![]() The book is full too of another emergent Vonnegut trope – cartoons that break up the text: “To give an idea of the maturity of my illustrations for this book, here is my picture of an asshole,” he writes, above a generously proportioned, felt-penned asterisk. The other thing that happened was that Vonnegut leaned into the playfulness that was emerging in his writing, and the prime example of this mid-period Vonnegut – serious topics, anecdotal whimsy and eccentric characters – is Breakfast of Champions, or, Goodbye Blue Monday! (1973). It was evil deeds and lying that hurt us.” If ‘masterpiece’ means anything, it means Vonnegut’s 1963 novel Cat’s Cradle They didn’t damage us when we were young. It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely hose words really don’t damage children much. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are. “If you were to bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are not sexy, and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. Vonnegut wrote to the head of the school board, in polite but uncompromising terms. ![]() First, Vonnegut’s books began to be censored and banned – and even burned, as happened to Slaughterhouse-Five at Drake High School in North Dakota in 1973. “We are what we pretend to be,” he writes in his introduction, “so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”Īs he became a literary celebrity, and his scepticism toward the Vietnam war made him a countercultural figure, two things happened. In punchy chapters of snappy dialogue and selections from Campbell’s mailbox (“Dear Howard: I was very surprised and disappointed to hear you weren’t dead yet”), Vonnegut gives us a surprisingly bright and highly readable account of the knowing descent of a man into a world of evil. “Howard W Campbell, Jr – this is your life!” Campbell’s tragedy and sin is his failure to realise that the lies he told in his broadcasts, even though he didn’t mean them, were providing succour to real Nazis. Mother Night takes the form of the confessions of an American spy and Nazi propagandist while he awaits trial in Israel. It slipped under the radar on publication as it went straight into paperback – Vonnegut needed the money – and it took time for its greatness to be recognised. There’s a case to be made for the blackest of his black comedies, Mother Night (1961), to be considered his unsung masterpiece. Slaughterhouse-Five wasn’t Vonnegut’s first attempt to put the second world war in a novel. (So it goes.) On the publication of Slaughterhouse-Five, a journalist for this paper wrote that “Catch-22 was a splendid, savage but abstract joke compared with the irony and compassion of Mr Vonnegut’s.” Every character’s death is punctuated with the resigned – or stoical – sigh of “So it goes”, and the ironic epitaph that war-veteran Billy Pilgrim imagines for his gravestone – “Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt” – is now often seen quoted with a straight face. The balance of irony and sentimentality at which “Uncle Kurt” excelled is exemplified in the book’s two most famous lines. The novel, Vonnegut’s sixth, represents a concentration of the author’s style that means, even if it’s not the very best of his works, it’s certainly the most intensely Vonnegut-ish. Ron Leibman and Michael Sacks in the 1972 film adaptation of Slaughterhouse-Five.
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