kurt vonnegut was a god amongst men, although he would resent that sentiment entirely. i fiercely enjoy his non fiction work over his fiction, but his fiction is beloved too. he is sharp and observant and nearly carefree and funny (understatement)

i admit i did skip a chapter where he basically wrote an absurdist, fan-fiction-like version of Jekyll and Hyde.

Wise wise wise wise man

One of my favorite little quotes is when he grades his own works. Cat’s Cradle naturally gets the highest grade. Slapstick got a D, which I agree with.

Thanks, my guy

So. The book has lots of Vonnegut paraphernalia which could have been left without, particularly the story and the play, which are 100% nonsense. What remains isn't far from brilliance. Occasionally funny, occasionally kind and wise. Oftentimes just clownish. The chronology of the texts works as some sort of autobiography, but only if you care to fill-in the dots. I did.

It was a cozy book but sometimes I regret to think that he is a bad man . But I’m still a big fan

This is not a must read if you are pressed for time or have read a lot of other Vonnegut books. And it meanders quite a bit into his family’s history and somewhat dated speeches and I guess what you’d call literary criticism. However, there is a lot of wisdom, too, and it was quite enjoyable for me. I try to preserve the five star for truly great books, which means four stars are really, really good books. There is definitely worth a read, just not what I might call essential if you are a sparing reader.

This is Vonnegut at his nonfiction best. As much as I liked A Man Without a Country, I think this was superior. Among the highlights for me were his thoughts back when he was a writing teacher, the self interview he did for the Paris review, his family's thoughts on his writing, and the impact that the Dresdon fire bombing that he wrote about in Slaughterhouse 5 had on him throughout his life. Much of the book is classic Vonnegut in the fact that it is humorous and pessimistic, but there are also plenty of touching parts where you feel like you are actually getting to know the man behind the sarcasm and wit.

Midway through Chapter 18, Vonnegut gives an A through D letter grade to all of his published works to date.

The "C" for Palm Sunday strikes me as about right.

A personal account of Dresden - where he was held a captured POW during the Allied firebombing - is a memorable piece for obvious reasons (“Self Interview"). His broader family history ("Roots" and "Children" specifically) were also surprisingly compelling. Familiar Vonnegut wit and wisdom permeates the book thereafter, touching on topics from writing and religion to specific literary criticism (Joseph Heller, Jack Kerouac, Jonathan Swift, etc).

With all those good nuggets, it still feels like there's a lot to sift through to get to the good parts. For me, A Man Without a Country keeps my vote as the best collection of Vonnegut essays.

Palm Sunday is a day of great importance in the Christian calendar – commemorating, as it does, the day on which Jesus of Nazareth made His triumphal entry into the city of Jerusalem, a few days before the Last Supper and the Passion. So why would a writer as famously skeptical as Kurt Vonnegut Jr. give this 1981 book the title Palm Sunday? After all, Vonnegut is the man who, while speaking in 1980 at the First Parish Unitarian Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said, “Anytime I see a person fleeing from reason and into religion, I think to myself, ‘There goes a person who simply cannot stand being so goddamned lonely anymore’” (p. 196).

Please be assured that there is actually a real and legitimate reason why Vonnegut gave this Autobiographical Collage (the book’s subtitle) the title Palm Sunday -- and we’ll get to that, I promise. For now, suffice it to say that this collection of speeches, addresses, letters, and sketches provides a valuable look at the philosophy and the concerns of a great American author.

Vonnegut is renowned for his avuncular, conversational voice, and for the way he uses humor and irony as a way of addressing difficult human truths. His Midwestern roots – he is originally from Indianapolis – come through in books like Breakfast of Champions (1973), his satire of Middle American commercialism, materialism, and shallowness of thought.

And he has used the medium of science fiction to make very real points about human folly and weakness – most famously in Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), a novel based in part on Vonnegut’s real-life experiences as a prisoner of war in Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Fans of the novel already know that the only reason Vonnegut survived the Allied firebombing of Dresden in February of 1945 was that, during the bombardment, he and his fellow P.O.W.'s were incarcerated in an underground slaughterhouse – Schlachthaus-Fünf, or Slaughterhouse-Five. That Vonnegut survived while 25,000 people above him were incinerated got him thinking a lot about life and death, and about human beings’ capacity for good or evil – and he spent his entire literary career exploring just those kinds of concerns.

Readers of Palm Sunday who are themselves aspiring writers may appreciate Vonnegut’s insights regarding the art and craft of writing. In “When I Lost My Innocence,” Vonnegut recalls how he was invited to speak at the annual banquet of the Cornell Daily Sun, the student newspaper for which he once worked, in May of 1980. Vonnegut told his listeners that “That is how you get to be a writer, incidentally: you feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time” (p. 59).

Any writer, I think, would benefit from the advice that Vonnegut offered to his Cornell Daily Sun colleagues on this occasion: “If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate my subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out. Here is the same rule paraphrased to apply to storytelling, to fiction: Never include a sentence which does not either remark on character or advance the action” (p. 68).

Vonnegut continues with these reflections on the writer’s art in a “self-interview” that he published in The Paris Review in 1977. Talking to himself – quite literally – Vonnegut states that “It’s the writer’s job to stage confrontations, so the characters will say surprising and revealing things, and educate and entertain us all. If a writer can’t or won’t do that, he should withdraw from the trade”. Pursuing the metaphor of writing as a trade, Vonnegut as interviewee adds (for the benefit of himself as interviewer) that "Carpenters build houses. Storytellers use a reader’s leisure time in such a way that the reader will not feel that his time has been wasted. Mechanics fix automobiles" (p. 99).

In “The People One Knows,” Vonnegut, talking about his life as a writer, provides a 3-page list of writers whom he knows personally, from Chinua Achebe to Richard Yates. It’s enough to make one jealous. But then Vonnegut does his level best to demystify the status of “being a writer,” stating that

…novelists are not only unusually depressed, by and large, but have, on the average, about the same IQ’s as the cosmetics consultants at Bloomingdale’s department store. Our power is patience. We have discovered that writing allows even a stupid person to seem reasonably intelligent, if only that person will write the same thought over and over again, improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anybody can do it. All it takes is time. (p. 115)

In a chapter titled “Embarrassment,” Vonnegut talks about some of the things that embarrass him; for example, he is embarrassed at the way a number of his Indiana relatives are embarrassed by his books. In the process of discussing another thing that embarrasses him – the failure of his first marriage, after 25 years – he starts to explain the circumstances under which the marriage ends, but then corrects himself: “But I am beginning to explain, which is a violation of a rule I lay down whenever I teach a class in writing. ‘All you can do is tell what happened. You will get thrown out of this course if you are arrogant enough to imagine that you can tell me why it happened. You do not know. You cannot know’” (p. 171). Once again, he provides good advice for writers.

Because Vonnegut’s humor has always reminded me of Mark Twain’s, I was delighted to learn that Vonnegut was asked in 1979 to speak at the Mark Twain house in Hartford, Connecticut, on the 100th anniversary of the house’s completion. Again, he used the occasion as an opportunity to discuss the writer’s art, saying that “the secret of good storytelling is “to lie, but to keep the arithmetic sound. A storyteller, like any other sort of enthusiastic liar, is on an unpredictable adventure. His initial lie, his premise, will suggest many new lies of its own. The storyteller must choose among them, seeking those which are most believable, which keep the arithmetic sound” (p. 153).

Vonnegut then applies these ideas to Twain’s work, calling Adventures of Huckleberry Finn a “world masterpiece” (as, of course, it is), and then going on to describe A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court as “The wildest adventure, with Missouri calculation, of which I know” (p. 153). In the process, Vonnegut zeroes in on the later passages of Connecticut Yankee, in which protagonist Hank Morgan and 54 of his followers use late-19th-century weapons technology to kill 25,000 enemy knights.

Vonnegut says, “How appalled this entertainer must have been to have his innocent joking about technology and superstition lead him inexorably to such a ghastly end”, and invites his listeners, there at Twain’s Hartford home, to reflect on how Twain’s ideas apply only too accurately to the Cold War world in which Vonnegut was speaking on Twain’s work and ideas. Vonnegut states that “the fatal premise of A Connecticut Yankee remains a chief premise of Western civilization, and increasingly of world civilization – to wit: The sanest, most likeable persons, employing superior technology, will enforce sanity throughout the world” (p. 155). The reader who knows Vonnegut’s work is likely to think back to the many and powerful anti-war passages of Slaughterhouse-Five.

Along with being a thoughtful practitioner of the craft or writing, and a ready provider of advice for aspiring writers, Vonnegut is also quite the civil libertarian. In his chapter on “Obscenity,” he talks about how his mother-in-law, and the good people at Indianapolis Magazine, have objected to his use of “certain impolite words” in his books, words about bodily functions and such. Vonnegut answers these objections by writing that “even when I was in grammar school, I suspected that warnings about words that nice people never used were in fact lessons about how to keep our mouths shut not just about our bodies, but about many, many things – perhaps too many things” (p. 202). In short, attempts to control what people say – no matter how good the intentions – are, quite literally, attempts to control what people are capable of thinking.

As an illustration of that principle, Vonnegut tells a sad but true story of how his parents – good and mannerly Indianapolitans, both of them – were ripped off by old friends who offered them an investment “deal” that turned out to be a confidence game. As Vonnegut puts it,

My parents had been taught such nice manners in childhood that it was actually impossible for them to suspect that these old friends of theirs were in league with crooks. They had no simple and practical vocabularies for the parts and functions of their excretory and reproductive systems, and no such vocabularies for treachery and hypocrisy, either. Good manners had made them defenseless against predatory members of their own class.

The point that Vonnegut is making here is twofold. First, censorship is always a matter of enforcing one form or another of “good manners,” of claiming that a word or a poem or a song or a book or an image or a movie is somehow outside the bounds of what is socially acceptable. Second — and this point is worth repeating — when you shut down the range of what can be written or said, you are shutting down the range of what can be thought. Censorship is the tool of tyrants. The censor is never your friend.

Vonnegut’s remarks from an American Civil Liberties Union fundraiser at Sands Point, Long Island (16 September 1979), in the house that was said to be the model for Jay Gatsby’s home in F. Scott Fitzgerald, could be a prophetic anticipation of life in the U.S. in the Trump years: “What troubles me most about my lovely country is that its children are seldom taught that American freedom will vanish, if, when they grow up, and in the exercise of their duties as citizens, they insist that our courts and policemen and prisons be guided by divine or natural law” (p. 10).

Writing almost 50 years ago, Vonnegut anticipates that, one day, there will be plenty of Americans who will be willing to discard American democracy itself, so long as doing so corresponds with their notion of the will of God: “Well – all good things must come to an end, they say. So American freedom will come to an end, too, sooner or later. How will it end? As all freedoms end: by the surrender of our destinies to the highest laws” (p. 10).

In that connection, I might as well mention what may be the most famous part of this book: the letter that Vonnegut wrote to the chair of the Drake, North Dakota, school board in 1973, after he learned that “My novel Slaughterhouse-Five was actually burned in a furnace by a school committee there, and the school board made public statements about the unwholesomeness of the book” (p. 3).

Vonnegut’s letter is a hallmark of the fight for intellectual freedom. After mentioning that he is a family man, an educator, and a World War II infantry veteran and Purple Heart winner, Vonnegut reminds the Drake school board bureaucrat of the reasons why people across the United States of America were shocked and appalled that an American school board would burn an award-winning American novel:

I read in the newspaper that your community is mystified by the outcry from all over the country about what you have done. Well, you have discovered that Drake is a part of American civilization, and your fellow Americans can’t stand it that you have behaved in such an uncivilized way. Perhaps you will learn from this that books are sacred to free men for very good reasons, and that wars have been fought against nations which hate books and burn them. If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own. (pp. 5-6).

It is a mike-drop moment if ever there was one – and it is all the more important at a time when ideologically motivated activists across the United States are seeking to remove books from school libraries and public libraries. What these people don’t seem to understand – or what I hope they don’t understand – is that, if every library book that offends someone is removed, eventually there will be no library books. Not even the Bible.

I promised, at the beginning of this review, that I would reveal – and I don’t think this constitutes a spoiler – why this book is called Palm Sunday. The reason is that Vonnegut was asked, by Saint Clement’s Episcopal Church in New York City, to speak there on Palm Sunday in 1980, as “It is the custom of that church, which is also a theatre, to have a stranger preach just once a year” (p. 294).

Vonnegut chose, as his text, the Gospel of Saint John, Chapter 12, verses 1 through 8 – the passage that deals with Mary the sister of Martha wiping Jesus’ feet with aromatic ointment, while Judas Iscariot protests that the money that Mary used to purchase the ointment could instead have been given to the poor. Vonnegut connects this passage from the Greek Testament with his belief that “Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion, to the futility of thinking and striving anymore. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward – and since I can start thinking and striving again that much sooner” (pp. 297-98).

How does Vonnegut establish this seemingly unlikely connection? You’ll have to read the book to find out.

Palm Sunday is a miscellany; and perhaps inevitably, not all the parts that constitute it will work equally for all readers. (Vonnegut’s musical-comedy version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, for example, didn’t do a thing for me.) But it is a bracing experience to spend all this time in the company of such a gifted storyteller as he pulls aside the proverbial curtain and tells us all what has been on his mind.

So much to highlight! So many wise things to say! I love Vonnegut, and this book of miscellaneous this-and-that (it seems to be more college speeches he gave than anything else) is really top-notch. Some slow parts, some stuff that I skipped over, but overall very good.

I'll share a few of my highlights with you:

“That is how you get to be a writer, incidentally: you feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time."

"every one of the tales of lost innocence you receive will embody not only the startling discovery of the human soul, but of how diseased it can be."

"How sick was the soul revealed by the flash at Hiroshima? And I deny that it was a specifically American soul. It was the soul of every highly industrialized nation on earth, whether at war or at peace. How sick was it? It was so sick that it did not want to live anymore. What other sort of soul would create a new physics based on nightmares, would place into the hands of mere politicians a planet so “destabilized,” to borrow a CIA term, that the briefest fit of stupidity could easily guarantee the end of the world?"

"When you yourself put words on paper, remember that the most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not. Don’t you yourself like or dislike writers mainly for what they choose to show you or make you think about? Did you ever admire an empty-headed writer for his or her mastery of the language? No."

"readers insist on the very same thing. They want our pages to look very much like pages they have seen before. Why? It is because they themselves have a tough job to do, and they need all the help they can get from us. They have to identify thousands of little marks on paper, and make sense of them immediately. They have to read, an art so difficult that most people do not really master it even after having studied it all through grade school and high school—for twelve long years."

"The only way to get anything out of a writer’s brains is to leave him or her alone until he or she is damn well ready to write it down."

"Everybody knows that the dumbest people in any American university are in the education department, and English after that."

“What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured."

Ah, Mr. Vonnegut, we never did get to smoke those Pall Malls. So it goes....

Thought I'd read this this week in honor of the 70th anniversary of the firebombing of Dresden and the man who emerged with a mission to bring people together, to understand, help, and laugh with anyone and everyone despite all outrages.
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So I’ve read more books by Vonnegut than any other author, obviously I love his outlook on life and his style, yet I have not read this until now. I’ve mentioned my dislike of nonfiction and whatnot, and with Vonnegut here, yes, I would rather read any of his other writings before a collection of speeches, essays, and reflections. But for any lover of Vonnegut, this really is an interesting inclusion in his oeuvre. The average reader might not be carried away by this title --- but for a fan of Vonnegut’s philosophy, this is a must.

There’s really no section/chapter that blew me away, and the third chapter on his family tree was pretty dull (perhaps those who care about genealogy and family traits/dynasties would care more than I), but the rest of the book was an interesting compilation of thoughts and waxings about life – formally done in speeches of NYT pieces or informal reflections – that really expound on the voice he has created in his fictional works. It’s like watching him on a Daily Show interview for more than 9 minutes. It’s like wishing you could read one more interview with him before he died. And all of his reflections stand perfectly aside the persona he has created with his fiction, perhaps even adding a bit of reasoning behind his beliefs and choices of writings, not to mention just the basic bio information that any fan might want to know.

But it’s still classic Vonnegut all the way through. There are jokes a plenty, thoughts on suicide, religion, his responses to the burning of his books across the country, philosophies imparted to graduating classes, and – the high point of the book for me – a sermon he gave about a “joking Jesus” before his betrayal, showing that humor can be as powerful and honest and cutting as heartbreaking tears, even in a scene/subject matter as sacred as humans can experience.
Vonnegut was truly one in a million, and I’m glad for any chance to read any sentence/thought he came up with. It could be a three for its nonfiction blandness, or a five for its autobiographical impact expounding the Vonnegut persona. I’ll call it a four for my enjoyment, for the enjoyment and impact it will have for a Vonnegut fan, while realizing that his genealogy and terrible play about Jekyll/Hyde don’t really place it next to Cat’s Cradle, as far as his own writing goes…

Vonnegut fans will appreciate this hodgepodge of writings for its insights on his life, work, and family. It's long, at over 300 pages, and some parts are more interesting than others. I loved where he gave each of his books a grade (Palm Sunday itself got a C) and seeing the graphs of story plots (his rejected master's thesis at University of Chicago). There's a good reason much of this wasn't published before, but items like "The Big Space Fuck" and Vonnegut's "Free Thinking" speech to the 1974 graduating class of Hobart and William Smith Colleges make this book great.

Palm Sunday is full of classic Vonnegut humor, such as this gem from an interview included in the book:

Interviewer: What is a twerp in the strictest sense, in the original sense?
Vonnegut: It's a person who inserts a set of false teeth between the cheeks of his ass.
Interviewer: I see.
Vonnegut: I beg your pardon; between the cheeks of his or her ass. I'm always offending feminists that way. p. 98-99

"If you make people laugh or cry about little black marks on sheets of white paper, what is that but a practical joke? All the great story lines are great practical jokes that people fall for over and over again." p. 109

I also loved his comments in reaction to Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" (which begins "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness..."):

"I like 'Howl' a lot. Who wouldn't? It just doesn't have much to do with me or what happened to my friends. For one thing, I believe that the best minds of my generation were probably musicians and physicists and mathematicians and biologists and archaeologists and chess masters and so on, and Ginsberg's closest friends, if I'm not mistaken, were undergraduates in the English department of Columbia University.
"No offense intended, but it would never occur to me to look for the best minds in any generation in an undergraduate English department anywhere. I would certainly try the physics department of the music department first--and after that biochemistry.
"Everybody knows that the dumbest people in any American university are in the education department, and English after that." p. 156

As a musician, I agree with Vonnegut. As I usually do.

Having now read most of Vonnegut’s novels and loved them, I certainly enjoyed Palm Sunday. That being said, I would argue that quite a lot of this book is skip-able. For instance, the long chapter describing Vonnegut’s entire family history or the long chapter which is a reworking of ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ as a play. Much of what is written in this book will not be new for any Vonnegut fan, but there are nevertheless many great quotes littered throughout. Overall I would definitely recommend this book to anyone working their way through the Vonnegut catalogue, but probably wouldn’t recommend to more casual readers or anyone unfamiliar with his most well-known novels.