Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Collection
The Big Trip Up Yonder, 2BR02B
Ratings1
Average rating4
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Newsweek/The Daily Beast • The Huffington Post • Kansas City Star • Time Out New York • Kirkus Reviews This extraordinary collection of personal correspondence has all the hallmarks of Kurt Vonnegut’s fiction. Written over a sixty-year period, these letters, the vast majority of them never before published, are funny, moving, and full of the same uncanny wisdom that has endeared his work to readers worldwide. Included in this comprehensive volume: the letter a twenty-two-year-old Vonnegut wrote home immediately upon being freed from a German POW camp, recounting the ghastly firebombing of Dresden that would be the subject of his masterpiece Slaughterhouse-Five; wry dispatches from Vonnegut’s years as a struggling writer slowly finding an audience and then dealing with sudden international fame in middle age; righteously angry letters of protest to local school boards that tried to ban his work; intimate remembrances penned to high school classmates, fellow veterans, friends, and family; and letters of commiseration and encouragement to such contemporaries as Gail Godwin, Günter Grass, and Bernard Malamud. Vonnegut’s unmediated observations on science, art, and commerce prove to be just as inventive as any found in his novels—from a crackpot scheme for manufacturing “atomic” bow ties to a tongue-in-cheek proposal that publishers be allowed to trade authors like baseball players. (“Knopf, for example, might give John Updike’s contract to Simon and Schuster, and receive Joan Didion’s contract in return.”) Taken together, these letters add considerable depth to our understanding of this one-of-a-kind literary icon, in both his public and private lives. Each letter brims with the mordant humor and openhearted humanism upon which he built his legend. And virtually every page contains a quotable nugget that will make its way into the permanent Vonnegut lexicon. • On a job he had as a young man: “Hell is running an elevator throughout eternity in a building with only six floors.” • To a relative who calls him a “great literary figure”: “I am an American fad—of a slightly higher order than the hula hoop.” • To his daughter Nanny: “Most letters from a parent contain a parent’s own lost dreams disguised as good advice.” • To Norman Mailer: “I am cuter than you are.” Sometimes biting and ironical, sometimes achingly sweet, and always alive with the unique point of view that made him the true cultural heir to Mark Twain, these letters comprise the autobiography Kurt Vonnegut never wrote. Praise for Kurt Vonnegut: Letters “Splendidly assembled . . . familiar, funny, cranky . . . chronicling [Vonnegut’s] life in real time.”—Kurt Andersen, The New York Times Book Review “[This collection is] by turns hilarious, heartbreaking and mundane. . . . Vonnegut himself is a near-perfect example of the same flawed, wonderful humanity that he loved and despaired over his entire life.”—NPR “Congenial, whimsical and often insightful missives . . . one of [Vonnegut’s] very best.”—Newsday “These letters display all the hallmarks of Vonnegut’s fiction—smart, hilarious and heartbreaking.”—The New York Times Book Review
Reviews
Popular Reviews
Reviews with the most likes.
Originally posted at FanLit.
http://www.fantasyliterature.com/reviews/kurt-vonnegut-jr-collection-the-big-trip-up-yonder-2br02b/
Brilliance Audio is now producing some science fiction story collections on audio, and recently they sent me a few of them to review. The first one that caught my eye was this one by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. It contains two related stories: ???The Big Trip Up Yonder??? narrated by Emmett Casey and ???2BR02B??? narrated by Kevin Killavey. I recognized both as stories that were produced on audio by Jincin Recordings and have been available at Audible.com for a couple of years. In case you didn???t know (and in case you???re interested), Brilliance Audio has a relationship with Audible and often produces CD versions of Audible titles a couple of years after the original release. In fact, it occasionally happens that Brilliance Audio sends me a review copy of a book I???ve already read at Audible.
These two Vonnegut stories happen to be on my wishlist at Audible, so I was happy to receive and review them. This particular collection is only 45 minutes long, so it was the perfect length for my daily commute. (By the way, the package says in one place that the CD is 2 hours long and in another place that it???s 1 hour and 45 minutes ??? this is wrong. It???s 45 minutes. Somebody on their staff made a big mistake!)
Anyway, I loved the stories. ???The Big Trip Up Yonder??? (25 minutes, originally published in 1954 in Galaxy Science Fiction) is about a future (2158 A.D.) America in which aging has been stopped, the earth is overpopulated, and families are forced to live together in small apartments, eating seaweed and sawdust. Nothing new here for those who read science fiction, but Kurt Vonnegut???s take on it is hilarious as he details the life of one family who can???t wait for its patriarch to die and who might even be willing to help him along. There???s a terrific twist at the end.
???2BR02B??? (19 minutes, pronounced ???To be or naught to be,??? originally published in 1962 in Worlds of If) is also set in an over-crowded world where life is cheap. The title, 2BR02B, is the phone number of the Municipal Gas Chambers of the Federal Bureau of Termination where people can make an appointment when they???re ready to die. The story takes place in a hospital waiting room where a man waits for his wife to deliver a baby. When he finds out that she has delivered triplets, he???s got a real problem. If he wants his babies to survive, he has to find three people who will volunteer to be terminated.
???The Big Trip Up Yonder??? and ???2BR02B??? feature Kurt Vonnegut???s absurd sense of black humor. This is great entertainment, but these stories also vividly point out the problems we???ll have if we ever conquer the aging process, something that seems so much more possible today than it did when Kurt Vonnegut wrote these stories. I enjoyed both Emmett Casey???s and Kevin Killavey???s narration.
OK, here???s where I feel a little guilty. Brilliance Audio was nice to send me this collection and I???m going to link it in this review so if you click on that pretty cover up there you???ll be taken to Amazon where you can purchase it for $9.99 and FanLit will get a 6% referral fee, which is nice. But, I???m compelled to also let you know that you can purchase the downloadable version of ???The Big Trip Up Yonder??? at Audible.com for 95?? ($2.43 if you???re not a member) and ???2BR02B??? for $1.95 ($3.47 for non-members). Sorry, Brilliance Audio, but as good as these stories are, 45 minutes for $10 just isn???t a good deal. These stories are, however, definitely worth the cost for members at Audible.
