Procure Matadouro Cinco Ou A Cruzada Das Crianças Translated By Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Print

finally read Vonnegut, I finally read a war novel, And after a long time I finally read something with so many GR ratings and a decent number of reviews which is precisely the reason I have nothing much to add to the already expressed views here.
So I urge you to indulge me to state a personal anecdote, Thank You.

My Grandfather was a POW during IndoChina war and remained in confinement for some six months, By the time I got to know about it I had already watched too many movies and crammed endless number of answers about when and where such n such war was fought.
But I was naïve and lets assume innocent and someone who was yet to learn to ask the right questions, So the fact that someone so close in the family had witness something I only read in schoolbooks was utterly fascinating for me, Thus began my streak of stupid questions,

Me: Did you kill someone Did they torture you Did you dig some sort of tunnel to escape And so on,

My Grandpa gave this hearty laugh he is famous for and said that Im missing one important question: Why the war happened at first place I thought for a while and answered: Because it always happens.


I cant recall properly what he replied to that but it was something on the lines of this: I wish the answer changes when youll grow up because as of now thats exactly how it is.
War always happens.

With books like SlaughterhouseFive Schlachthöffünf, its not the writing which matters but simply the ideas and thoughts it carries which transgresses the literary boundaries and create a place in the heart of the readers as a humble reminder that Love happens, Hate happens, Life happens, Death happens, Peace happens, War happens and sometimes Shit happens.
Update: I decided to upgrade the rating to, Still on my mind after more thanyear,

This was such a pleasant surprise, This book has been on my toread list since the beginning of my activity on Goodreads and I did a good job avoiding to read it, I was sure I would not like it since:, I am not a fan of books/movies about war and, I thought this sciencefiction satire style was not for me, I only wanted to read it because it is a classic and I resolved to read more of those modern or not, This book kept bumping on different lists so I could not escape its lure,

Oh, I judged this book so wrongly, Actually, I liked it a lot, I thought the time travelling, the fractured prose and the detached tone of the narrator were very effective to portrait the Dresden atrocities and how to witness this can impact your life forever.
Contains spoilers
SlaughterhouseFive is about a man called Billy Pilgrim who timetravels frequently, He was in the Second World War and, captured, was sent to Dresden to work in a malt syrup factory before the city was bombed, He studied optometry and had a nervous breakdown, He

married the daughter of a rich optometrist, and became rich as well, He was abducted by aliens called Tralfamadorians, who put him in a zoo with a young porn actress, Montana Wildhack, whom they also abducted, He had a daughter called Barbara and a son called Robert, He was in a plane crash that killed everyone except him and the copilot, Rushing to the hospital in frantic worry, his wife Valencia dies in a car accident, He gets to meet his favourite author, an unsuccessful scifi writer called Kilgore Trout, "SlaughterhouseFive" is the name of the building where the American POWs lived in in Dresden,

Because the narration jumps around as frequently as Billy does, you learn everything early on and then simply revisit it all, The fractured narrative is worse than watching ads in a commercial break, or those horrible pop songs where the scenes and costumes change every two seconds it gives you a headache.
It's extremely boring, and hollow, and unsatisfying,

I'm not a huge scifi fan, as you know, But I do like timetravel stories, Billy is nothing like Henry from The Time Traveler's Wife, For a start, not even a second seems to pass in "real" time while he is travelling no one ever notices, It seems less like timetravelling than like reliving the past, present and future of your life, all at once, because it's his consciousness that does the travelling, What isn't clear, at all, is which is the real Billy He moves so much, you have to wonder how he doesn't become completely dislodged from his own corporeal self and go mad.


The timetravelling predates the abductionbyaliens, but the aliens themselves see the past, present and future simultaneously, and teach Billy their philosophy of not really caring about anything, since nothing can be changed etc.
etc. Fatalism.

I think I hated this book, but not quite, Hate is a strong emotion and I don't think it brought that out in me, It wasn't even frustrating, nor even particularly confusing, though the repetition of the Tralfamadorian expression "so it goes" was so irritating I saw red a few times, The bits about theAmerican POWs being welcomed by the British POWs in a German prison camp was delightful, though boldly stereotyped, and I loved the excerpts from the work on American soldiers and prisonersofwar by the AmericanturnedNazi, forget his name, something Campbell.
A lot of it and it's a small, short book could easily be skipped, The temptation was very strong,

In short, it's a very "postmodern" story, and like all things postmodern, it's impractical, disjointed, a bit wanky, tries too hard, is extremely outdated and, at the end of the day, rather useless.
Vonnegut is also very heavyhanded and bangs you on the head with his messages, It doesn't really inspire me to read more of Vonnegut's work, I guess he's a lovehimorhatehim kind of storyteller, کتاب رو دو بار خوندم. یه بار خلاصه کتاب رو که برای رادیو تنظیم شده بود با اجرای بهروز رضوی گوش دادم. و حس کردم داستان بی نظیرتر از اونه که فقط اجرای رادیوییش رو گوش بدم. به خاطر همین برای تولد برادرم کتابو براش خریدم. خودش هنوز که هنوزه کتاب رو نخونده اما من همون موقع خوندمش.

کتاب بی نظیره. لحن طنز برای توصیف کشتارهای وحشتناک ترکیب داستان جنگ با داستان علمی تخیلی و فانتزی و وقایع و شخصیت های زیاد. همه و همه کتاب رو تبدیل به یه اثر لذت بخش کردهن. یه جای داستان صحنهاى فوق العاده هست که راوی داستان که در زمان پخش شده و ناخواسته به عقب و جلو میره یک فيلم مستند راجع به تولید بمب تماشا مى کنه اما همون موقع در زمان به عقب حرکت می کنه و فیلم رو از آخر به اول می بینه: كارگرها بمب ها رو به مواد اوليه تجزيه مى كنن و معدنچى ها اين مواد اوليه رو به زير زمين مى برن و با دقت زير سنگ ها مخفى مى کننن تا اين مواد خطرناک به كسى آسيب نزنه.
بعد از چند سال مرور این صحنه هنوز برام لذتبخشه. .