So it goes

Troppo doloroso per Vonnegut scrivere questo libro. Tra i fatti raccontati e la loro rappresentazione ha dovuto mettere un tempo sufficiente, vent'anni, per smorzarne il terrore, l'orrore, il dolore.

Sì, perchè qui c'è lui e la sua esperienza nella seconda guerra mondiale, come fante americano impegnato nella liberazione dell'Europa dall'esercito tedesco. Prigioniero di guerra, si ritroverà sotto uno dei più terribili bombardamenti della storia, quello di Dresda, di cui a tutt'oggi non ci sono neppure cifre certe sul numero dei morti, visto che la potenza di fuoco ha ridotto tanti ad un mucchietto di cenere. Si è salvato grazie al rifugio trovato nel mattatoio nr. 5.

Ce la racconta in modo affatto originale, fuori dagli schemi, con un pizzico di ironia/humor nero, ed efficacemente. In prima persona e nei panni del suo alter ego, Billy Pilgrim, incastona quell'evento nel nastro temporale della vita di un uomo, srotolato attraverso continui salti temporali. Una vita che come tutte si sviluppa in modo spesso casuale e con eventi ed esiti imprevedibili, talvolta negativi, talvolta positivi. E sebbene il bilancio finale sia tutto sommato in attivo, quell'evento rimane lì, non evitabile, neppure fuggendo sul pianeta Tralfamadore.

E quindi, che fare? La speranza che la politica e l'umanità impari dal passato non aiuta. Il commilitone ritrovato, il ritorno a Dresda, l'amicizia con un taxista locale che ha perso la madre in quel bombardamento, ci emozionano, già nel primo capitolo, prima di realizzare che Dresda è sotto il dominio sovietico in piena guerra fredda. Nell'ultimo capitolo, amaramente, V. rileva che mentre termina questo libro gli USA sono impegnati nella guerra del Vietman e Kennedy e M.L.King sono stati da poco assassinati. Potremmo continuare noi, fino al presente.

"Puu-tii-uiit?" cinguetta e ci interroga l'uccello che attraversa il libro, incapace di comprendere la nostra insensatezza. 

Forse aiuta tornare a srotolare il nastro della propria vita e trovare conforto e carburante in tutte le cose buone che ci sono e ci sono state, e prendere il resto come viene, perché così va la vita (so it goes). 


Guernica, Picasso

here it is. yet another book that i didnt read in school but decided to pick up later in life. and i think this is one of the rare instances where i think i would have benefited from some educational instruction to supplement my reading, because i did not seem to get this on my own.

i mean, on a surface level, i understood the anti-war tones and commentary on society in general, but anything deeper than that eluded me. so taking this at face value, i think its safe to say this is a really weird book. lol.

also, i wasnt really a fan at how women were portrayed in this. they were always noted as being ugly, or dull, or only good for sex. and i know many people might say thats vonneguts signature satire, but it definitely rubbed me the wrong way.

overall, i get that this story evokes much needed discussion on several important issues. however, this didnt impact me as significantly as it was probably meant to. so it goes…

↠ 2.5 stars

This book is an absolute masterpiece and it makes it clear in every single sentence. I think it is best to go into it without knowing too much about the plot. You just got to take it as it comes, so to say.

Before reading, I was worried that I might have trouble with the writing style. English isn't my first language and the older a book is, the more trouble I seem to have with the writing (because of obsolete words, unusual sentence structures, ect.). However, my worry was totally for nothing in this case. I found the entire book very easy to read (which is even more surprising considering the heavy topics that get dealt with). I also loved how there were many little passages and repetitions of certain phrases. It seemed fitting somehow.

I would have never guessed that the blend of a war story with Science Fiction could work so well! It gives it so much room for analysing and interpretation.
Honestly, I could write a thousand more reasons why I loved this book, but in the end I would just repeat myself, because I seriously just loved every.single.little.thing! I highly recommend everyone to give it a shot.

This was my first Vonnegut book, but it won’t be my last.

Back in high school, a friend gave me a paperback copy of Breakfast Of Champions, and I leafed through it, amused at the drawings, but didn’t read it. (I think I was going through my Salinger stage… or perhaps it was my Dickens stage.) Now I want to find it in my boxes of old things. I want to read more from this strange, misanthropic (?), genre-busting, inventive and oddly soulful and philosophical author.

Slaughterhouse-Five has expanded in my imagination. The more I think about it and revisit certain passages, the more I admire it and recognize it as a great 20th century novel.

Vonnegut writes these deceptively simple declarative sentences, jumps around in time, introduces characters who won’t reappear until much later (if at all), and sometimes stealthily buries the most moving and profound passages in the middle of some chapter that’s (seemingly) about something else.

I won’t bother with a plot summary. The main character is the sweetly-named Billy Pilgrim, an optometrist with a wife and two children. As a tall, thin, sickly and generally incompetent American soldier and POW during WW2, he miraculously survived the firebombing of Dresden in 1945. After returning to America and continuing his life, he became “unstuck in time” – time-travelling various episodes, without any reason. Oh yeah, and at one point he was also abducted by aliens.

Here is a picture of Dresden before the war. It was one of the most beautiful cities, often compared to Florence.



And here is a picture after.



The book is a puzzle it's up to the reader to figure out. How much is “real”? Are Billy’s memories caused by the aliens, by his experiences in the war? If you survived being slaughtered because of being hidden in a slaughterhouse, wouldn’t that kind of make you unhinged?

It takes a while to get used to the structure, which at first seems arbitrary. But the deeper you get into the book you realize it's anything but.

There are moments in the narration that take you aback, such as this one in Chapter 8:

And then it developed that Campbell was not going to go unanswered after all. Poor old Derby, the doomed high school teacher, lumbered to his feet for what was probably the finest moment in his life. There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.

Right in the middle of a paragraph, the narrator brings up the very thing you’re thinking about its characters (or non-characters), the lack of dramatic incident and cause and effect! One of the main effects of war is that people are discouraged from being characters. Fascinating. How do you make sense of something as absurd and senseless as war? Does something like cause and effect even apply to this situation?

A page or two later, Vonnegut gives us this aside about the sci-fi writer Kilgore Trout, who I believe shows up in some other books:

Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer.
So it goes.

What an absolutely dead-on, if cynical, summation of the effects of a capitalist-driven society.

And in an earlier section about the aliens on the planet Tralfamadore, we’re given this, told to Billy by a Tralfamadorian "voice":

“There are no telegrams on Tralfamadore. But you’re right: each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message – describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn’t any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.”

Every word I’ve bolded applies to this book as well. In a way, many of them apply to life in general.

The phrase that Vonnegut uses when he mentions a death – of any sort – in the book is quite simple: “So it goes.” There’s something so ordinary, resigned, and absurdly all-accepting about these three little words. Sometimes the effect is annoying, sometimes funny, and sometimes just devastating.

Pay attention. We’ve been told how to read the book. When seen all at once, it “produces an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep.”

Indeed. Art is a profound act of optimism, especially in the face of acts of meaningless violence and slaughter. So it goes.

It was a movie about American bombers in World War II and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans though and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.

Somehow, I had never read Slaughterhouse-Five. Well, it’s a classic for a reason.

Listen: Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time. He travels backwards and forwards to various points in his life, trying to make sense of what happened to him in World War 2, up to and including witnessing the firebombing of Dresden. The book is wonderfully jumbled, leaving the reader as uncertain as Billy about the meaning and connection of the various threads of his life. Moving and gripping, Slaughterhouse-Five is an amazing experience. An absolute must read.

“How nice -- to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.”

The author was taken as prisioner of war and was in Dresden (Germany) when it was bombard. So it goes. Having failed to write a book on his war experiences - probably because of psychological stress involved in it ; he veils himself in character of Bill:

“Every so often, for no apparent reason, Billy Pilgrim would find himself weeping. Nobody ever caught Billy doing it, only the doctor knew. It was an extremely quiet thing Billy did and not very moist."

The transition from writer to character happens within the book and thus loosing the point where reality ends and fiction starts. This in fact, is beauty of book – it is not the best war novel, but it shows beautifully how easy it is for a disturbed person to lose her/himself into world of fiction.

When I saw aliens in it and easy, frequently funny narration - I start doubting the truth of Billy's war experiences as well but “All this happened, more or less.” The aliens are in fact are result of Billy's schizophrenia.

His sufferings, desire to escape and sexual desires combined to create a world of illusions, where he created for himself the answers to problems that tormented him in real life. (the sci-fiction he liked to read gave him material for same)

The so called time travel are the old memories that keep imposing themselves upon him. There is no escaping those old memories (which is veiled in forever existence of time): “All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.”

The determinism, in above quote, which is just fancy word for fatalism, is a recurring theme in this book:

“Among the things Billy pilgrim could not change were the past, present, and future.”

“- Why me?
- That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?
- Yes.
- Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.”

When asked if he was happy in his prison in alien planet, he replied ‘about as happy as he was on Earth. Such fatalism stop him from taking any stand, through out the book Billy is like fish caught off water – just struggling to stay alive.

“One of main effect of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.”

And not to mention, Vonnegut’s usual satire on general stupidity of humanity (particularly war), his questioning of assumptions we hold (specially that seven parent thing) etc.

“Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.”

A re-read.
Loved this so much better the 2nd time around.
Great unique story. Addictive.

I have to admit to being somewhat baffled by the acclaim Slaughterhouse-5 has received over the years. Sure, the story is interesting. It has a fascinating and mostly successful blend of tragedy and comic relief. And yes, I guess the fractured structure and time-travelling element must have been quite novel and original back in the day. But that doesn't excuse the book's flaws, of which there are a great many in my (seemingly unconventional) opinion. Take, for instance, Vonnegut's endless repetition of the phrase 'So it goes.' Wikipedia informs me it crops up 106 times in the book. It felt like three hundred times to me. About forty pages into the book, I was so fed up with the words 'So it goes' that I felt like hurling the book across the room, something I have not done since trying to read up on French semiotics back in the 1990s. I got used to coming across the words every two pages or so eventually, but I never grew to like them. God, no.

I found some other nits to pick, too. Some of them were small and trivial and frankly rather ridiculous, such as -- wait for it -- the hyphen in the book's title. Seriously, what is that hyphen doing there? There's no need for a hyphen there. Couldn't someone have removed it, like, 437 editions ago? And while I'm at it, couldn't some discerning editor have done something about the monotonous quality of Vonnegut's prose -- about the interminable repetition of short subject-verb-object sentences? Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying all authors should use Henry James- or Claire Messud-length sentences. Heaven forbid. I'm actually rather fond of minimalism, both in visual art and in writing. But Vonnegut's prose is so sparse and simplistic it's monotonous rather than minimalist, to the point where I frequently found myself wishing for a run-on sentence every now and then, or for an actual in-depth description of something. I hardly ever got either. As a result, there were times when I felt like I was reading a bare-bones outline of a story rather than the story itself. Granted, it was an interesting outline, larded with pleasing ideas and observations, but still, I think the story could have been told in a more effective way. A less annoying way, too.

As for the plot, I liked it. I liked the little vignettes Vonnegut came up with and the colourful characters he created (the British officers being my particular favourites). I liked the fact that you're never quite sure whether Billy is suffering from dementia, brain damage or some kind of delayed post-traumatic stress disorder, or whether there is some actual time-travelling going on. I even liked the jarring switches in perspective, although I think they could have been handled in a slightly more subtle manner. And I liked the book's anti-war message, weak and defeatist though it seemed to be. In short, I liked the book, but it took some doing. I hope I'll be less annoyed by the two other Vonnegut books I have sitting on my shelves, Breakfast of Champions and Cat's Cradle.

At first, the absurdity of Slaughterhouse-Five (now read 5 times) makes it difficult to take seriously.



However, part of Vonnegut's magic is that this absurdity becomes impossible to ignore (and increasingly powerful as the narrative moves forward). Vonnegut actually wants you to focus on the absurd. It works itself not only into the narrative, where our protagonist becomes unstuck in time and is abducted by aliens, but also into questions about war, civilization, identity and theories of time (and how this impacts perceptions of life and death). Slaughterhouse-Five didn't grab me right away, but as I continued to read, Vonnegut's explorations become more intriguing and insightful. I know I've commented on Vonnegut's perspective on the world in other reviews. You wonder how Vonnegut made the leaps he did and when you think about them there's something completely rational about these leaps (which are taken to possibly irrational extremes). In any event, Slaughterhouse-Five is a book I wouldn't hesitate to recommend; Vonnegut's unique perspective continues to be fresh and interesting...And so it goes!

This is a simple story written in order to put the mind at thought in a way most complicated works won't be able to! At the heart of this novel lies the destruction of Dresden .. a German city, during the second world war. The most attractive thing about this book is the time structure that goes zigzagging all through the book.

The protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, gets unstuck in time every now and then introducing us to characters, stories and timelines that tells us a hell lot of stuff about war and its effects on people, their minds and their lives. No doubt, war is a nasty business!

Another amazing feature of the book is the heartless humor Vonnegut uses describing the most cruel of scenes. It takes time to get into the essence of this book but once there you start enjoying the way of it. This book is deep and requires correct knowledge and information to appreciate even the satire in it.

"And so it goes..."

Loved spending time reading it.
5 stars!

My favourite book.

The God of Accidents

Only God knows all of time as if it were the same instant; only God can annihilate the Universe; only God knows our innermost thoughts: so contends Judaic, Christian, and Muslim theology. For God, therefore, there is no cause and effect; everything just is. And because there is no cause and effect, there is no issue of free will. Free will is an idea created by human beings who can't imagine any other way to escape the mechanical inevitability of causality.

In Slaughterhouse 5, the alien race of Tralfamadorians are not just god-like in their ability to transit the Universe, they are collectively God in their power over time and existence itself. The book is a subtle and very clever theology that has fundamental implications for morality and ethics.

Billy Pilgrim is the recipient of important revelations from the divine Tralfamadorians. The first revelation is that although death is a real certainty, it doesn't matter because one can revisit moments in one's life ad infinitum; resurrection is part of existence.

Second, God is neither external to the Universe, nor pantheistically distributed throughout it; rather God is a very discrete presence in the Universe, as well as in charge of it. Importantly for the fate of everyone, God is also as hapless as human beings; he can't change himself or his fate.

The most significant revelation is that Kilgore Trout, the famous science fiction writer and newspaper delivery boss, is God's prophet, whose every pronouncement is sarcastic.

It's difficult to say what portion of these revelations come directly from the divine source and what portion comes through Kilgore Trout's explorations into Billy's consciousness. Nevertheless the bottom line is clear: “Everything is all right, and everybody has to do exactly what he does.” In other words, life is so screwy that it can neither be analysed nor rationalised. Not the best of all possible worlds, but the only one possible. Accident willing.