Hardcover, 186 pages
English language
Published March 1969 by Delacorte Press.
Kurt Vonnegut's long-awaited war novel proves to be a miracle of compression. It is a contemporary Pilgrim's Progress, with the hero named, curiously enough, Billy Pilgrim. He is the son of an American barber. He serves as a chaplain's assistant in the Second World War, is captured by the Germans, survives the largest massacre in European history, the fire bombing of Dresden.
(Vonnegut, too, was a prisoner of war and saw that fire storm.)
Billy Pilgrim becomes an optometrist after the war, makes a great deal of money, is kidnapped by a flying saucer from the planet Tralfamadore on his daughter's wedding night. He is mated in public in a zoo on that planet—to a star of many Earthling blue movies, the gorgeous Montana Wildhack.
And so on.
Beautiful.
An incredible and innovative book full of wisdom, humor, purpose, and the kind of writing that makes you feel like the author is sitting by your side telling you the story. I was sad for it to come to an end. So it goes.
Da avvicinare alla Trilogia della Città di K. Incomprensibile per gli umani.
It's a little embarrassing to confess that I'd never read Vonnegut. That's not true. I read Harrison Bergeron in some sort of enrichment reader in 6th grade. I thought that was pretty great, and the only story I remember fondly from that age outside of an Edgar Allen Poe collection that I probably read until the cover came off, and then read again. Somehow I always expected this book to be some kind of hippie acid trip because the people I knew growing up who read it had black light posters and blew smoke into their iguanas' faces to give them a contact high. I did not expect the book to be about WWII, to play with time the way it did, or to make me cry, not for anything in particular, but just a little catharsis for a moment after the book was finished. The book is lively and …
It's a little embarrassing to confess that I'd never read Vonnegut. That's not true. I read Harrison Bergeron in some sort of enrichment reader in 6th grade. I thought that was pretty great, and the only story I remember fondly from that age outside of an Edgar Allen Poe collection that I probably read until the cover came off, and then read again. Somehow I always expected this book to be some kind of hippie acid trip because the people I knew growing up who read it had black light posters and blew smoke into their iguanas' faces to give them a contact high. I did not expect the book to be about WWII, to play with time the way it did, or to make me cry, not for anything in particular, but just a little catharsis for a moment after the book was finished. The book is lively and readable, and feels at all points as though you've read it before, but can still be utterly disarming, especially when humor gives way to Vonnegut's most humane or damning observations.
