Kurt Vonnegut, 1968 Date Read: 2/23/22
I surprised myself by liking this novel. I liked it quite a bit. I did not expect to. A satiric novel about WWII, time travel, and aliens really didn't sound like something I'd enjoy. But I am pleased to say I was wrong.
This is satire. This novel was actually funny. Unlike some other "satiric" novels I've not been able to finish (Catch-22, The Crying of Lot 49, etc) this novel was actually amusing and told an interesting story. A weird story. But a story, nonetheless.
One of the biggest moral bombshells handed to Billy by the Tralfamadorians, incidentally had to do with sex on Earth. They said their flying saucer crews had identified no few than seven sexes on Earth, each essential to reproduction. Again: Billy couldn't possibly imagine what five of those seven sexes had to do with the making of a baby, since they were sexually active only on the fourth dimension.
Take that "there's only two genders" idiots!
A few issues I had with the novel can be considered generational, as so many of my issues with other novels have been. The novel is hugely fat-phobic when describing Billy Pilgrim's wife, Valencia. Like, disgusting and really stereotypical (she's basically always eating candy bars). Also, there was a significant amount of ableism in the novel, calling disabled people "cripples" and describing how those cripples are being taken advantage of in a scam. Billy also considers cripples "pitiful" and believes everyone sees them this way.
In a later scene, he (an optometrist) is evaluating a patient described as being "a Mongolian idiot" whose mother has to "translate" for him. At first, I thought it meant a Mongolian, i.e. a person from Mongolia. I realized though that it actually refers to a person with Down's syndrome. They used to be called "mongoloids". Like, damn dude.
I found several things in this novel that have become part of common parlance. I'm not sure if they originated in this novel or if they were just popularized through it. They are:
Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference
the trope of humans being kept in a zoo on an alien planet
Again, I don't know if Vonnegut made these up (I doubt it) but this novel is probably where most people learnt them.
Besides the stated issues, I enjoyed this novel a lot more than I thought I would. It is definitely unique!
Length: 220 page
Rereadability: Probably. There is a lot going on and it might be easier to follow on a second read-through.
Classic: If "classic" means "something nobody else has done before but probably should be doing" then yes, this is a classic.
Comments