Review: Slaughterhouse-Five

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This might be the strangest book I have ever read. I loved it. I think it's Billy Pilgrim's fatalism that I found peculiarly appealing. How did Vonnegut create a voice so pessimistic without having that voice be "judgey"? For me the appeal is in that phenomena.

I have officially begun my quest to read all that Vonnegut wrote.

I do take some comfort (since I'm getting to know this writer almost a decade after his death) that on his very own planet of Tralfamadore he is still very much alive, since the inhabitants there see all time as simultaneously present.

Although Vonnegut, through Pilgrim, ends up sounding like he doesn't believe in much at all, he is funny and rather endearing. Maybe I'm the only one who finds it amusing when an author convincingly points out the absence of progress on Earth.

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