Mother Night - Kurt Vonnegut

  

I have to be honest: I generally wouldn't pick a Vonnegut novel if I had a vast choice. I find his wackiness growing stale over the course of novels with a minimal (or at times a highly convoluted) plot. 

But the plot in Mother Night is actually clear and linear, and the wackiness grows gradually, like in so many books that I love from Jonathan Coe to Zadie Smith, or like in the best Coen brothers movies. And I read this book more or less at the same time as I read The Porcupine by Jonathan Barnes, so I was probably positively inclined towards a book about the Cold War and the legacy of the Second World War. 

In short: I really liked Mother Night, but in spite of that I still won't rush to read my next Vonnegut book.

Breakfast of Champions – Kurt Vonnegut

One of my latest Fopp acquisitions (actually strictly speaking my mom bought it for me…). After loving all the other Vonnegut novels and stories that I had read, the most I can say in this case is that Breakfast of Champions, despite being one of his most famous works, is alright (which I think is also how he felt about the novel himself).

Nothing more, nothing less. Alright. The book is not really a novel and neither it’s a long short story, and I can’t somehow push myself to label it a novella (it just doesn’t feel right). So, because of its felt pen drawings and its clear autobiographical traits I’ll just call it a gift that Vonnegut gave himself for his 50^th birthday, or maybe a literary way out of (or further into?) a mid-life crisis…

Bagombo Snuff Box – Kurt Vonnegut

I don’t even know how I managed (or was it my wife that managed?) to get my hands on this collection of short stories, but I’m glad I did.

I was expecting science fiction, but what I got was a wide range of styles, with stories often about American suburban life (the joy!), and in which the American dream is, in one way or another, crushed time and again.

Vonnegut’s humour and irony are very much there, like in all his other works, and some of the stories (like The Package) would have given me a bit of faith in the future of mankind – too bad they were written 60 years ago and the world is still very much an awful place… 

Galapagos – Kurt Vonnegut

I thought this was going to be the first properly sci-fi Vonnegut book I would read (the only other I ever read was Slaughterhouse 5, and I tend to consider this more as a funky historical novel). As it turns out, this book is more about the lives of a few castaways than about the genetic mutations that the human race undergoes over a million years.

Entertaining and funny, I really wish the book would also tell the reader what actually happened with all those humans who didn’t have the luxury of getting stranded in the Galapagos. Standard nuclear apocalypse? Usual alien attack? I wish I knew…

Luckily, there is a cuddly and furry Japanese seal-baby. Kind of wish I could see one of those…