Slaughterhouse 5

I think I went into this book not knowing what to expect. I've finished it, and I'm still not quite sure what I read. It's one of those books that makes me either think I'm too shallow to get the point, or perhaps I get the point but I'm too jaded (or emotionally guarded) to feel it. Perhaps I actually expected too much or too less than what the book was willing to give, and in some form of ironic justice I'm inexplicably disappointed that I didn't get whatever I expected.

All I know is that this book moved me in some way. I cannot say what way it was. Maybe I need to read it again. Maybe it'll come to me in an hour or a day or a week. I'm not sure I want it to, because there's something incredibly powerful there. It's a little frightening.

Like other books by Vonnegut focusing on the war, the humor in this book hits a little differently. As opposed to some of his other books which read to me like humor with bits of serious deep-cutting insight, this doesn't have the same baseline levity. It feels more like a long tragedy with bits of gallows humor paced throughout. Even the more fantastical parts of the story feel more eerie, perhaps because we know we're going to come back to the real world some day to finish living out the rest of the tragedy.

Some of this perspective no doubt comes because this is something like the fifth Vonnegut book I've read (after Galápagos, Breakfast of Champions, Player Piano, Mother Night, The Sirens of Titan) so I have certain expectations that you may not have if you're new to the author. It gave me a similar feeling to reading Mother Night (probably because they both deal with real-life tragedy of WWII), but for some reason I wasn't prepared for that.

Based on what little I had heard about the book (perhaps everybody supposing that it was required reading and I must already have read it), I was expecting something like a gritty memoire. Instead, I got a combination of post-modern framing, fantastical interludes, and humor about tragedy that feels unique to Vonnegut.

It has been 35 years since I read my first Vonnegut book: [b:Breakfast of Champions 4980 Breakfast of Champions Kurt Vonnegut https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1327934446s/4980.jpg 2859378]. I remember liking that one much more than this.