vonnegut can be funny and grim on the same page, same sentence even, and not lose relevance or sincerity.

** 2018 - My wife and I visited Dresden, Germany this year and I could not help think of Vonnegut as a young POW who miraculously survived the firebombing and lived to tell the tale.

***** 2019 reread

Perhaps his most celebrated and recognized this is also considered one of his best and I’d agree. This 1969 publication was nominated for a Hugo and a Nebula and was also a finalist for the National Book Award. I think maybe only Ursula K. LeGuin could also pull that off. This was made into a 1972 film directed by George Roy Hill (who also directed Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting) and the film won the Hugo and the Cannes Grand Prix.

Billy Pilgrim has become “unstuck” in time. We all walk through life with a film of our past raging in our minds, but Vonnegut had Billy go one step further, in that he actually lives random moments in time, from his famous prison time in Dresden to his airplane crash, to his kidnapping and zoo sentence on Tralfamador.

Yes, Tralfamador. And we have another Kilgore Trout sighting, and also Elliot Rosewater and Howard W. Campbell Jr. We are surrounded and encompassed in the world Kurt made.

We must play a drinking game of sorts, every time death is mentioned we must say “so it goes”. In his introduction, we are told that this is to be a novel against war, an anti-war novel, and the ubiquitous phrase is used as an existential (and ironic) reminder that we live in each moment of time but that freewill is an intangible thing, as flimsy as dry rubber bands. The novel is also ripe with situational irony throughout, peppered with his inimitable dry humor and wit.

An observant reader will also note that when Pilgrim’s wife Valencia is in a car wreck, there is a bumper sticker that said, “Reagan for President”. Since this was first published in 1969, seven years before Reagan would be mentioned in the Republican primaries and eleven years before he would be elected, one wonders if KV had some time travel experience.

An absolute must read for his fans, a good introduction to his work, and an excellent book for all readers.

Leonard Gaya

Rating: really liked it
Don’t be fooled: this is a short novel, but a pretty difficult one! Kurt Vonnegut, like his protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, witnessed long ago one of the most dreadful (and now almost forgotten) events during the crepuscular spring of 1945, when the Allies, pretending to eradicate Nazism, utterly destroyed the German city of Dresden and killed tens of thousands of civilians (comparable to the Hiroshima bombing). This event is the bleeding core of the novel. So it goes.

What is more bewildering about this book is its disjointed time structure: very soon in the story, Billy Pilgrim, a former prisoner of war, gets “unstuck in time”, thanks to the intervention of a Tralfamadorian flying saucer. He then keeps travelling in time from one paragraph to the next, going back and forth from the days before the Dresden destruction, to his childhood years, to his postwar life as an optometrist who is writing a book about Dresden and suffers a plane crash, to the time of the Vietnam War and Ronald Reagan (the present time when Vonnegut was writing), to a geodesic sphere on the far-off planet of Tralfamadore, to Times Square, and back to the firestorm of World War II.

In doing so, we get to know a gallery of quaint yet pitiful characters Billy meets along the way: Weary the bully, Lazzaro the enraged sadist, Campbell the American Nazi, Kilgore Trout the crook sci-fi writer, the Spinozist four-dimensional Tralfamadorians, Montana the porn star, the rich and fat Valencia who dies in her car, Derby the teacher who dies before a firing squad, Jesus Christ a “nobody” who dies on a piece of wood. So it goes.

Added to this sense of disorientation (which indeed is that of Billy/Kurt), Vonnegut uses a dry, detached and fatalistic humour, when describing the most unspeakable, even unthinkable, moments of this war experience, that, if amusing, truly conveys a sense of utter despair. So it goes.

Henry Avila

Rating: really liked it
Now for something completely different , stating it mildly ...Billy Pilgrim is not just another time travelling man, kidnapped by aliens from the unknown planet Tralfamadore and put in their zoo, he's an eyewitness to the destruction of Dresden, during World War Two. Our Billy an optometrist, (eye doctor) marries the boss's slightly overweight daughter Valencia (who no one else wanted, people are so unkind) . The couple have two disrespectful children, Barbara and Robert, the truth that he becomes very rich through his nuptials, doesn't make him a bad guy, lucky, I guess is the proper adjective . Billy is no prize either , a tall, skinny weakling, an ordinary looking man , with a peculiar tendency for nervous breakdowns... welcome to modern life. The only unique thing about him, is the fact he visits rather reluctantly different stages of his life, by way of an unexplained and altogether involuntary power , by time travel. Yet for a while at least, life doesn't become endless and boring, still not as much fun as you'd think, repeating situations again and again, ouch . IT DOESN'T MATTER HE'D RATHER NOT GO...Past, Present and Future, are all the same to poor Pilgrim, he can be at his daughter's wedding and in a few moments, be back as a P.O.W. in Dresden, Germany on February 13th, 1945, when 1,200 allied bombers from England and America, dropped thousands of explosives on the city. Causing fires to spread quickly and kill (fry) thousands, anywhere from 30,000 to 130,000 humans, nobody will ever know the exact amount. "So it goes ". Then poor Billy is back in Illium, New York, talking to his only friend, Kilgore Trout an unsuccessful science fiction writer, (75 unread novels) I understand you can get his books at the local library, if you are diligent . The cosmic flying saucer that took Mr.Pilgrim secretly to that strange world...(not sure if it's the right word for the weird planet) millions of light years away, through a wormhole, did Billy a favor. The very curious people of Tralfamadore like to watch and how. They are not embarrassed by any kind of activity, providing him with a young, beautiful, and eager movie starlet Montana Wildhack, for the prisoner. The salacious activity gives the inhabitants of this planet many hours of entertainment...Billy will never really die, he will always travel through time and space forever."So it goes".

Garima

Rating: really liked it

I finally read Vonnegut. I finally read a war novel. And after a long time I finally read something with so many GR ratings and a decent number of reviews which is precisely the reason I have nothing much to add to the already expressed views here. So I urge you to indulge me to state a personal anecdote. Thank You.

My Grandfather was a POW during Indo-China war and remained in confinement for some six months. By the time I got to know about it I had already watched too many movies and crammed endless number of answers about when and where such n such war was fought. But I was naïve and let’s assume innocent and someone who was yet to learn to ask the right questions. So the fact that someone so close in the family had witness something I only read in schoolbooks was utterly fascinating for me. Thus began my streak of stupid questions.

Me: Did you kill someone? Did they torture you? Did you dig some sort of tunnel to escape? And so on.

My Grandpa gave this hearty laugh he is famous for and said that I’m missing one important question: Why the war happened at first place? I thought for a while and answered: Because it always happens.

I can’t recall properly what he replied to that but it was something on the lines of this: I wish the answer changes when you’ll grow up because as of now that’s exactly how it is. War always happens.

With books like Slaughterhouse-Five (Schlachthöf-fünf), it’s not the writing which matters but simply the ideas and thoughts it carries which transgresses the literary boundaries and create a place in the heart of the readers as a humble reminder that Love happens, Hate happens, Life happens, Death happens, Peace happens, War happens and sometimes Shit happens.

Lala BooksandLala

Rating: really liked it
This was really weirdly fantastic.

Re-read in 2020 as book 29 of 30 for my 30 day reading challenge.
https://youtu.be/8CA3Ep_Z1-g

Fergus

Rating: really liked it
Life can be so unutterably sad.

That in a nutshell was my early life; and Kurt Vonnegut’s life.

And young Billy’s too.

But Vonnegut was American, and so was I (by birth at least) - and so is Billy Pilgrim.

And Americans always jazz up their sadness.

And that’s what they all did to get themselves through the War. Big Bands became the perfect anodyne to stark terror.

And zany behaviour - my own, Vonnegut’s and Billy’s - became the preferred personal way for American bullied innocents to jazz up their sadness.
***

Living in a meat cooler under a city while your country is Decimating that city can only leave a traumatic scar.

BIG TIME.

So you jazz it up big time yourself - you start to prefer your mini-vacations on Trafalmador over more mundane hot spots.

Like, for example, foxholes.

So it goes, with Kurt and Billy, and me, and with cringing, bullied kids like us EVERYWHERE. Because where there is carrion like us there the crows gather. And crows don’t even chew you before swallowing.

And they have gizzards to take care of your bones.

You know, had Kurt Vonnegut been a believer he might have considerably mollified his trauma.

Or even reading books by and about declared Aspies, like I do now, may have helped do the trick.

But alas, dear Kurt, back then they shot first and asked questions later.

If they’d have heard you were an Aspie back then they would have leered and just told you to keep marching and shut up.

No wonder their Jazz was in as much demand as a good, stiff drink back then.

For you too, Kurt - you picked up their old-time jazzy zaniness...

And just marched on into doomed Dresden -

Dreaming of long-lost Tralfamador.

Annemarie

Rating: really liked it
This book is an absolute masterpiece and it makes it clear in every single sentence. I think it is best to go into it without knowing too much about the plot. You just got to take it as it comes, so to say.

Before reading, I was worried that I might have trouble with the writing style. English isn't my first language and the older a book is, the more trouble I seem to have with the writing (because of obsolete words, unusual sentence structures, ect.). However, my worry was totally for nothing in this case. I found the entire book very easy to read (which is even more surprising considering the heavy topics that get dealt with). I also loved how there were many little passages and repetitions of certain phrases. It seemed fitting somehow.

I would have never guessed that the blend of a war story with Science Fiction could work so well! It gives it so much room for analysing and interpretation.
Honestly, I could write a thousand more reasons why I loved this book, but in the end I would just repeat myself, because I seriously just loved every.single.little.thing! I highly recommend everyone to give it a shot.