Another review in the KISS series (Keep It Short, Steve)

In Anne Fadiman’s superb book about books called Ex Libris, she divides readers into two categories: those who keep their books in pristine condition (courtly lovers) and those who delight in marginalia (carnal lovers). I started out as one of the former (conditioned, no doubt, by fear of library fines), but became one of the latter. Cat’s Cradle was my first prurient experience, dating back to high school. Part of the reason was that I snagged my copy at a garage sale for a dime – cheap even then. But the real motivation was to highlight this great little rhyme:

n  Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?'
Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand.n

That one deserved stars, a yellow marker, and the granddaddy of all desecrations – a dog-ear. I liked how it was framed as such a natural conclusion to the activity of thinking. We tell ourselves that our efforts to understand have paid off.

If I’m honest, I don’t recall much of the book’s premise. I remember thinking Vonnegut was one of those cool, sort of counter-cultural writers who wielded his satirical axe well. He may have been a bit darker than Tom Robbins, and less playful with his words, but he was similarly entertaining, incisive and free-wheeling. The book tracks the unusual offspring of the man who invented the A-bomb. They possess a substance called ice-nine that can make water freeze at room temperatures. And you can imagine what might happen if it fell into the wrong hands. The Russians and Americans procured some as did the dictator of a secluded Caribbean island where a religion called Bokononism is practiced despite being illegal and, according to Bokonon himself, based on lies. Still, anything that sells “living by the harmless untruths that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy” will have its appeal.

Vonnegut would poke fun at religion, politics, and just about any other human institution where our base natures hide in some gussied up form. And he may well have had a point. If I remember this cautionary tale correctly, a follow-up poem of my own might apply:

n  Monkey got to play, fish got to swim;
Man got to risk his life to some psycho’s whim.
Monkey got to doze, fish got to coast;
Man got to rest assured he won’t become a ghost.n

And it may give us pause.

Човек цял живот се учи. Първо родителите го учат, после по-късно в живота други хора и неща. Смятам, че в моя живот може да се ситуира определен период, в който Кърт Вонегът ме е учил как се живее, как се приемат гадните неща и как се подминават глупостите. За този, който е отворен да слуша, Вонегът може да го научи на много.

Този човек е велик.

It occurred to me while reading this novel that I've lived my life with the subliminal terror of some button being pushed, some singular choice being made, that suddenly plunges the world into nuclear winter and that will be the end of us. I'm too young to remember duck-and-cover exercises in elementary school or the Cuban missile crisis but the mini-series The Day After was a formative experience, one that defined this terror, maybe, for my generation; and now it's October 2022, and once again we humans are living with a real live maybe-this-time-it-will-really-happen, nuclear-war threat to the planet, where the fallout of course will not respect international borders, and where a singular madman in Russia seems unstoppable, should he choose to unleash a nuclear holocaust...and yet. When I came to the end of this book, about just this fear, I realized that I'm no longer as afraid of that singular moment where a maniacal leader makes the call, and the bomb is dropped, and a button pushed, as I'm afraid of the cumulative worldwide genocide that is taking place minute by minute and decision by decision as we continue driving our cars, and flying in airplanes, and eating our farting cows, and sleepwalking toward the doom of our planet.

Thanks, Kurt Vonnegut.

So it goes.

This started off really interesting but then it started to drag and got a bit ridiculous :(

Così andai a mia volta dal mosaicista, lo osservai per un po', poi gli dissi: "La invidio".
"L'ho sempre saputo" disse lui con un sospiro, "che se avessi aspettato abbastanza, sarebbe arrivato qualcuno a invidiarmi. Continuavo a ripetermi di pazientare, che, prima o poi, sarebbe arrivato un invidioso".

Tutte le verità che sto per dirvi sono spudorate MENZOGNE:
"Una grande rivelazione Bokononiana tutta per me:
-non ho amato questo romanzo,
-è troppo lungo,
-non fa riflettere sulla fine del mondo,
-non parla dell'imbecillità della gente,
-non mette a nudo la società con una grandiosa parodia,
-non mi ha fatto ridere come un cretino ad ogni pagina,
-non ha dialoghi brillanti e folli cha a me piacciono tanto,
-sicuramente domani mattina lo avrò dimenticato,
-non leggetelo."

"La gente deve pur parlare di qualcosa per tenere in esercizio le corde vocali, in modo da avere una bella voce nel caso gli capiti di avere qualcosa di veramente significativo da dire."

----------------------------------
So I went back to the mosaicist, I observed him for a while, then I told him: "I envy her".
"I always knew," he sighed, "that if I waited long enough, someone would come to envy me. I kept telling myself to be patient, that sooner or later an envious man would come".

The truths I am about to tell you are shameless LIES:
-I didn't love this novel,
-It's too long,
-does not make you think about the end of the world,
-doesn't talk about people's imbecility,
-does not expose society with a grandiose parody,
-it didn't make me laugh like an idiot on every page,
-it doesn't have brilliant and crazy dialogues that I like a lot,
-surely tomorrow morning I will have forgotten,
-don't read it."

"People have to talk about something to keep their vocal cords working, so they have a nice voice in case they happen to have something really meaningful to say."

This was a difficult re-read. In the flush of youth, when I first read it (at my cynical, pessimistic - and arrogant - peak), every line spoke to me. Now, I am amazed at how flimsy the story, and how brittle and bleak - but oh-so-deeply entrenched - is the cynicism. I don't remember it that way. Today, it made me deeply, almost unbearably sad to think that the world - that I - felt so aligned with the dominant worldview of this novel. It still speaks to me, but it says different things.

I haven't re-read Slaughterhouse Five, so can't know right now if I'd have the same response to it, but I can say that in Cat's Cradle there is no relief from the pessimism with any of Vonnegut's trademark compassion, humanism or humour, as there is in, for example, Mother Night or Jailbird, both of which remain enduring favourites of mine upon many re-reads.

All of Vonnegut's novels are, by definition, permeated with a deep pessimism - but most of them offer up at least some slim hope, usually in the form of a single human being's ability to connect with another, or even just need that connection (which at least points to his or her humanity). There is the opportunity for atonement for wrongs done which provides some comfort, if not absolution. There is a sense of humanity's deep flaws, but also its resilience and capacity to love.

There is none of that here.

Here, conversations and human relationships are superficial, cliché-ridden, vapid - even worse, unnecessary. Traditional connections between people are lampooned as granfaloons - a gentle and whimsical irony, even the word itself, that betrays a deeper violation of trust and breakdown of social structure.

Science and scientists create world-destroying technologies simply because they can, and because they are so far removed from any connection to humanity, love, a moral or ethical system, that they have no compunction or qualms in doing so.

The drive for conventional sex - as opposed to the Bokononist practice of boku-maru - has evaporated as its only value is not to express love or build intimacy, but for procreation - which dampens desire faster than a cold shower in a post-Ice Nine world. Politics have failed, and are so irrelevant and corrupt that a random stranger who shows up on a remote island is named president because no one else wants the job.

The comfort of religion is non-existent: Bokononism, the closest thing to a spiritual belief system, undermines the need for belief and a sense of purpose, and its own believers, in a layered irony so serpentine it almost sucks itself into an intellectual black hole. Everyone believes in it in secret, which is not secret, although it is punishable by death. Everyone turns to it for comfort in times of both celebration and trauma, and it invariably mocks them with its own meaninglessness.

Published in 1963, this novel is of a time and place (as was I when I first read it) that no longer exists in exactly this form, although it is hauntingly, chillingly contemporary and because written as an allegory, easily transposed. Although this particular Cat's Cradle, a metaphor for seeking pattern and meaning with its added layer of infinite futility, is an allegory for the scientists who first split the atom and the weaponry of mass destruction to which that accomplishment led, it is an end-times scenario that offers maximum flexibility across time and remains disturbingly apt.

Vonnegut's anger at that particular act, those men, that world is palpable - it radiates from the page.

I've written before on goodreads that the difference between today and 1963 is that the dangers we now face - although surely as potentially planet-destroying - are still far enough away to afford us the false comfort of deniability. Not so in 1963. Vonnegut himself had seen the atom bomb deployed. He knew how the world could end, and it was imminent. In Cat's Cradle, he is at his most nihilistic - he believes, as the San Lorenzans did after Ice Nine was let loose, that suicide is absolutely the only sane answer in a doomed world.

In short, though its prose barely holds together as a story, and though its humour is so dark as to be invisible (at least to this reader, on this read), this novel's satire is so biting, its cynicism so pervasive, its sense of futility and purposelessness so extreme, that the thing almost felt hot to the touch. As hard as it was to read, it's equally hard not to acknowledge it as a masterpiece.

What is it about Vonnegut's authorial voice? It's simultaneously wry and tender, sarcastic and gentle. I don't know of any other authors that can manage that particular combination. And here, writing about the end of the world in so many different ways, it is on full display.

Note: The rest of this review has been withdrawn due to the recent changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to this decision here.

In the meantime, you can read the entire review at Smorgasbook

“What hope can there be for mankind,” I thought, “when there are such men as Felix Hoenikker to give such playthings as ice-nine to such short-sighted children as almost all men and women are?”

And I remembered The Fourteenth Book of Bokonon, which I had read in its entirety the night before. The Fourteenth Book is entitled, “What Can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?”

It doesn’t take long to read The Fourteenth Book. It consists of one word and a period.

This is it:

“Nothing.”

Our narrator, John, is looking back on his life before. He had been writing a book about the bombing of Hiroshima he planned to call The Day the World Ended. He was interviewing family and acquaintances of the late Dr. Felix Hoenikker, a co-creator of the atomic bomb, when he learned that Dr. Hoenikker had invented something potentially even more dangerous than nuclear weapons: ice-nine, a type of water that’s solid at room temperature and converts any regular water it touches into more ice-nine—placing the entire world in peril of essentially flash freezing.

The tone in Cat’s Cradle is relentlessly satirical and often sarcastic. It is surely not a coincidence that the focus of the end of the world in this book, written a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, takes place on a (fictional) Caribbean island named San Lorenzo. The book explores and skewers numerous serious ideas, starting with religion and technology. But perhaps the biggest target is science, or more specifically, scientists. Mr. Vonnegut would have wholeheartedly agreed with Ian Malcolm in  Jurassic Park that “Scientists are actually preoccupied with accomplishment. So they are focused on whether they can do something. They never stop to ask if they should do something.”

Cat’s Cradle is an interesting reading experience. It meanders through an odd assortment of characters—the three Hoenikker children and several others—but all the while slowly drawing you into the existential danger presented by the ice-nine. I didn’t love this book the way I loved  Slaughterhouse-Five, but it’s a fast, thought-provoking read. Recommended.

Was an accidental reread but my thoughts of this hasn't changed much
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I wanted to enjoy it a lot more then I did. Most of the satire and whatnot went over my head and I wasn't able to grasp the story overall. But what I did was able to grasp I quite enjoyed. Might not have been the best time to read or something to rush through as I have to return it to the library soon

New review:
One of my most wtf reads of 2017. (How the fuck have I been using this site for 5 years!? Also why am I not more rich or famous? Can you help me out with that okay cheers. Baby needs a new pair of books!)

I was hoping this would be one of those books that I read the first time just to prove to myself I can get to the end, then a second time the fog would clear and it would all make sense. That happens with some of my fave books ever. But, nah, it just... I couldn't tell what I was supposed to make of any situation, what Vonnegut was trying to tell me. Is Bokononism a good thing? A bad thing? What does he think about these characters? They explain their attitudes towards life and, what? Are those attitudes good or bad? Well if you're asking me to evaluate, I'd have to know what the point is in what they're saying. Might need them to be memorable characters so I can keep track of them more than two pages also.

It seems very much indicative of the 60s in a way I can't connect to. (People love when you admit shit like this in book reviews. I can hear them clicking away their replies under the guise of assisting my understanding of this work but really just going nyah nyah I got it you didn't. Go float your goat elsewhere! I don't even know you.)

But this kind of thing reassures me, because, like, when I send stuff out to publishers and they say they didn't connect with it, I think, if I were running a publisher, I'd probably pass on Vonnegut and like 60% of the stuff I buy for myself to read. My own damn recommendations!

That's correct: I'm saying I'm a better writer than Kurt Vonnegut. (Jk ;) We're so different in subject matter it would be unfair for someone to compare him to me ;))))))))))

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Original review:
One of my most wtf reads of 2012.

Nothing in this review is true.

As much as I enjoy reading Vonnegut, one of the nagging little doubts I always have is that I'm missing something. That there's a hidden message in there that I'm not picking up on. Or, on the other hand, that I am picking up messages that just aren't there.

Which is, perhaps, the point of the whole book.

The world is full of lies. Good lies, bad lies and indifferent lies, but lies nonetheless, and we pick and choose the lies that make our lives happiest. The lie that we know more than other people, or that we are chosen by one deity or another. They're all lies, and the acknowledgment of that is.... depressing.

So, rather than just write about that, Vonnegut wrapped it in a "religion" known as Bokononism - the indigenous and completely artificial "faith" of the island of San Lorenzo. And in order to tell us about Bokononism, we need a narrator - and a disaster. Which brings us to Ice-Nine.

A variant of water ice which is the final creation of the father of the atom bomb - Dr. Felix Hoenikker - Ice-Nine is solid at temperatures up to 45.8°C (114.4°F). A single crystal of Ice-Nine can convert any liquid water it touches, which will in turn convert any other water in contact with that. If Ice-Nine were to come into contact with a natural body of water, the chain reaction would lead to the total freezing of the planet Earth.

The narrator's journey to the end of the world is an interesting one, started by a search for the truth and ended with the death of humanity. As, perhaps, all searches for truth must.

Unfortunately I had to power through this one. This is my fourth Kurt Vonnegut story and I think he's written better books. He does a good job of creating black humor with the use of technology and religion. The overall theme was the fatalistic warning of the misuse of technology.

The second theme was the danger of blindly following religious precepts. I am a religious and spiritual person but I interpreted this book as the dangers of fundamentalism when religion goes off the deep end. In the book, Bokononism is a newly created/revelated religion and follows the negative stereotype: "The newer the religion, the weirder it gets."

I found 'Mother Night' and 'Player Piano' much more enjoyable. These books and 'Slaughterhouse Five' are good starting points for someone new to Kurt Vonnegut. Thanks!