Older and Bleaker
Indiana legend Kurt Vonnegut has published another book.
Vonnegut's humor has become more pessimistic. 'I now give up on people,' he writes.Kurt VONNEGUT doesn't want any part of contemporary culture. Or, at least, that's what he says. At 82, he's lived through some of the worst history has to offer, from the firebombing of Dresden at the end of World War II — which he survived as a 22-year-old POW — to the attack on the World Trade Center and what he sees as the collapse of American values beneath an avalanche of public and private greed.
"Look," he says by phone from his home in Manhattan, his voice robust but rheumy, as befits someone who has smoked for 70 years. "I think we're a very bad idea. Look at the 20th century. You've got the Holocaust, two world wars, Hiroshima. Let's just call it off."
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posted by torporindy at 9/14/2005
3 Comments:
I'm embarrassed to admit that I've never read Vonnegut. But after reading that and seeing him on the Daily Show a few nights ago, I'm going to have to head down to the library and get one of his books.
Let me know how that goes. I'd recommend Breakfast of Champions for starters or his most famous book Slaughterhouse 5. Breakfast is a critique of America (especially the Midwest) that probably is more apt today than it was 30 years ago when published. The narrator in the story explains life in a small town to someone who presumably is not from this planet. You see how nuts humans (especially Americans) are when you step back and look at us through a fresh perspective.
I had the same thought as Jim when I watched TDS. Never read Vonnegut, always sort of meant to, maybe I ought to get on that.
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