Word: titanic
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...great achievement of The Sirens of Titan is to present us with a complexity, such as literature has never before offered us, that comes close to representing what we, at least in this century, understand to be the complexity of our own lives...
KURT VONNEGUT has written five novels (Player Piano, Cat's Cradle, God Bless you, Mr. Rosewater, or Pearls Before Swine, Mother Night, and The Sirens of Titan); periodic short stories that keep popping up in magazines like Playboy and science fiction anthologies like Tomorrow, the Stars; a book of collected short stories called Welcome to the Monkey-house; and a new novel out this spring called The Slaughterhouse Five, the first two chapters of which were recently printed in Ramparts...
Another thing we found out was that whereas it took him years to write Cat's Cradle, a crazy book with mini chapters that leaps forward and around so fast one would think it was written in weeks, he put together the whole of The Sirens of Titan, a much more intricate book, in one night. Vonnegut says he was at a party where someone told him he ought to write another novel. So they went into the next room where he just verbally pieced together this book from the things that were around in his mind. It's really...
...COULD tell you just how great a book The Sirens of Titan is, I would tell you all these things; and they would make you feel happy...
...Sirens of Titan achieves an incredible complexity that probably only a style like Vonnegut's is capable of--a complexity that goes far beyond such intricate plots as Dickens' Great Expectations. Vonnegut's hero, Malachi Constant, moves through three sets of circumstances, three whole identies so remote from each other that he goes by three different names...