"To compensate a little for the treachery and weakness of my memory, so extreme that it has happened to me more than once to pick up again, as recent and unknown to me, books which I had read carefully a few years before . . . I have adopted the habit for some time now of adding at the end of each book . . . the time I finished reading it and the judgment I have derived of it as a whole, so that this may represent to me at least the sense and general idea I had conceived of the author in reading it." (Montaigne, Book II, Essay 10 (publ. 1580))

Tuesday, August 18, 2020

Slaughterhouse Five (Kurt Vonnegut, 1969)

(215 pages)

I'm glad I read this, but I don't think I "get it" in terms of what the author is trying to do.

It's a story built around the WWII Dresden fire-bombing.

But mostly tracks the adventures of Billy Pilgrim - a rather strange fellow who ends up in the war, gets captured and sent to Dresden (where he survives because confined in a reinforced slaughterhouse), gets married to a wealthy spouse, runs (or perhaps "falls into") a thriving optometry practice, travels in time, and journeys to a faraway planet.

Anti-war; lots of clever writing; absurdist style; all that's fine.

But still.
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