Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. writes unusual and quirky novels, this one does not disappoint.

“If you can do no good, at least do no harm.”

“Love is where you find it. I think it is foolish to go around looking for it, and I think it can be poisonous. I wish that people who are conventionally supposed to love each other would say to each other, when they fight, 'Please — a little less love, and a little more common decency'.”

“What does seem important? Bargaining in good faith with destiny.”

Kurt Vonnegut's Slapstick, or Lonesome No More! is a sort of autobiography within an autobiography. In the prologue, Vonnegut, the author, meditates on the death of his sister, Alice, on loneliness and the assertion that the novel Slapstick itself is autobiographical. Slapstick then is written by the former last president of the United States, Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain, from his nearly empty offices in the Empire State Building. It is a post-apocalyptic world. The U.S government has collapsed and much of humanity has been ravaged by plagues known as the green death (caused by the fatal inhalation of Chinese who have miniaturized themselves) and the Albanian flu.

Swain writes about his life, and the connection to his twin sister, Eliza, without whom neither one is really whole. They are viewed as simpletons; however, together they are brilliant and wildly creative. Their separation at age 15 signals the destruction of paradise. Apart, the twins refer to their simpleton selves as Betty and Bobby Brown. Even years later, Eliza asks Wilbur,"How could anybody love Bobby Brown?" Hi ho!

Though Vonnegut gave it a grade of 'D,' I really enjoyed Slapstick! Unlike some other works by Vonnegut, it was immediately engaging, and of course, fun and wildly irreverent! 4.25 stars.

Again, and as sort of a postscript, I wonder about Vonnegut's perception of Wyoming. "If you ever go to Wyoming..." This reference occurs with respect to a new scheme to create artificial families Swain is told he'd have connections, wouldn't be lonesome. Otherwise, and in so much of his other work, Wyoming exists on the edge of crazy!


“In case nobody has told you," she said, "this is the United States of America, where nobody has a right to rely on anybody else--where everybody learns to make his or her own way.”

“FËDOR Mikhailovich Dostoevski, the
Russian novelist, said one time that, "One sacred memory from childhood is perhaps the best education." I can think of another quickie education for a child, which, in its way, is almost as salutary: Meeting a human being who is tremendously respected by the adult world, and realizing that that person is actually a malicious lunatic.”

I read this when I was doing something

I was prompted to re-read this Vonnegut novel by a non-fiction work that I read recently. The Juggler’s Children was about the use of genetic research in relation to genealogical research and about the search of the modern North American to make some connections with people around them. People are lonely and looking for distant relatives assuages the loneliness somewhat.

I was put in mind of this novel and its alternate title, Lonesome No More! I’m not sure why that slogan and the new middle-name scheme espoused by the main character stuck in my mind when all the other details had faded to a hazy blur, but they did. [Each American was assigned a new middle name, a natural object noun and a number—those with the same word are cousins, those with matching word and number are siblings. Voila, instant family!] Like Vonnegut himself, I am lucky to have a large extended family, most of whom seem to enjoy spending time with me as much as I love visiting with them. Also, as a certified introvert, I am perfectly comfortable spending long stretches of time alone--alone but only very rarely lonesome. I do realize, however, that not everyone is so fortunate.

KV calls this book semi-autobiographical. It seems to me to be a paen to his relationship with his deceased sister Alice, who he declares he has always secretly written for. I guess we all have an audience in mind when we write and he lost his dearest audience. In Slapstick, Wilbur and Eliza, the freakish twins, who do their best thinking together, are the fictional counterparts of Kurt and Alice. Wilbur is the writer and reader of the two, Eliza is the one who can figure out what is actually going on. Separately, they are much less intelligent, calling their alter-egos Bobby and Betty Brown. If I remember correctly, KV claimed in another work that Alice was actually a much better writer than he was, but did not feel compelled to do something with that talent, as he did.

I know what it is like to lose family and how that can affect one’s life. After the death of my mother, I quit reading fiction for many years. Fiction was something that I had shared with her and without being able to talk to her about such books, I just didn’t have the heart to continue reading them. Non-fiction became my go-to reading. So I believe I have some idea how crippling it must have felt to Vonnegut to lose his sister and how he could end up feeling like a much duller Bobby Brown without her. When I read this book in my twenties, prior to losing my parents, I had no proper appreciation of all of this—re-reading the book now, I have much more sympathy.

Slapstick contains many of the same themes that make Vonnegut’s writing dear to me: his insistence that common human decency is worth its weight in gold, that kindness is always a good alternative, and that life is has its ridiculous moments even when it hurts.

I was amazed with Vonnegut's tour through an apocalyptic world; his mixture of Gothic, science-fiction and comedy.

That said, I stepped toward this reading tentatively, with visions of the horrible Jerry Lewis movie from the 1980s in my head. It was a rental: "Hey! This movie's got Jerry Lewis!" - a man whose cinematic ouevre is unparalleled if you give it a chance, you're 10 and the videocassette market is pretty slim pickings (it was, in the 80s).

So I feared this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GS9IJf...

But what I got was so rewarding and spoke so empathically to the universal condition of loneliness that I was genuinely moved and wanted to give Vonnegut a big hug.


Bonus track: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4p2Hlp...

Bonus track No. 2: Batman, Nazi collaborator?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHD_53...

Странен, странен Вонегът... ; ))

"Светът е пълен с хора, които са много изкусни в създаване на впечатление, че са по-умни, отколкото са в действителност. Те ни заплитат и омайват с факти, цитати, чужди езици и т.н., докато всъщност не знаят почти нищо за полезното в живота и как истински да се живее. Моята цел е да откривам тези хора и да защищавам обществото от тях, както и самите тях от собствената им личност."

Un libro flojo a lo que es la obra de Vonnegut. Sus ideas humanitarias siempre claras, pero es el humor el que falla, encima abordado con insistencia fútil resultando en un libro aburrido y pesado. Se pasa de absurdo.

Vonnegut is my savior. Hi Ho.

At this point I've gotten fairly familiar with Kurt Vonnegut's tone and flavor. The sense of universalism and equality consistently sound as often as his humor and irony rings.

This books reads as a perversion of all four themes.

To me.

Usually Vonnegut's works seem to read with some underlying sense that no matter how bizarre everything seems, no matter how depressing or how inspiring a situation seems, there's always a punchline, and that punchline brings you back to reality, forcing the reader to realize that we're all human. We're all prone to make mistakes just as often as we succeeed. We're all prone to die just as sure as we're prone to live. We're all prone for 15 minutes of fame surrounded by an average of 76.4 years of mundaneness.

But that doesn't ring the same for Slapstick. The introduction gives you an immediate idea of why Vonnegut steps out of his comfort zone on this one.
If the introduction reads true, and there's no guarantee that reality and honesty aren't being blurred in any of Vonnegut's novels, then he wrote this following the death of his sister. His sister, coincidentally, died days after her husband was killed in a freak accident. As if this pit of depression didn't dip far enough down, the couple left a cadre of children that Vonnegut would go on to adopt.

So this is understandingly, sympathetically a departure from the Vonnegut norm. The main character is a freak that finds himself surrounded by similarly freakish people. Smartly, the freaks in this novel are those people that perhaps seem the most normal and successful. The main character is a grotesque monster who is a successful pediatrician (though he graduated at the bottom of his Ivy League class), a former Senator, and currently the reluctant President of the United States. He had written the best selling novel about child care with his best friend and twin sister. He has revolutionized mankind's interpretation of family. He is one of the few, healthy survivors left on the Island of Death (Manhattan). He has just sold the Louisiana Purchase to the King of Michigan for a dollar. And he regularly gets an erection.

Ok. Fair enough. The novel does take place in a post-apocalyptic future where most humans have been killed by a mysterious plague, Manhattan is a haven of corpses, slaves, and candlesticks, and gravity fluctuates with the weather. The usual science-fiction elements are still in place.

However, I do not put this side by side with the normal Vonnegut works, and I cannot. There is not a happy ending. However, in hindsight, I don't believe I've read a happy ending in any of his works. I suppose it's safer to say that there's more of an impending doom with little to no hope of salvation in Slapstick. But, to be fair to the reader, Vonnegut delicately expressed this very early in the book when he compared salvation to a Turkey farm one can communicate with via a lunch box.

Read it if you're curious. Read it if you're a Vonnegut fan. Go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut if you're neither. Or take a flying fuck at the moooooooooon!

I love and miss you, Kurt Vonnegut.

Slapstick or Lonesome No More! is a rather strange sort of book, about a United States in a future when gravity becomes wildly variable, where millions have died of the Albanian Flu or The Green Death, and in which the Chinese have miniaturized themselves to microbe size and developed a means of space travel that did not involve space ships. The author, Kurt Vonnegut, sees it as the closest he would ever come to writing an autobiography.

The author's alter ego is one Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain, who was elected to the Presidency of what remained of the United States with his motto "Lonesome No More!" He used a computer to assign new family middle names to everyone based on flowers, plants, animals, minerals, and so on so that people would no longer feel lonely as they could form new families.

Wilbur was originally thought to be retarded, as was his sister Eliza, who were both very tall and frightfully ugly. They were also geniuses, but they didn't let on to that fact until that revelation destroyed their lives together and traumatized their parents, who separated them. After Eliza died in an avalanche on Mars, Wilbur becomes dependent on a medication called tri-benzo-Deportamil.

In many ways, despite its name and inspiration (Laurel and Hardy), Slapstick is one of the grimmer visions of the future. Especially grim is the afterlife, which is compared to a badly run Turkey Farm in which all the dead are mightily bored.

Just as in Slaughterhouse-Five there was the recurring refrain, "So it goes," there is a similar refrain in Slapstick, a very mirthless "High ho."

There are reasons I did not want to like this book, but I like Kurt Vonnegut too much; and I did enjoy reading Slapstick.

This one was one of Vonnegut's best. He was creating worlds here, folks. Most specifically, a world---ours.

The narrator happens to be the President of the United States---the LAST one, as a matter of fact.

Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain and his sister, Eliza, have got to be two of the most sympathetic characters KV ever created. Their voices just envelope you and draw you in.

Some of Vonnegut's most ingenious devices & characters are in here---Green Death, the Hooligan (a thingie to communicate with those in the Afterlife), the Turkey Farm, tri-something-Deportamil, the super-feelgood drug Swain gets hooked on, the Raspberry family, Vera's teenaged Tourette's-afflicted son, the King of Michigan.

Yes, KV was firing on all cylinders here. Strange, then, that I found the ending to be something of a letdown. Then again, how could it be anything but?

If you have to read just one Vonnegut book, I'd say go for SLAPSTICK. SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE has the reputation, but in my humble opinion, SLAPSTICK is the better book.

"LONESOME NO MORE!"

At first, I thought this was, even for Vonnegut, a little too weird; perhaps even, a failed book. But Vonnegut is incapable of failure, I think.

Unfortunately, I saw the movie first, and it prejudiced the book. The images taken from the book by the director of the movie haunted it. I like Jerry Lewis but was saddened that this might have been his swan song.

The story started one way and flipped into something completely different later on, which is Vonnegut’s genius. It actually turned out to be one of his most outrageous, memorable and interesting works. The bit of bio-story telling in the intro is also a plus here.

Hi-ho.