Word: vonnegut
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Sleeping Murder, Christie (1 last week) 2-Trinity, Uris(2) 3-Slapstick, Vonnegut (6) 4-Storm Warning, Higgins (3) 5-Dolores, Susann (5) 6-Touch Not the Cat, Stewart (4) 7-Ordinary People, Guest (7) 8-Blue Skies, No Candy, Greene (8) 9-Ceremony of the Innocent, Ca/dweff 10-Wednesday the Rabbi Got Wet, Kerne/man...
...Slapstick, Vonnegut...
...book, says Vonnegut, "is about what life feels like to me." That feeling might be described as the phantom ache an amputee sometimes has where his limb once was. Vonnegut is keenly aware of the separation between his present and his past-the Indianapolis where he grew up surrounded by members of a large, cultured and comfortable German-American family. Indeed, Slapstick begins with a recollection of flying home a few years ago to attend the funeral of a favorite uncle. Predictably, Vonnegut finds the city has become just another "interchangeable part in the American machine...
...Vonnegut's principal characters are Dr. Wilbur Swain and Eliza Swain, a brother and sister who seem to owe some of their identities to Vladimir Nabokov's Van and Ada of Ada. The aged doctor camps out in the lobby remnant of the Empire State Building and relates the disjointed fantasy of his life and times...
...figurative significance. Wilbur's and Eliza's love and loneliness are conveyed in a slurry of short scenes, part science fiction, part dreamlike shorthand, whose allusions the author seems unwilling to share fully with his reader. Instead of ideas, he offers whimsy; instead of feeling, merely sentiment. Vonnegut calls his method "situational poetry...