Slaughterhouse-five
Posted by SgtPepper | Posted in books | Posted on Wednesday, March 18, 2009
[What kind of blog are we if we only speak of ourselves and our stories? (a real one) But today I don't want to make it about me. We speak of literature but we never comment deeply about any books. So here, I make the first step, without the promise I'll be a better reviewer than I am a short-story-ist (novel makers are called novelists, why not?) and that describes the next as poor already]
Slaughterhouse-five by Kurt Vonnegut is a book about war, it is a book about dentistry, about aliens, how absurd the time is, and about of death, lots of death. The story of Billy Piligrim, and how being alomst a child, an unprepared weakling, he is sent to war (WWII) and how he manages to live trough, and of course, life after war.
The magic of it is in the way the metanarrator can go from time to time, use a literary figure, and a hundred pages later bring it back with elegant fluency and amusing style. The many nonsense put into a way that is almost believeable, and the lost of track of were was reality left, along with hard hits of crude truth.
In my opinion it is a master piece by the way it is written, but by the story as well, and the strong anti-war message sent by this book. It doesn't only amuse with the writing, it has actual meaning and deep and simple philosophical views. It is not another World War II hero warrior tale, it is the story of "The children's crusade, a duty dance with death".
"He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going yo have to act in next."
This is what the philosophical part of this master piece is about, how absurd time is, being just a dimension to measyre a life, which will end up being memories tangled in an old person's mind.
It is a most read in the humble opinion of this penguin, and so I say Poo-tee-weet
By I'm the penguin
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