It’s a bit of a shame to use a star system in evaluating literature. Such a system makes perfect sense when judging kitchen appliances, electronics, or furniture—where the customer can judge the product based on how well it performs its obvious function. But the purpose of a book is not obvious. In fact, the onus lies almost entirely upon readers to figure out how a book best fits into their lives. It can be anything from filler for conversation to a roadmap to happiness, from a table-decoration to a guilty pleasure.
tt
Plus, how does one go about really judging a work of fiction? Those who have read much probably get to the point where they can confidently place a book into the totality of books they’ve experienced, and judge its worth by how it measures up within that totality. But that method relies upon the hazards of one’s autobiography—and even the most voracious reader can get through a mere fraction of the books that are out there. The hoary field of literary criticism is also there to help, offering the reflections, ideas, and frameworks of brilliant readers from the past to bounce your own opinions off. But can opinions—even extraordinarily thoughtful, erudite opinions—eventually add up to fact?
tt
The easy way out of this mess is to resign yourself totally and completely to the subjectivism of the task, and to rate a book solely on how well it pleased you. I suspect this is what many do. But this option, however elegant and straightforward, denies the potential for one to strip away one’s own opinions and to judge something based on more abstract criteria. I believe that, with hard work, this is possible, but most mere mortals aren’t up to it.
tt
To bring the matter round to this particular work, Kurt Vonnegut adds but another layer to the already thorny matter of judging literature. This is because he has established his own entirely and completely original aesthetic. As one blurb in the front of this book puts it, Vonnegut is “unimitative and inimitable.” As a result, even when I place him within my own reading experience, he occupies his own very special corner on the outskirts, and the added context hardly helps.
tt
So, to fall back on the handy old measure of enjoyability, I give Vonnegut five stars. Reading this book was a blast.
tt
First, his writing-style is excellent. The prose is so taut, so compressed, and so expressive, that it often approaches poetry.
tt
Second, his ideas are (pardon the pun) out of this world. The meaning of life, the question of human history, the existence of free will—all are grist for his mill, and the resulting bread is delectable.
tt
He demands to be read on his own terms, and the demand is irresistible. From the first sentence, you are pulled into his peculiar world, a world where nothing seems to make sense to anybody but Vonnegut, until he generously explains. Fortunately for us, Vonnegut’s explanations usually took the form of novels.

4.5 Stars

What Reading Sirens of Titan is Like: A Short Fable

You are in a room with a great puzzle maker (Vonnegut). You stand before the puzzle maker's newest creation, a ten million piece mega-puzzle. It is in a disassembled mountain of pieces laying on the floor.

"Behold!", says the puzzle maker.

You crouch down and take your time examining a piece (analogy for reading a chapter of Sirens). The artwork is beautifully drawn (analogy for well-written, which Sirens is), and depicts part of a building. Is it a small building? A large one? Is it significant, or maybe just one of many of its kind? Curious, you ask the puzzle maker. He does not seem amused.

"What does it mean? What a preposterous question. Just admire its beauty. You'll figure out what it means when the time is right."

"When will the time be right?"

"When it is..."

Frustrated, you look at another piece and see a ball of fire. You examine this piece, and several others, and return to the puzzle maker to demand some kind of meaning. He still refuses to explain, and then suddenly snaps his fingers and cries out:

"Tada!"

You look down. The puzzle is no longer a mountain of pieces on the floor, it is fully assembled. It is a masterpiece. The obscure building fragment you examined turned out to be part of a magnificent castle. The castle is under siege, and is being advanced on by thousands of armoured soldiers, some on horseback.

In the distance, soldiers fire flaming projectiles toward the castle with wooden trebuchets. You can stand back now, looking at the whole, the meaning of which has, only in the end, and quite suddenly and unceremoniously, been revealed to you. Now you can see how brilliantly all the pieces you so thoroughly and tediously examined fit into it.

This is what reading Sirens of Titan is like. A masterpiece, without question, but confusing and esoteric until very near the end, when all is revealed and where everything you've read over the previous 150+ pages finally has meaning. I've never read a book like this before, and have undecided feelings about the long and tedious parts of this book that seem totally pointless but then have meaning in the end, but overall the whole is a masterpiece and I'd highly recommend it.

Malachi Constant's quest for meaning in an absurd universe. . . .

This entertaining, thought-provoking novel chronicles a fascinating journey from familiar places like Newport, Rhode Island, Fall River, New Bedford, and West Barnstable, Massachusetts, to other worlds, including Mars, Mercury, and Titan, Saturn's largest moon.

For one thing, according to Epicurean philosophy, the gods are in a state of perfect ataraxia and mind their own business. They have no needs and, although they are omniscient and can observe all points in the space-time continuum, nor do they bother themselves much about us, insignificant human beings. Perhaps the same could be said of the Tralfamadorians in Kurt Vonnegut’s novels. In Slaughterhouse-Five, they abduct poor Billy Pilgrim to their intergalactic zoo and observe with mild interest how he breeds with a porn-star mate. So it goes.

For another thing, here too, in The Sirens of Titans, we’ll meet the creatures from Tralfamadore and see if they can or even wish to do us, humans, any good. The unfortunate Malachi Constant (the protagonist) will travel across the whole solar system, from Earth to Mars, from Mars to Mercury and from there back to Earth and on to Titan, in the periphery of Saturn and the chrono-synclastic infundibulum. Meanwhile, he will suffer all sorts of hardships and strokes of bad luck — “a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all...” (LoA, vol. 1, p. 485). Still, despite it all, he will maintain to the very end that “somebody up there likes me” (p. 313). Malachi Constant is, in many ways, like Candide in Voltaire’s short novel, a die-hard optimist who, in the end, comes back from the dead, and gains a modicum of wisdom along the way. While Candide concluded that “one must cultivate one’s own garden” (an Epicurean motto, if ever there was one), Malachi declares that “it took us that long to realize that a purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.” (p. 528)

For another thing, The Sirens of Titan was published in 1959, the same year as Philip K. Dick’s Time Out of Joint and Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. The former was already touching on the nature of reality, and the latter already preaching about America’s moral standards. In The Sirens, Vonnegut, like PKD, plays with memory manipulation and all sorts of mindfuck; like Heinlein, he touches on the topic of war and the military but doesn’t linger on it for very long.

For another thing, what Vonnegut does here, though, is lay out one of his first “mosaic of jokes”, as he liked to call his books. Indeed, The Sirens of Titan is primarily a parody of trashy pulp science fiction novels, a boisterous, chucklesome book, written in syncopated, eclectic, dense textures, high energy, tangled threads, plot twists aplenty, extended techniques and unorthodox uses of language, and finally landing on its feet at the end. In this sense, The Sirens of Titan, twenty years early, precedes and foreshadows (and, I would say, is superior to) Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Salo is a foreign emissary from a risibly-remote planet. He's travelled trillions of light years to deliver a loony-toons message.

He's a likeable little gnome.

And if you said that's a ridiculous satire on the gee-whiz Boys from NASA spending umpteen gadzilions of Taxpayers' Dollars for a (whoops) Intimately Freudian rocket ship thrusting into deep space, bearing greetings from us poor humanoids - yes, complete with kiddy-like line drawings of two healthy, well-adjusted WASPS (male and female, of course) - well, then, I guess you read ole Kurt's mind.

Well.

And what if you belong to a dirt-poor part of the populace, and don't much care for Rich Folks' Gentrification Projects for Deep Space?

Kurt Vonnegut can read your lips!

So it goes.

That and a buck fifty may buy you a nice coffee.

It drove the poor man down the path of despair, right into the Monkey House, in fact. If you think the zany situations from Welcome to the Monkey House's collection of fictional gems were made up by an average normal American male, think again.

Vonnegut was as real as they get.

Warts and Blooming All.

Back in the early sixties, there was a little song - I think Bobby Goldsboro sang it - about a Funny Little Clown:

See the funny little clown -
I'm laughing on the outside
But I'm crying on the inside...

Don't let anyone tell you Kurt Vonnegut wasn't that clown -

For though his satire may SCALD -

His Endless Compassion could HEAL this poor old world, when it sees dear old Salo got it right.

So so long, Space-X!!

From Earth (earthly desires) to Mars (mid-life crisis) to Mercury (looking inward) to Titan (enlightenment), ‘The Sirens of Titan’ is laced with Vonnegut’s view of the human condition.


['Harmoniums' which live deep underground] have weak powers of telepathy. The messages they are capable of transmitting and receiving are almost as monotonous as the song of Mercury. They have only two possible messages…The first is, “Here I am, here I am, here I am.” The second is, “So glad you are, so glad you are, so glad you are.”

---

“The ship was being controlled skillfully by its pilot-navigator. The equipment was talking nervously to itself—cycling, whirring, clicking, buzzing. It was sensing and avoiding hazards to the sides, seeking an ideal landing place below.
The designers of the pilot-navigator had purposely obsessed the equipment with one idea—and that idea was to seek shelter for the precious troops and materiel it was supposed to be carrying…Twenty minutes later, the pilot-navigator was still talking to itself—finding as much to talk about as ever.”

The existential pendulum swings from inner harmony to a paranoid scanning of the environment. One produces agreement and gratitude, the other produces self-chatter and fear.


On personal growth: “almost everything I know for sure has come from fighting the pain from my antenna.”


On how to read: “He accepted it all hungrily, uncritically. And, in accepting it, Unk gained an understanding of life that was identical with the writer’s understanding of life. Unk wolfed down a philosophy.”


On life’s value: “It was in the nature of truly effective good-luck pieces that human beings never really owned them. They simply took care of them, had the benefit of them, until the real owners, the superior owners, came along.”


On our purpose: “It took us that long to realize that a purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”

Să zicem: o satiră a condiției umane.

Senzația rămîne permanent că Vonnegut mobilizează un bombardier nuclear plus o divizie de tancuri în scopul de a captura un iepure șchiop. Înzestrările lui Vonnegut sînt la apogeu (ironie, inventivitate, voie bună etc., era tînăr, avea 37 de ani), dar romanul nu poate fi mai mult decît o glumă pe seama cititorilor naivi. Intriga amuză și cam atît. Fiind la rîndu-mi extrem de naiv, nu pot scăpa de senzația asta (a glumei).

Repet, nu este un SF propriu-zis, este o parodie. Deși criticii pretind că romanul în cauză propune (și) o meditație despre liberul arbitru și fatalitate, n-am găsit nici o pagină care să corespundă caracterizării.

„Ако въпросите не ти говорят нищо, такива ще бъдат и отговорите.“


„Сирените от Титан“ е забележителен роман! Кърт Вонегът съчетава по своя неповторим начин различни жанрове, поставяйки важни житейски въпроси, над които си струва читателите да се замислят.

Историята несъмнено е сатирична, тъй като авторът чудесно осмива отрицателните черти на човечеството, подобно на Станислав Лем в „Звездни дневници“. Освен това, усетих в нея силни антиутопични елементи, но четенето ми беше страшно приятно, заради превъзходното чувство за хумор! В дадена част от действието Вонегът критикува най-вече войната и начина на живот в армията, а пък в други моменти - религията, бизнеса, Холивуд... За мен, „Сирените от Титан“ представлява изключително качествена фантастика, към която със сигурност ще се завръщам!

Главният герой Малахия Констант е разглезен богаташ, който има необичайно голям късмет и си живее безгрижно на Земята. Обаче, след време неговият бизнес тотално се срива, а той по тайнствен начин е принуден да си тръгне от планетата и живее в различни части на галактиката. Впоследствие му предстоят доста любопитни и опасни космически приключения, по време на които израства като личност...





„Казано е, че Аристотел е бил последният човек, запознат както трябва с културата на собствената си цивилизация. Рансъм К. Фърн бе положил впечатляващи усилия да постигне неговите успехи. До известна степен не бе сполучил така добре, както Аристотел, да види закономерност в нещата, които знаеше.“


„Да си спомняш миналото — заяви Бракман. — Зат’ва те изпратиха в болницата, в края на краищата. Щото помнеше много. — Той сви грубите си длани като купички и показа на Вуйчо какъв сърцераздирателен проблем е представлявал. — Дявол да го вземе, помнеше толкоз много, че като войник не струваше пукната пара.“


„Вооз бе достатъчно мил, за да му спести истината, независимо колко силно Вуйчо го предизвикваше да го цапардоса с нея между очите.“


„Младите лъвове, които първи проповядваха вярата, сега можеха да се превърнат в агнета и да съзерцават такива ориенталски тайнства, като например спускането на капки вода по въже на камбана. Дисциплиниращата ръка на Църквата навсякъде се намираше у тълпите.“


„Радостните изненади през този ден бяха докарали Космическия скиталец до детинско състояние — състояние, в което иронията и сарказмът бяха недоловими за него. През тежкия си живот той бе ставал пленник на много неща. Сега бе пленник на една тълпа, която го смяташе за чудо.“


„Горката му душа се разтопи от удоволствие, когато си даде сметка, че един-единствен приятел е напълно достатъчен, за да бъде удовлетворена човешката нужда от приятелство.“


„— Аз съм последната, която ще отрече — четеше Беатрис собствения си ръкопис на глас, — че силите на Тралфамадор наистина са играли важна роля в земните дела. Въпреки всичко онези, които са обслужвали интересите на Тралфамадор, са го правили по толкова удивително специфични за себе си начини, че спокойно може да се твърди, че тази планета няма нищо общо със случая.“


„Беатрис изведнъж обърна гръб на картината и отново излезе на двора. Идеята, която искаше да включи в книгата си, вече и се бе изяснила напълно.
— Най-лошото, което изобщо може да се случи на някого — каза тя, — е никой да не го използва за нищо.“


„— Виждам, че най-накрая си я заобичал — отбеляза Сало.
— Едва преди една земна година — отвърна Констант. — Твърде много време трябваше да мине, за да разберем, че смисълът на човешкия живот, без значение кой го контролира, е да се обича някой, който може да бъде обичан.“

"A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved." ♡

Another masterpiece from an author that always blows me away with his great ideas.

It is disturbing in parts and amusing in others. I enjoyed it!

Piercing the Veil on Religion
27 January 2014

tI'll start of by saying that I have read a number of Kurt Vonnegut books (five to be precise) and have a another one on my too read list (Player Piano) and of the five, three of them I have read twice (including this one) and of the remaining two, one I them I intend on reading again (Slaughterhouse Five). As a writer, a satirist, and post-modern thinker, I quite like Vonnegut's work, but for some reason the second time around I found that I simply could not get into this book as much as I was able to get into the other two (Breakfast of Champions and Cat's Cradle), though I am not saying that this book is essentially bad, it was just somewhat dryer than the others that I have read.

tHowever, before I go on with this commentary I have to say something important:



tmeaning that if you haven't read this book, and would like to read it, then please read this after reading the book because what I want to do here is not so much sway your mind to whether you want, or don't want, to read this book, but rather discuss some of the ideas that Vonnegut explores in this book, and unfortunately I am unable to do this without pretty much revealing what ends up happening in the book.t

tNow, Vonnegut has explored the concept of religion in his other books, however in Sirens of Titan religion pretty much takes front and centre. In his own, strange way, Vonnegut explores what he understands religion is, and the role religion plays in a universe that pretty much makes absolutely no sense (and remember the absurdity of existence is also pretty much front and centre in Vonnegut's books). A lot of Christian writers (rightly) expose our world as a world where we only see half of what is going on, namely we see things from our point of view, but are blind to being able to see and understand reality from God's point of view. The Bible (particularly in the book of Job) attempts to draw the curtain back to enable us to see the world from the spiritual reality so that we may be able to make sense of the absurdity of the world around us.

tVonnegut also pulls aside the curtain, but in pulling aside the curtain, he is not adding purpose to the world, but rather completely destroying it by indicating that there is actually no purpose to this world and for those of us who are desperately trying to seek purpose in this world are on a fools errand. In the end, Vonnegut suggests, we should stop looking for purpose and simply seek the company of others, and the love that comes from those around us. So, I am going to go through and explore a number of themes, starting off with his conclusion, and that is of love.

Love
tHave we ever experienced unrequited love? I know I have and I have wasted a lot of time trying to turn unrequited love into requited love. In the end that task is little more than a fools errand because not matter how hard we try, we can never really change somebody's thoughts. Okay, that may not always be the case, because there are times when the iron is metaphorically hot, and we need to be able to recognise those times so that we can strike it. However, the problem is that by narrowing our focus on one specific area we can end up missing the beauty of the world around us. As the protagonist comes to realise at the end (and the protagonist, whether it be Unk, the Space Wonderer, or Malachi Constant – I'll explain that in a bit – isn't actually searching for meaning, but rather stumbling around an absurd universe and ends up discovering the pointlessness of the universe) that the only purpose is love, and the love that he needed was around him all the time. However, it was only for a year in which he actually experienced this, and then it all came to an end, at which point he died, and upon his death bed is thrust into an illusion of paradise.

tThe other interesting character is Chronos, who at the end, says goodbye to his mother and father (the first time he recognises them as such, or seems to because we are never allowed to see inside his mind) and runs off to immerse himself in nature. What we see in Chronos, especially at the end, is contentment. He is content in nature, and does not need the company of others. He only recognises the two most important people in his universe, and then departs to immerse himself in his own universe, and that is the last we see of him. He is described by some as a savage, but in reality he is the most civilised of all the characters because he needs no purpose, he just accepts and appreciates, and immerses himself in that appreciation.

The Future
tWe are told at the beginning that one of the major characters, William Niles Rumfoord, and his dog Kazak, had gone off on a space voyage and was caught in a space anomoly which resulted in him going into an infinite loop between the sun and Beatleguese and would only appear on Earth for a set time every so many years. For a time he is kept hidden away, and when Malachi Constant is finally allowed to see him, he tells him that the reason his wife has kept him away from everybody is that he told her her future, and then proceeds to tell Malachi his own future. Immediately Malachi resents this and seeks to go and do completely the opposite (as his wife had done) however it ends up that the future Rumfoord predicted comes true. In a way we see biblical ideas coming out here in the belief that we can never run away from God (such as we see in the book of Jonah) however the catch is that the future is not actually being told, it is being created.

tMalachi, and Mrs Rumfoord, cannot escape the future because the future has not actually come to pass. In the end everything that they do ends up moving them towards the future that has been predicted. Once again there is no purpose and there is no future, there is only a route that we are travelling, and it is a route that we cannot escape from – it is the absurdity of the universe. Sometimes it only takes a simple suggestion (hey, what do you think of such and such, do you want to ask her out – which results in you suddenly thinking about it, and moving yourself in that direction despite you initially not wanting to go down that path). It is not that the future has been set, but the future has been created, and while there may be a purpose to that creation – it has nothing to do with you – that is the essence of the absurdity.

Malachi Doll

There was only one proper way to hang a Malachi Constant doll.
That is by the neck.
There is only one proper knot to use,
and that was a hangman's knot.

tThis chapter is immediately followed by a chapter entitled 'We Hate Malachi Constant Because …'

tThe comparison between Jesus Christ and Malachi Constant are astounding. Firstly, we have the Malachi Constant doll, a doll of a figure known as Malachi Constant (though not necessarily in his image because when he walks among the people of Earth nobody recognises him), which is being hung by an hangman's noose. Have you ever wondered the origin of the cross that you see around many people's neck? Yes, it is the cross that represents Jesus Christ. And why does that cross represent Christ? Because that was the cross that he was executed on. Many of us know, but do not really appreciate, that what we are hanging around our necks is an instrument used to execute people. This is the absurdity of Christianity and that is that we glorify somebody whom we executed. What is being suggested, or what I understand, is that what the cross symbolises is not so much our faith in Christ, but rather a statement suggesting 'this is what we did the Christ the first time he appeared on Earth, and if he dare come back again, we will do it to him again.'

tThen we have the chapter on hating Malachi Constant. While we are not told, those of us who are astute readers will realise that Unk, and the Space Wanderer, are both Malachi Constant. The thing is that the people of Earth do not realise this. When the Space Wanderer appears, everybody is worshipping him, all the while displaying effigies of what they will do to Malachi Constant when they get their hands on him. Thus, when Rumfoord brings the Space Wonderer in front of the people, they are worshipping him, right up until the point that Rumfoord informs them that he is Malachi Constant, and which point the attitude of the crowd changes from one of immense adoration to a desire to rip him limb from limb.

tSuch it was with Jesus Christ, for one day they are heralding him as King as he rides into Jerusalem on a Donkey, and the next they are calling for his blood and demanding that the Romans crucify him. The reasons behind that sudden change in attitude deserves an essay entirely to itself, but it demonstrates three things:

1) our immensely fickle nature;
2) our innate desire for self preservation; and
3) the fact that we would rather follow the crowd than think for ourselves.

The Purpose
tSo what was the purpose of the events in the story? Simply put it was to enable a highly advanced alien to be able to get the component that he needed to get his ship working again. What was the mission that this alien was on? It was to travel millions of light years to another civilisation to deliver a message that simply said 'hello'. All of Earth's history, all of our wonderful achievements, and all of our technology was simply manipulated for this one goal, a goal that had nothing to do with us. As such, all human existence is absurd and pointless, and in the grand scheme of things our purpose, to ourselves, was not so much pointless, but only to allow a very simple mission to succeed, a mission that seems to be almost as absurd as the book itself.

tIt is a good thing that my world view is not as absurd as that, but at least it helps me look out beyond my self satisfaction and appreciate the fact that while my existence here on Earth may seem meaningless to me, and indeed meaningless to us all, that there are greater things at work. What Vonneget seems to have forgotten, or not even mentioned (because maybe it is for us to work it out) is that this little thing that the alien Salo is performing has a much greater significance than even he realises. The universe is so great that it is mindboggling, and even the most insignificant events have a much grander purpose than even we can realise.t

Video review

The Depressed Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Vonnegut's second novel started off great for me. The whole thing about the chronosynclastic infundibulum being "those places...where all the different kinds of truth fit together" struck me as pretty cool. I thought the hapless irresponsible Malachi Constant, richest man in America, was going to get straightened out and find the meaning of life.

Well, he did, but it did not make him happy. Rumfoord, who at first appeared to me as someone who had the good of mankind at heart, turned out to be quite the opposite. He didn't end up happy either. That terrible antisocial kid Chrono becomes the only guy who redeems himself in any way.

The story just seemed to sputter out exactly the way some people's lives do and I found that depressing. So Vonnegut fooled me, which is OK because I actually don't mind when authors jerk me around a bit. In fact, at this point in my life, I also believe that we live in an indifferent universe but we still ought to love "whoever is around to be loved" while we do our best to survive, keep the planet going and practice kindness when at all possible.