Vonnegut
The first time I read Kurt Vonnegut’s work, I was about 14 years old. The blurb on the back of the book, Breakfast of Champions if memory serves, promised “a zany romp through another of Vonnegut’s hilarious fantasies” or something like that. It was, to my young mind, a total gyp. “Zany”? All the characters were miserable and unhappy. Misfortune befell them at every turn. I didn’t get it.
A few years later, I picked up the book again. This time I couldn’t stop laughing at poor, insane Dwayne Hoover, and I was hooked for good. I would be difficult for me to say exactly which Vonnegut book was my favorite: Slaughterhouse Five is of course his monumental achievement, but then you have the incomparable genius of Slapstick in which telepathic neanderthal twins come up with a plan to eradicate loneliness
I only read Cat’s Cradle once, Player Piano only twice.
‘When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is ‘So it goes’.”
That’s from Slaughterhouse Five. So it goes.
And a great farewell from Vonnegut himself. Flown the coop. Poo tee weet.
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