book review: Slaughterhouse-Five

One of my best friends I met only a couple years ago. Him and I would chat for hours over coffee and every time we got together I felt like it was the best use of my time to get deep into intellectual conversation with him. Like in our bantering of ideas I could find answers to figure out my life. I seem to remember, among many of his cultural references that would go over my head, that he mentioned Kurt Vonnegut and I had to admit that I had never read any of his work. While visiting another friend and browsing her bookshelf, I noticed several Vonnegut novels and she offered to let me borrow one. I went for Slaughterhouse-Five, the one I had heard so much about.

I didn't read Slaughterhouse-Five in two days like I have some of his others since this eye-opening experience. What I did feel, in the chunks of time which I devoted, too many days apart, to a chapter or two from this book, was a sense that everything I was reading was exactly the way I wanted it to be before my eyes graced the words. Each paragraph was conversational and natural. Modern and yet grounded in an infallibility that escapes most authors. The predictable and yet somehow surprising motif of "So it goes" feels like it was meant to be adapted to our everyday lives. As does Billy Pilgrim's time traveling. Whether real, crazy or simply retrospective is irrelevant. Being adducted by aliens feels as natural as the dialogue with his wife and innocent follies in World War Two. Throughout the story he interacts with characters who love him and who hate him, but he is unaffected by their frustration or praise. Billy Pilgrim is simply wandering through his life, whether from start to finish or haphazardly to different moments throughout. His calm, optimistic outlook on life in general is a work of art to discover, and when I decided to reread this novel two years after my first time, it was again unique and endearing. This time around took me less than a week, covering about a quarter of the book in each sitting. I am already imagining another winter of being curled up with a cup of tea and a novel. Anyone who's been to my house knows I have a bookshelf of "need to read"s. All the same, something feels like it will be missing until I read everything in Vonnegut's catalog.