Word: lifeness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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With Jailbird Vonnegut finally succeeeds in meshing the best elements of his previous novels. Starbuck's screwed-up, out-of-control life is grotesquely fictitious, yes; but Vonnegut makes it clear that there, but for the obvious absurdity of the storyline, go we. In Jailbird, Vonnegut's tenth novel, Kilgore Trout a.k.a. Starbuck goes beyond and back-he visits the depths of Harvardiana and survives. The story is inspirational, the Vonnegutisms ("Small world") are typically comforting, and his black humor is as sordid as ever. Jailbird will make you eager for more Vonnegut, and with any luck, Kilgore Trout will...
...structure demands ingenuity and patience. It's choppy--long descriptions interspersed with telegraphic bits of interior monologue and haphazard conversation. She switches perspectives to let Rosa explain how she sees herself and how she believes others see her. The reader has to fit it all together, compose a life out of these poetic fragments...
...conflicts did not always exist for Rosa. Since childhood, she has routinely subordinated her life to what she calls the Future--the utopia of a South Africa without apartheid or capitalism. Her parents ask her for sacrifices as calmly as one would ask for directions. Rosa fakes a romance with a political prisoner to smuggle messages, hides excruciating cramps from her first period to bring her mother a quilt in prison, watches her parents and her brother die stoically...
Baasie's hostility jolts Rosa from her comfortable daydream, forcing her to confront the question she has fled: whether to fight or capitulate. Rosa, the reluctant dissident, is not larger than life. She is not like her singleminded father, who chose his path without regrets or soul-searching. Rosa must find her own way to fight. Her heroism is more moving because it is more human, because her conflicts--both selfish and unselfish--mirror...
Barth knows. No novel has displayed such an elaborate Maginot Line of prepared defenses since Joyce had Stuart Gilbert write a whole book under his "supervision" to explicate Ulysses. Barth demands that Joycean parallel. You could spend a month, a year, maybe a life detecting patterns within patterns in Ulysses; at the end you might look back and wonder why you bothered, but at least you'd have met thousands of smart people along the way. You can spend the same time with Letters and find equally pleasing patterns, but then look over your shoulder and your only company...