Slaughterhouse-Five

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Billy Pilgrim, a traumatized American POW, becomes unstuck in time after he is abducted by aliens. Under their watchful gaze, he must relive his life over and over again, coming at last to some understanding of the human comedy.

Review:

I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone. I get drunk, and I drive my wife away with a breath like mustard gas and roses. And then, speaking gravely and elegantly into the telephone, I ask the telephone operators to connect me with this friend or that one, from whom I have not heard in years.

Slaughterhouse-Five is quite the beautiful book. It is also terrible and disturbing, after all it is a book about war, but that cannot change the fact that it is inherently beautiful. It's beauty struck me at odd times, sometimes a particular sentence resonated with me, sometimes a particular imagery enchanted me, and sometimes a story-telling device amazed me. What I'm trying to say is that this novel is stunning on a technical level.

I think about my education sometimes. I went to the University of Chicago for a while after the Second World War. I was a student in the Department of Anthropology. At that time, they were teaching that there was absolutely no difference between anybody. They may be teaching that still.
Another thing they taught was that nobody was ridiculous or bad or disgusting. Shortly before my father died, he said to me, "You know–you never wrote a story with a villain in it."
I told him that was one of the things I learned in college after the war.

However, as you might have been able to gather from my specific use of "technical level" instead of simply praising the entire existence of the book, while the book was able to convey its beauty effectively I felt quite disconnected from the narrative. I don't know exactly why that is (maybe it has to do with the fact that I read it in pieces instead of all at once and this is the kind of book you're supposed to read all at once, maybe it's simply not my cup of tea, maybe...) but it has affected my reading experience quite meaningfully because every time I came across one of those incidents of beauty I was both amazed at the skill portrayed by Vonnegut but also disappointed in my lack of adequate reaction to said skill and whenever the narrative did not portray its beauty I started sinking into something like dullness.

The 'dullness', I think, might be due to the topic of the novel itself. Vonnegut portrays WWII in a way that takes away all meaning of everything and, instead, renders it cruel to a point where one is not able to comprehend it. At times I felt just as lost in the narrative as Billy Pilgrim was lost in time.

Which brings me to my conclusion that I really admire this book but, sadly, cannot count myself to the group of people who are able to lose themselves in it. 

Billy is spastic in time, has no control over where he is going next, and the trips aren't necessarily fun. He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next.

Rating:

Initially I wanted to give this book 4 stars but the more I think about it I don't think it felt like more than a 3.5 out of 5 stars book to me, maybe even only 3 out of 5 stars. I'm still conflicted about my actual rating, obviously. 

Details:

Name: Slaughterhouse-Five

Deutscher Titel: Schlachthof 5

Author: Kurz Vonnegut

Publisher: Dell

Pages: 285

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