Nataliya's Reviews > Slaughterhouse-Five

“And Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.”

Listen:

When you find yourself in the middle of horror, enormity that defies rational understanding, and survive despite everything, can you ever leave that place and that time behind? Can you ever let it go, and can it ever set you free? Can you help looking back, like Lot’s wife, at the pain and destruction that are calling to you through time and distance? Can you ever?

“It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds.
And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like “Poo-tee-weet?”

“All this happened, more or less.” In 1945, at the end of brutal World War II, the Allies firebombed the German city of Dresden and almost 25,000 people died in the inferno. Kurt Vonnegut was in the city as a prisoner of war, and years later wrote his most famous book about Billy Pilgrim, an American POW in Dresden who lives through the war and survives Dresden bombing, and gets “unstuck in time”, moving between different periods of his life, seeing “his memory of the future” through the disorienting now, always now.

“Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.”

It’s a book that to me defies explanations. It’s science fiction inasmuch as there are aliens that see all the time simultaneously. It’s an anti-war book insomuch as it shows the absolute atrocity and monstrosity of mindless destruction. “So it goes,” continues the constant refrain — and yes, so it does.

And it is a book about trauma of war that stays with you no matter what else happens, because after such enormity how can life ever be the same? How can you ever come to grips with things that happened? War is absurd, and absurdity becomes reality.

“Derby described the incredible artificial weather that Earthlings sometimes create for other Earthlings when they don’t want those other Earthlings to inhabit Earth any more. Shells were bursting in the treetops with terrific bangs, he said, showering down knives and needles and razorblades. Little lumps of lead in copper jackets were crisscrossing the woods under the shellbursts, zipping along much faster than sound.”

This book combines farce and seriousness, surreal experiences and crushing reality, and is perfect example of comedy and tragedy combining into something much greater than the sum of its parts.

“Was it awful?”
“Sometimes.” A crazy thought now occurred to Billy. The truth of it startled him. It would make a good epitaph for Billy Pilgrim—and for me, too.”

Vonnegut’s language isn’t wasted in a single line here. It’s economical and spare; it says just as much with words on the page as with the words left unspoken but implied. The sentences are short, the syntax is simple, but beyond the deceiving simplicity lies the world of complex thought and feelings it evokes in the reader. And that quiet feeling of detachment punctuated with “So it goes” at the moments of death affected me more than any number of likable identifiable-with characters of other books have. After all, “There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.”

It does it to me, this book. It gets to me.

“People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore.
I’ve finished my war book now. The next one I write is going to be fun.
This one is a failure, and had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt.”

5 stars.

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Buddy read with Dennis.

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Also posted on my blog.