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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Who is Kurt Vonnegut?

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16:27 / 28.11.02

Yeah, I was the ass who asked "Who is Philip K. Dick?" but I've grown since.

Now the question is "Who is Kurt Vonnegut?" I was supposed to read Slaughterhouse-5 when I was in high school but I was ignorant and rebellious and I didn't read anything except for a Room With A View (laugh it up, but I was forced!) So what's his writing like? What are good novels to get into first? Enlighten me.

Tuna Ghost: Pratt knot hero

18:05 / 28.11.02

Kurt Vonnegut is one of my favorite authors. It shocks me that you've never heard anything about him before.

My favorite Vonnegut book has to be Cat's Cradle. There's an interesting story behind that book and Vonnegut's anthropology degree from Cornell, but I'm positive I've told it here more than once.

Also great is Timequake. The first time I read it, I wasn't impressed. But it gets better every time you read it. The Universe, tired of constantly expanding, decides to not just stop but to contract itself as well. So everything and everyone goes back in time ten years, and then the Universe gets fed up with contracting and goes back to expanding. Leaving everyone to re-live the previous ten years all over again, making all the same mistakes.

Here, this fella says it well:

Vonnegut's vision of the fantastic in daily life surely must have been influenced by some of the extraordinary events that occurred while he was still a young man, such as the suicide of his mother on Mother's Day 1942 while he was home on leave; his surviving as a prisoner of war the Allied firebombing that destroyed Dresden (which, by the way, is what Slaughterhouse-5 is about); the death of his sister Alice from cancer within hours of her husband's death in a train crash. His fiction struggles to cope with a world of tragi-comic disparities, a universe that defies causality, whose absurdity lends the fantastic equal plausibility with the mundane.

18:18 / 28.11.02

I reccomend reading them in order, so you can follow the mentions and later participation of the character of Kilgore Trout in the books.

Slapstick is very good, and very very odd.

Mother Night is another great one, about an American/German acting as a propaganda radio host for Germany during the war.

Scrambled Password Bogus Email

18:51 / 28.11.02

Breakfast of Champions is without doubt my favourite book ever.

I have lots of favourites, but this one is the grandaddy of them all. Must read.

11:30 / 29.11.02

[Quick bitch] No Topic Abstract [/Qb]

Kurt Vonnegut is (Western) sf's dark master of savagely funny polemics against the human race. Kurt Vonnegut doesn't like you. Or himself. Or anyone else. Which makes his writing fair, if somewhat black.

If you don't want to (or can't face) reading his entire back catalogue in order (for which I wouldn't blame you - there's a lot of it) I recommend his two most famous books (both previously mentioned): Slaughterhouse 5 and Breakfast of Champions.

I probably can't tell you any more about Slaughterhouse 5 than you've already heard, but Breakfast of Champions is fucking superb. It's quintessential Vonnegut; he lays out simple observations of the world around him (often with his own hand-drawn illustrations) as if seeing them for the first time, as if he were a visiting alien or a born-again baby, and the effect is tremendously powerful. It mixes fact and whimsy, time lines and realities and the division between the author and his fiction with a predatory glee. It was written by Vonnegut when he'd just turned fifty and it pretty much (metaphorically) catalogues his thought processes as he (actually) decides whether or not to kill himself. Read it.

11:33 / 29.11.02

Vonnegut is quite simply my favourite writer ever. I read just about all of his books within one 12 month period quite a long time ago (relatively speaking).

the essentials:

Cat's Cradle
Sirens of Titan
Mother Night
God Bless You Mr. Rosewater
Breakfast of Champions
Slaughterhouse 5
Galapagos
Hocus Pocus
Timequake

I won't bother trying to write clever things about what Vonnegut does and why he's so good etc. - just get 'em all and read them right now, basically, you won't regret it.

The Natural Way

12:15 / 29.11.02

Indeed.

13:59 / 29.11.02

Ephemerat:
"Kurt Vonnegut is (Western) sf's dark master of savagely funny polemics against the human race. Kurt Vonnegut doesn't like you. Or himself. Or anyone else. Which makes his writing fair, if somewhat black"

That's weird, I've never had him pegged as being so harsh. He's always come across to me as being more disappointed by and weary of Humanity (or rather, the awful, dumb things we do) than angry at it. Does anyone else feel that? I don't see him as a straight-forward cynic or misanthrope, enjoying their dislike of the species (I've probably misread you and that's not what you're saying anyway, but I think it's suggested by "predatory glee") . I have to admit I haven't read any Vonnegut for a while, I'll have to take another look.

yawn - thing's buddy

15:29 / 29.11.02

there's a bit in Slaughterhouse where Vonnegut explains an alien's perception of spacetime and it's basically the same vision as Morrison's timeworm.

Cept he does it in about 100 words.

15:57 / 29.11.02

Now you've gotten me all excited... So what's his first book? If I'm going to attempt to read everything from the begining, where should I start? Looks like 2003 is going to be a Vonnegut year.

17:39 / 29.11.02

Weird. I'm just rereading Cats Cradle now. Brilliant book, maybe my favorite Vonnegut. I wanted to post about the books religion Bokononism.

Karass - An unknown team that does Gods will.
Kan-Kan - The instrument which bring you to your Karass.
Wampeter - The pivot of the Karass. All members swirl around its chaotic, spiritual center. It can be anything.
ect.

Oh, a sleeping drunkard,
Up in Central Park
And a lion hunter
In the jungle dark,
And a Chinese dentist
And a British Queen-
All fit together
In the same machine.
Nice,nice,very nice;
Nice, nice, very nice;
Nice, nice, very nice;
So many different people
In the same device.

Very slick.

14:09 / 30.11.02

The easiest, most fun way to get into Vonnegut is to read Breakfast of Champions.

I first read it whilst suffering a horrible bout of flu. No doubt this added to the impact, with my mind feverishly spinning off through time and space via the God's-eye-view descriptions and diagrams. I remember almost crying at some points...

It's the perfect book if you're not much of a reader or have got out of the habit of reading. It seems so simple and direct, no fancy words or long winded passages - just clear, enlightening objectivity. A nice little mind-expanding blast - keep it on standby for when you've no energy and daily life is clogging up your brain.

By the way, Bruce Willis has made it into a film. Anyone seen it? I haven't, but it definitely sounds like a candidate for discussion in the Unfilmable Book thread.

I'd recommend scouring your local charity shops for his stuff. I picked up my collection for the price of one new paperback.

14:10 / 30.11.02

That's weird, I've never had him pegged as being so harsh. He's always come across to me as being more disappointed by and weary of Humanity (or rather, the awful, dumb things we do) than angry at it.

Yeah. I don't think Vonnegut's work is at all misanthropic (well..maybe a little bit, but not violently so). The crux of his worldview really is somewhere between the constant defence of liberal humanism and freedom, and the constant disappointment in the ugly things humanity chooses to do..

Scrambled Password Bogus Email

15:08 / 30.11.02

PLease tell me that you're joking!

Bruce Willis & Breakfast of Champions?

WTF?

If David Cronenberg and Peter Weller couldn't pull off Naked Lunch, what kind of spectacle will this be?

Must seek it out.

16:58 / 30.11.02

I have seen the film. I haven't read the book.

I loved the film. Mainly because it DOES, in a peculiar way, look like Vonnegut on film, because it's so entirely fucked-up. Bruce Willis is the car salesman, Nick Nolte his cross-dressing sidekick, and Albert Finney is a marvellously bitter Kilgore Trout. It's very, very silly. No-one else I saw it with liked it, but I kind-of knew what to expect from other Vonnegut. It's worth seeing. I think, anyhow. It does have the most peculiar cast (imdb entry), and is wonderful for it.

17:50 / 30.11.02

I have also seen the Breakfast of Champions movie, and it was funny, and fast paced and all those things, but I just couldn't enjoy it. They changed things that didn't need to be changed, and took out my favorite character, the narrator. And the whole time I was watching it I just couldn't shake the feeling that the movie should have never been made. The book was too damn good, and it's only good as a book.

20:02 / 30.11.02

Vonnegut always seemed weary of humanity, but it seems like he still has hope in it. In the introduction to one of his books (I can't remember which, maybe Hocus Pocus?) he says that he got a letter in the mail from an admirer who in one sentence summarised everything he ever meant to say. If he just wrote this, he could have skipped the 20-odd books:

"Love may fail, but courtesy will prevail."

There's a movie of Mother Night with Nick Nolte too. It isn't as good as the book of course, but Vonnegut is in it near the end. (Shot of people walking down a sidewalk past Nolte, he's one of the people)

Tuna Ghost: Pratt knot hero

15:40 / 02.12.02

there's a bit in Slaughterhouse where Vonnegut explains an alien's perception of spacetime and it's basically the same vision as Morrison's timeworm.

Cept he does it in about 100 words.

Ha! I had forgotten all about that. Another fun idea, from Sirens of Titan, is the guy who is only around when matter (such as a planet, or a planet's moon, hence the title. Titan is a moon of Saturn, I believe, or maybe Jupiter, but I'm sure you all knew that) intersects the energy transmission he and his dog have accidently turned into/become a part of. And that scene where he confronts his alien friend about the real purpose behind human civilization is great.

He's got some good short stories as well. Check out Canary in a Cat House.

17:56 / 02.12.02

Did anyone else think that the thingummy from Sirens Of Titan was oddly similar to Barbelith? You know, the 'Chrono-synclastic infundibulum'. That was the place where everything exists together, yeah?

Nelson Evergreen

23:41 / 02.12.02

Where everyone is right, and everyone realises that everyone else is also right. Right? Something like that. Very 'Invisibles' indeed. I just finished that book and loved every page of it. Nobody does daft-profound-funny-sad-wise like Vonnegut.

at the scarwash

00:55 / 03.12.02

I cry dissent! Don't fall for it! Or do, whatever. Kurt Vonnegut has one authorial voice, weary, snide wisecrackery shoveling tiredly through heaps of tired existential cliche. And his prose is cute. Very very cute. His characters are flimsy, papery things, and his ideas not worth their imprinting on the above-mentioned.

Okay, Bluebeard is a touching book (but flawed). Slaughterhouse Five is a decent war novel. The whole unstuck-in-time thing is kind of silly, though.

He's like a dreary Tom Robbins.

I really feel kind of silly posting this unfocused rant, but for the sake of literature in the English language, someone must stop this man.

at the scarwash

00:57 / 03.12.02

And to give better reasons for why I think that one should handle KV with lead-lined gloves in a clean room, I'd have to read him again. Uh-uh. No way.

08:31 / 03.12.02

testpattern:
"And his prose is cute. Very very cute"

How do you mean? I'm not sure I understand what 'cute' means in this context.

13:21 / 03.12.02

Vonnegut's faux-naive prose style can get tiresome after awhile. When he wants to press a point he sounds like he's patiently explaining to a child. It's a little patronizing, but it's a little better than Harlan Ellison's occasional "why can't you selfish bastards understand!?" voice that mars *his* otherwise excellent work.

I recommend Welcome to the Monkey House and other short stories.

Cat's Cradle was excellent. Though the scientific MacGuffin in it is impossible, it would make a decent movie and metaphor for genetic meddling.
Mother Night was his most adult book, I thought. Maybe the satire and irony were too dark to be filtered via an artificial voice.
Player Piano is a bleak story of the grubby future of automation resulting in "structural" mass unemployment and neglect of those consigned to the ash-heap of economic history.
The Sirens of Titan is basically "Candide" and a shaggy dog story, but it's worth sticking around for the punchline.
Director Robert Altman should have filmed Breakfast of Champions, because it reminds me a lot of "Nashville," structurally anyway.

Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, in their "Inferno," consign him to the circle of the incurably vain, sticking him in a tomb topped by a neon sign flashing "SO IT GOES." But Pournelle was a monarchist who later whored for rightwing "cyber" politician Newt Gingrich in the '90s.

Here is my drawing of an asshole --> *

No fucking cat and no fucking cradle.

13:59 / 03.12.02

Loved him, weariness, cuteness and all.

Had breakfast with him once. Generous man.

Haven't read Timequake, but all the others, yes. And somewhere, I have videotapes of the Canadian "Welcome to the Monkey House" TV show he introduced, episodes based on his short stories.
Cheesy, but fun.

14:51 / 03.12.02

Timequake's essential, really.

I do hope Vonnegut will write some more books, but if he doesn't it makes an absolutely perfect conclusion to his career..

Actually, the only Vonnegut tome that's ever disappointed me is the recent collection of his earliest short stories .. Something-or-other Snuff Box?
He basically admits in the introduction that the stories were written extremely quickly with the sole intention of being sold to magazines, and as such they're extremely bland and deliberately written so as not to offend or alienate a middleaged middleclass 1950s audience. He slips the odd good idea in (mostly in the form of liberally-inclined morality tales), but generally speaking it's hack work, and as such extremely generic and dull. Shouldn't really have been re-published..

15:28 / 03.12.02

Vonnegut depresses the hell out of me. I don't see what's so cynical and misanthropic about 'kindness is the only virtue that matters' or however it went. Hocus Pocus belongs on our next transmission to Alpha Centauri as one of the definitive books of modern life; Galapogos, as one of the most depressing.

15:49 / 03.12.02

Cat's Cradle will always be one of most favorite novels of all time. And reading all of Vonnegut's novels will always be some of my happiest memories, but man, I can't read him anymore. Especially the Kilgore Trout stuff. You have to read that when you're young, high school, college or soon after. I don't mean this as a slam at all. I would be perfectly happy to write books that so successfully speak to the young, but which have little to say to the old.

I saw KV once at a musical version of Cat's Cradle (yes, every bit as bad as it sounds). They set it to calypso music and tried to make it uplifting (yes, someone should be murdered for trying). Kurt walked out about a third of the way through it, showed up for the last ten minutes, then skipped the party afterwards. It was painful to see one of my idols in such agony....

16:02 / 03.12.02

Love Vonnegut although i can understand why some people cant stand him (gimmicky and self-indulgent are two of the most popular critisisms).First read Breakfast FC during a bout of food poisoning in Tunisia. Actually i think i read it 3 times in a week and it's still my favourite. Sirens,SlaughterHouse5 and CatsCradle are also essential.

Saw half the Breakfast for Champions film and while it wasn't as horrifically bad as i was expecting i just found it really boring. The films of Mother Night and Slaughterhouse 5 on the other hand i think are great...

Tuna Ghost: Pratt knot hero

14:32 / 11.12.02

Had breakfast with him once. Generous man.

You lucky bastard! If I had literary heros this man would be one of them. What were his eating habits like? If you say slovenly, I don't know what I'll do. Inquiring minds want to know...

Seriously, though, Timequake is an essential. It's so personal. Seven times more so than any of his other books that I've read. After you finish reading it for the first time, leave it alone for a few months and then read it again. Repeat as many times as neccessary, it only gets better.

Actually, the only Vonnegut tome that's ever disappointed me is the recent collection of his earliest short stories .. Something-or-other Snuff Box?

Bagumbo Snuff Box, I belive. That disapointed me as well. But hey, everyone strikes out once in a while.

Mmmmmm....cat's cradle. My first Vonnegut book.

"I was under the impression that she had a very happy marriage."
Newt spread his hands about six inches apart. "See the cat? See the cradle?"

04:09 / 02.04.03

My gf just lent me "Wampeters, Foma, and Granfaloons (opinions)", and I've been loving it. Short stories, unpublished works, experiments in biography and war journalism. I was going to open a new thread to reccommend it, but Barbelith gets around to everything before it occurs to me. So, yeah, find it at the library. Som of the stuff therein is pretty topical today, if you just change some names.

recent interview: We have been conquered by psychopathic personalities who are attractive.

vonnegutWeb
The life and Times of kilgore Trout

11:49 / 02.04.03

He has apparently discovered how to stop aging. He's interviewed for '1 Giant Leap' (check it out)- you may have seen the posters all over London with his quote "Music for me is proof of the existence of God". He is 81 years old and is standing on one leg with his other leg pointing straight up, his foot next to his head, like vertical splits, talking about the nature of televised society and the point of existence. I would just be saying 'ow' and writhing on the floor. He also says he has cracked the secret of time "If I knew then what I know now I wouldn't have these" (points to wrinkles).
You've gotta admit he's got *something*.

22:46 / 03.04.03

Happy Birthday, Wanda June
It's a play. It ran for 142 performances from October, 1970 to March, 1971, with a lot of glitches and rewrites over the duration. It's brilliant, it's a quick read, it's got a weird Homer's Odyssey meets the 70s thing. Maybe not the best piece to start Vonnegut on, but definitely worth reading for the inititated.

17:47 / 08.04.03

I like what I've read of Kurt V's stuff. Good fun (Timequake), likable even when it's got a solid point at its centre (Slaughterhouse 5) , and thoughtful, as if he was crafting it carefully - his essay on writing in Palm Sunday suggests that to indeed be the case.

Starting with Slaughterhouse 5 might be an idea if you're not sure, it's so short you can chug through it.

And anyway, you have to admire the way the man delivered his first line in 'Back to School', that film with Rodney Dangerfield.
Oh.
I'll get me coat.

flufeemunk effluvia

20:12 / 27.04.04

*Bumping this topic after starting another thread on Vonnegut in a wild frenzy and feeling like a dolt shortly thereafter*

Two things in his work I love so very very much. One is the freindly and polite insanity of his characters and the other is the stories of Kilgore Trout. I would love to see Vonnegut or anyone write a book of short stories under the pseudonym of Kilgore Trout in the style found in Vonnegut's books.

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