Çok eğlendim, çok sevdim. Burunları iptal eden diktatörün hikayesine uzun süredir gülmediğim kadar güldüm, devamlı aklıma gelip kıkırdatıyor :) Nice okunmayı bekleyen Vonnegut kitaplarına, şerefe!

Getting to know about Kurt Vonnegut is one of the fewer sweetest things ever happened in my life.

The book primarily deals with the most humane lesson I could ever think which is being kind and loving to the people one is not familiar with. I know it all sound like an emotional outburst but it's honest and pathetically genuine. God bless you, Mr. Vonnegut and I'm glad to have found you in this vast crazy universe.

آخرین کتاب سال
99
آقای رزواتر به هملت جناب ونه گات معروف است

Nesu tikra, ar mano žinių apie JAV to meto visuomenę, kultūrą ir papročius užtenka visai ironijai pagauti, tačiau visos karo traumų pasekmės pavaizduotos liūdnai tikroviškai.

این دومین کتابی بود که از ونه گات میخوندم و طبق انتظارم یه داستانِ طنز تلخ که بعضی جاها درست و حسابی میخندیدی ولی خب بیشتر جاها طنزش مثل زهر مار بود و دلت میخواست دوش اسید بگیری و زیر دوش به این فکر کنی که این چه وضعیتیه بشر برای خودش و بقیه درست کرده آخه

یکی از چیزهایی که خیلی دوست داشتم نوع شخصیت‌پردازی ونه گات بود. در واقع شخصیت‌ها فقط اسم یا صاحب یه شغل نیستن و از هرکدومشون یه انسان واقعی درآورده و یه پیش زمینه‌ براش نوشته. چه شخصیتی باشه که توی داستان زیاد حضور داره و چه یه خدمتکار دفتر بیمه
و پایان بندی کتاب هم به واقع که معرکه بود و هنوز دارم میخندم و از معرکه بودنش لذت میبرم
-----------------------------
برای یه ریویوی کامل پیشنهاد میکنم ریویوی میس مایا رو بخونید که خیلی عالی در مورد کتاب نوشته

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

n  "There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind."n

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. must be my literary discovery of the year. Rarely have I spent novels's lengths in a state of constant awe – even in regard to those that I didn't consider fully refined, like this one here.



God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is the story of Eliot Rosewater, a millionaire who just doesn't know what to do with his wealth and goes off on a journey to philanthropy. Told in little vignettes, this turns into a humorous satire about greed and the efforts of overcoming hypocrisy.

Is Rosewater crazy? Or is he just the human we should all be? Helping the poor is something that we can all proclaim a good, if not necessary deed, and yet, watching Mr. Rosewater try to do good is as tragic as it is comic. Being kind is treated as a form of insanity in this novel, reflecting the state of our society as well today as it did during its initial release in the mid-60s.

n  "You know, I think the main purpose of the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps is to get poor Americans into clean, pressed, unpatched clothes, so rich Americans can stand to look at them."n

It's a story that beautifully ties into the whole universe Vonnegut created. A lot of the ideas were to be further developed in the novel that was to follow – Slaughterhouse-Five. I highly enjoyed the appearance of Kilgore Trout for example, who's a fictional science-fiction author in the novel's universe and will be familiar to people having read other work of Vonnegut.

His pondering on the state of the world felt a little less precise than they did in Cat's Cradle for example, ultimately leading to me feeling a little less connected to the narrative as a whole. And yet, a pleasant read, surprisingly full of ideas for a story so short!

4,5⭐️

як же я люблю прості книжки, де просто про непрості речі і без висновків

Воннеґут висміює цинічне суспільство, де цінується багатство і разом із його набуттям людина набуває також недоторканість і всевладдя.
але автор робить це більш ніж майстерно і легко. хотілось слідкувати куди цей абсурд доведе героїв і усвідомлювати, що так живуть ж не тільки герої. Воннеґут не так часто й використовував гіперболізацію

герої усі яскраві, і навіть попри незначний обсяг книжки, добре виписані.

ну а кінець — кращого не могло бути

0,5 забрала від себе тому, що впевнена, що далі буде навіть краще чтиво від Воннеґута. усе ж, усі ці рейтинги субʼєктивні)

In the opening sentence of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, the narrator informs the reader that "A sum of money is a leading character in this tale about people..." The sum of money is the millions of dollars amassed over generations by the Rosewater family and currently held by the Rosewater Foundation, a charitable organization. Eliot Rosewater, the "Mr. Rosewater" of Vonnegut's title, is the current head of this organization. Much of the plot of the novel involves the efforts on the part of his family members and their lawyers to wrest control of the money away from Rosewater. The best way to do this, they agree, is to prove that Eliot Rosewater is insane.

A lot of the humor of the novel arises out of the way that Rosewater appears to make his antagonists' case for them, particularly with respect to the methods he employs in effecting the philanthropic mission of the foundation. For unlike other philanthropists who build museums, endow research wings in hospitals, or (as seems increasingly to be the case, particularly in the U.S.), donate to political campaigns, Rosewater sits in his office in Rosewater, Indiana, answering the telephone and listening as callers tell him of their situation, in response to which he writes checks intended to help them in their pursuit of whatever they feel will make them happy. As Rosewater puts it, "I'm going to love these discarded Americans, even though they're useless and unattractive. That is going to be my work of art" (36, italics Vonnegut's).

Rosewater's particular form of philanthropy appears to be an extreme application of the slogan "Act locally, think globally," not least because the majority of the beneficiaries of his largesse are citizens of Rosewater. Eliot Rosewater is an absurdist hero whose practice of philanthropy must seem irrational from the perspective of conventional charitable organizations. However, the novel makes clear that Rosewater's philanthropy is motivated by compassion and love, and in this respect it can be read as a challenge to analogous, but more conventional organizations. Rosewater is a kind of Don Quixote tilting at the windmills of capitalism.

In terms of narrative style, there is a lot more telling than showing in this novel. Much of the action of the story takes the form of conversations among characters while in meetings or during telephone calls. There are references to moments of action, but rarely are these moments presented directly, through narrative description (one exception to this is a passage rich in visual images describing a scene set on a fishing boat; it seems significant that a page later an onlooker mocks the "three romantics" in the boat).

I did not like this one so well as Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five or Breakfast of Champions. Nevertheless, I did enjoy it for its humor and satire, for its intertextuality, for the character of Eliot Rosewater, and for Vonnegut's reminding his readers of the importance of sharing and of being kind to one another.

Acquired Aug 12, 2001
City Lights Book Shop, London, Ontario

نوشتن ریویو برای رمان کار سختیه به نظرم.
در کل باید بگم که سبک نوشتن ونه‌گات رو دوست دارم. پی‌رنگ یا ماجراها اونقدری عجیب نیستن که بخوای بگی نقطه قوت ونه‌گات هستن.
اما حرف‌ها و زبان طنز و جذابی که داره و ساختار قاطی‌پاتی و ایده‌هایی که توی متن هست کتاب رو به شدت جذاب و ونه‌گاتی می‌کنه. مایه این رمان، طبق اکثر رمان‌های ونه‌گات، دیدگاهی انتقادی به سرمایه‌داری و مدرن‌شدن و جامعه‌ی جدید آمریکا و رویای آمریکایی‌ست.
رمان، انتهای جذابی‌ هم داره. البته بیشتر از این نمی‌شه گفت، به دلیل خطر اسپویل.

خوندن‌اش شیرین و روونه. اما برای کسی که بخواد برای اولین‌بار ونه‌گوت بخونه، سلاخ‌خانه شماره پنج رو توصیه می‌کنم.

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is an excellent satire on wealth, capitalism, and the dark side of the American Dream.

Its main character is Eliot Rosewater. The novel is set in New York and the fictional town of Rosewater, Indiana. The Rosewater Foundation has its home in this tiny backwater town. The Foundation was originally conceived as a tax shelter. But Eliot has different ideas for the use of its money.

from supersummary.com:

"Eliot distributes fliers, stickers, and signs advertising that, in lieu of suicide, desperate people should call the Rosewater Foundation at their moment of crisis. He then gives each person a solution on the condition that they live for another week. Sometimes this means giving them a few hundred dollars. At other times he simply prescribes an aspirin and a glass of wine. He spends millions in this fashion."

Eliot is my hero. Others would like to see him declared insane, so that they can get their hands on the money. But Eliot finds a way around that and good wins in the end.

5 stars

I always seemed to have done things the way I wanted to when I was a kid.

Being mildly autistic, I learned things a lot differently than other kids - sometimes with none of it, especially math, sinking in!

I thought differently (but I was really half-dreaming).

I played piano differently (but I thundered downward on the keys, instead of flexibly moving my fingers Into them).

And I laughed hysterically (but usually with glee, especially at teenaged deranged cartoons like Rocky and Bullwinkle).

So, also, I laughed hysterically at my first Vonnegut book, which musta seemed like a cartoon but wasn’t - and it was probably Sirens of Titan.

I had heard all about the new Boomer Counterculture Sensation, Kurt V., from my Grandmother’s Atlantic Magazine, and from my Mom’s New York Times Book Review. The best thing for us Boomer Boppers since fresh sliced white bread, they all said.

Of course I was scandalized by Vonnegut’s crudeness, but thought I had to make a mature dent in such books - ones my parents’ more mature generation even endorsed - so reading Vonnegut ushered me into an oddly skewed adult world.

Most of the jokes I didn’t get, for I was a teen with no political savvy. But then again Woodstock was fanatically dear to my teen peers, so I fell in with a bandwagon of countercultural political leaning.

Of course later - combining leftist sentiment with conservative morality - I couldn’t see the Mack Truck Barrelling in my direction, in the rear view blind spot that was my nonexistent (and a little autistic) perspicuity. But that’s my history.

By the time I read Eliot Rosewater’s story, I could still laugh, thanks to my then mid-teen sister’s youthful giggling presence in my life, but it was after my ‘accident’, so Mr. Rosewater was for me a bitterly sardonic type of laugh.

School of Hard Knocks, anyone? Just check your joy at the door! The bored, faded girl there at the check stand will give you your ticket.

That’s why I was VERY happy today to read my good friend Brian’s review here (because he showed me a reason for joy in this book - which I thought joyless). You see, I never knew black humour in my life, because, like Norman Peale, I’ve always tried to see goodness in those around me.

And also, just like Eliot Rosewater, I was the cynics’ whipping boy.

So, when Brian resurrected Eliot from the depths of my depressive reaction to this novel, and showed the outright godliness in Mr Rosewater’s altruistic demeanour, I was overjoyed.

Because, Brian, you have rescued Eliot’s reputation for me.

And my warped understanding of this book -

Which was always threatened by an incipient cloud of despair over my shared fallen humanity -

As Brian so skilfully shows, was never this great author’s intention.

"God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" is indeed, as many reviewers have said, Mr. Vonnegut's most blatantly socialistic book. However, it is also quite obviously his most Christian. The text's protagonist, Eliot Rosewater, is nothing short of a benign Jesus figure. Numerous biblical references throughout the text are used as corollaries to Eliot's life and the plethora of those references make Vonnegut's point pretty obvious for the reader.
This text is less plot driven than many of Vonnegut's other works, but its themes and importance I think are far superior to many of his better written novels. The first 100 pages or so can be a little dull (not normal in a Vonnegut text) and the slow start is something his readers may not be used to. However, the text does build to what I think is a wonderfully written and executed conclusion.
Two highlights of the book are Eliot's baptism "sermon" for two twin boys that he is asked to baptize. Eliot has no religious titles or significance, so he just speaks to his hope for the boy's futures, ending with a simple and profound statement, "God damn it, you've got to be kind." Another excellent moment in the text is a biting letter written by an orphan named Selena who is serving as the maid in a rich household. The letter is written to the man who runs the orphanage that she came from, and it has the bite and sting that can only come through the eyes of a child. Vonnegut is at the top of his game in these sections.
Further highlighting the idea of Eliot as a Christ figure Vonnegut has Eliot well aware that those he helps are ingrates at best, and almost all are undeserving of his generosity and love. It is a great strength of the text that "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" freely admits that the people who need the help the most are often the most undeserving, and the acknowledgement of that is a great strength of the book.
The most blatant Christian references, and I think the most powerful parts of the text, start on page 264 when Vonnegut has his go to character (Kilgore Trout) explain what Eliot was attempting to do by helping anyone who asked, regardless of the circumstances. The 6 pages where Trout "explains" the "experiment" are worth the price of the book alone. They are stunningly simple and beautiful. I was trembling with joy as I read them. It is really nothing less than a secular Sermon on the Mount.
I won't ruin the end of the book here, but Vonnegut completes the obvious Christ archetype with Eliot in a manner that is unexpected, true to the character of Eliot, and perfect. And then Vonnegut in that way of his stops writing, it is over, the end. The rest is up to you. Very few novels make me think about my obligations to others in this world, this book did. It has stuck with me, and will. And for that I say God bless you, Mr. Vonnegut!