Word: booked
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...LIKE TO relate Kurt Vonnegut's latest book to the strike. Doesn't it seem that, now, whenever we turn to our minds to do a little thinking we always find the same unexplainable desire to go do political stuff? The politics of the strike are so much with us that most of the time it's near impossible to be at ease if we're not at the rally. And these days nearly every hour there's a rally we're not going to if we're not there. (I hear a muffled echo out my window...
Throughout Vonnegut's book there is a persistent and unavoidable sense of preoccupation similar to the feeling of obligation we now feel towards strike activities. What he is obligated to in Slaughterhouse-Five is death. This isn't a very easy thing for a fatalist to be obligated to Fatalism (that is, the belief that the "reasons" why things happen to us are a series of random events beyond our control) serves us particularly well as a transition--to, for example, move us philosophically from event to event in our existence. When someone's existence terminates in the book...
...Kurt Vonnegut doesn't really want to write a war book about death. That's why its presence hangs throughout this book as something he is unable to avoid. He takes off the first chapter to explain he doesn't want to write about war. He just has to. The book is more a thing of his environment than of himself? But we, for some reason, don't believe him when we read him saying that war is a topic he's been forced to deal with. I don't know Why we don't believe it. But, for some...
...argues that it is too soon to offer any speculation about lurking critical questions. (For example: Will Hemingway endure mainly as a short-story writer or as a novelist?) Yet the absence of strong opinion and strong feeling, one way or another, finally seems an aggravating weakness of the book...
Despite its dryness of tone, Baker's book is a massive and humane critical achievement. He firmly makes a necessary point: this sometimes foolish, vain and gallant man might have gone through life merely flailing at his personal terror-shooting it, gaffing it or punching it in the nose. Instead, he also tried to exorcise it with words. That made all the difference...