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by guggalugalug
1316 days ago
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An uncle of mine loaned me his abridged Vonnegut shelf, including Galapagos. Sirens of Titan also is good. Very strange.
For people who do not read much but are desirous of learning more, I'm unsure of the best approach. Maybe Slaughterhouse-Five or Cat's Cradle?
Vonnegut deals in Scenes. It is why we love him. Like Fitzgerald, he wrote of a Movie Age. And so I evaluate him based upon his individual scenes, not books.
My favorite is from Breakfast of Champions. Kilgore Trout, who I believe was a trucker or maybe only a hitchhiker, walks onto the tarmac of a strip mall used car dealership. He has somehow warped thru various dimensionalities. He looks down at the ground.
It reminded me of my father's description of walking the sidewalks of nyc after eating a brown paper bag of buttons: kicking a suddenly kaleidoscopic shard of glass. Or as Pynchon would say, you see "the warp and woof" of things. |
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"The impetus to create Kilgore Trout as a character, Vonnegut suggested in a 1979 NYPR interview, was the convenience it offered to turn science-fiction plots into humorous parables. "Kilgore Trout was more or less invented by a friend of mine, Knox Burger, who was my editor in the early days. He did not suggest that I do this, but he said, 'You know, the problem with science-fiction? It’s much more fun to hear someone tell the story of the book than to read the story itself.' And it’s true: If you paraphrase a science-fiction story, it comes out as a very elegant joke, and it’s over in a minute or so. It’s a tedious business to read all the surrounding material. So I started summarizing [them], and I suppose I’ve now summarized 50 novels I will never have to write, and spared people the reading of them."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilgore_Trout