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Crazyness	Customer Rating:
The book jumps all over the place in a captivating way. I wouldn't necessarily call it SF though.

The Why of Tralfalmadore

Customer Rating:

Like a lot of people who love this book, I first read Slaughterhouse Five when I was a teenager. I was young, unsuspecting, and worse yet, innocent. Many years have now gone by. But unlike Billy Pilgrim, I did not need prompting from a flying saucer to become unstuck in time. I did it with my own free will. By itself, the feat was easy. All I had to do was dig out my old pocket size copy of the novel. It has chew marks in the upper left corner, left by a beloved dog. He's long gone, too. Tralfalmadorean years. Earthling years. So it goes. Time does have a strange effect on someone rereading Slaughterhouse Five. This isn't nostalgia so much as a renewed conviction of that book's contribution to literary culture. After all, it introduced the Planet Tralfalmadore. What's lovely about the creatures who live there is that nothing much bothers them--not bombs, not hunger, not crowds, and least of all, history--although Billy Pilgrim is plagued by them all. That's because unlike Pilgrim (an Earthling), the Tralfalmadoreans don't believe in free will. They don't even believe in Time. They claim it's all in our minds. To help us understand this, they compare Time to bugs trapped in amber. At any given point, "here we are, ...trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why." Upon getting sucked into the Tralfalmadoreans' flying saucer, Billy Pilgrim is compelled to relinquish his Earthling traits of free will and time stuckness. This is a mixed blessing mainly because he gets to relive the horrors of a prisoner of war train in Germany, and subsequently, the carpet bombing of Dresden. From billions of possible Earthlings, Billy Pilgrim was selected for no explicable reason by Tralfalmadoreans who don't need reasons. In fact, they are deeply perplexed at the Earthling compulsion to explain things. For example, I like to figure out why I like this writer or that one--then write about it. I'm getting better, though. I'm learning from the Tralfalmadoreans to say, "I just do." Ironically, I'm still tempted to explain, at the very least, why I love this particular writer, Kurt Vonnegut--the best Tralfalmadorean translator we have. It's his gift for irreverence, second only to his talent for inventing absurd names. Take the porn star, Montana Wildhack. There's no improving on that. Montana, by the way, was abducted by Tralfalmadoreans. In captivity she was kept in a zoo and mated to the most hapless Earthling her captors could find--Billy Pilgrim. So it goes. Vonnegut joked that he didn't know if people read his books after high school. With that in mind, trying to get re-acquainted with Slaughterhouse Five can bring up a vague feeling of dread. I didn't think I'd be able to enjoy the book as I did when I was nineteen, assuming the inbetween years have left me as jaded as Earthling years do. Back then, Slaughterhouse Five had been endearing (buffoonish, but endearing). But other than the funny parts, what I remembered most were the parts that made me cry. Goofery aside, there are profound moments in this book. They tend to involve violence. In the German prison camp, a guard takes offense at a remark uttered by one of the American soldiers--and roughs him up. The prisoner is stunned, having intended no harm by what he said. Likely, though, it implied self-pity. Rising from the ground with two teeth missing, the boy asks, "Why me?" Shoving him back into the prisoner ranks, the guard replies, "Vy you? Vy anybody?" Along with the raging humanity, Vonnegut offers self-mockery to spare. A bit turns up in the fictitious, embittered science fiction writer, Kilgore Trout. By happy coincidence, Trout lives in the same home town as Billy Pilgrim--one of his most avid fans. The problem is that the literary hero is a hack. "His prose was frightful. Only his ideas were good." So it goes. Slaughterhouse Five is still best read with a dose of innocence. It is innocence, after all, that inspires a nineteen-year-old to sign personal letters, "Yours Truly, From Tralfalmadore." I haven't done that in years (more evidence that I truly am jaded). This is, of course, a time thing. All I know is that quite a lot's gone down in the amber since Dresden, enough accumulated calamity to leave even the Tralfalmadoreans in awe--if they believe in calamity, that is. It just so happens they don't. For Tralfalmadoreans, everything just is. But there's a warp and I'm back on Earth again. More hours have gone by, which bestows on me the privilege of reporting "I done it" (a phrase I will forever connect with Kurt, see his short story, "Great Day" in Armageddon In Retrospect). I've reread Slaughterhouse Five and still manage to laugh. Better yet, the big sleep of adulthood has not altered Tralfalmadorean love as much as I thought it would have. I appreciate (and need) the wisdom of those creatures as much as ever. It might be faith, denial, or blindness. Some say there's not much difference. I have a deeper suspicion. It's the Tralfalmadorean spell. Time passes, and doesn't. The glob of amber is real.

A great book

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This is a great book and an interesting insight into Kurt's world. The long awaited Dresden Novel that he claimed to be working on for so many years. I didn't find it funny, but sobering. There are many many great quotes to be taken from it and I'm sure they have been taken many times. It is worth reading for it's history alone, but deeper still there are tidbits of meaning and reality for the reader. The ending is a bit different than I would have expected, but I really enjoyed it, and consumed it in less than a day ( as I did also, with Mother Night). It is sobering and somber, but a great book, either way. It deserves it ranking with the top 100 novels of all time, and should be allowed in High Schools as required reading with or without the cussing. I am happy to have added it to my collection. But sad that there will not be more books like it.

Essential Vonnegut, still relevant today...

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I don't care who you are, you absolutely need to read this book. It's justly considered a classic. The thing about it is that it isn't really a "humor book" like some of Vonnegut's other, justly famous works (Cat's Cradle, Breakfast of Champions, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater). Parts of it are funny - I especially like the segments with the bitter Kilgore Trout, a sci-fi author reputed to be one of the worst ever - but humor isn't the focus of this book. Rather, it focuses on creativity and a solid message. Most if not all of Kurt's work is topical to some extent, but here his message comes to the fore. Vonnegut's view of time here is fascinating. Rather than present it as a straight line, as most other authors do, he explores its more abstract natures. To him, time is not a line, but a complex network of points that anybody at any time can travel arbitrarily amongst. This is prime creativity. Some of the most memorable segments of the book involve hapless hero Billy Pilgrim becoming "unstuck in time." The first time he describes it, he takes a beautiful, "poetic-prose" approach. He floats freely through ideas, ideas that intentionally don't connect but are still beautifully written. Billy actually experiences both his birth and his death over the course of the book. But here is the REAL reason why you need to read Slaughterhouse-Five. It's very much an anti-war book, and the central message it communicates is that there are no heroes in war. The war Vonnegut focuses on is World War II, specifically the Allies' firebombing of Dredsen, Germany, an event that killed more people than Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It's clear that Vonnegut holds Nazi Germany in the utmost of contempt. But he also makes the claim that the Allies were not flawless, wonderful supermen. It's obvious that he believes in their ideals, but he also argues that they could be just as bad as their enemies. After all, countless German civilians were killed during the Dredsen firebomings, and I'm going to guess most of them had nothing to do with the Axis powers. In today's world, in today's wars, things aren't so black-and-white, and I think our President desperately needs a reminder of that. This conviction of his that America is the heroic cowboy, shooting down them no-good varmints with a gun in every holster, then mounting his horse and riding off into the sunset, is simply delusional. Don't get me wrong, I have as much if not more hatred for the terrorists our soon-to-be-ex-President (hopefully to be replaced by Barack Obama, but that's irrelevant) is so staunchly opposed to. They certainly are psychopaths, and the world would be a better place without them. But I can at least see where they're coming from. After all, hasn't America stolen their culture with its obsession with a globalist economy? There are no clear-cut heroes or villains in this war. Both sides have understandable motives, and while I admittedly side with the U.S. on this matter (though the Iraq War is at least as unnecessary as the Vietnam War, and has arguably done more damage to our country's reputation), the terrorists do have a point, I suppose. And that's why you need to read this book. Because war isn't as simple and clear-cut as certain presidents would like to believe it is. This is a fine example of preaching to the choir, since I'm a pacifist (except in extreme cases, like World War II), but I simply love this book on many, many levels. Vonnegut's masterpiece. If you wanted proof that he was an author of real literary merit and not just some weirdo - though if that's the case, you can't be my friend - this is a sure bet.

Complex and Compelling

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Vonnegut's novel is about life, thought process, and death set against the author's life experiences in Dresden during WWII and his fictional character, Billy, who we see through memories and partial linear plot line. In my opinion, the story, however; very important, is not the point of this novel. Vonnegut used the novel as a vehicle to show us the purpose of being human which is life, thought process, and death. In my opinion, this is why the novel is not written in the traditional way: beginning, middle, climax, end. Vonnegut shows us through the vehicle of a novel, how the brain operates and how society operates which are connected unconsciously and consciously. Vonnegut's novel should be read by everyone.