Word: vonnegut
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SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE, OR THE CHILDREN'S CRUSADE by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. 186 pages. Delacorte...
Rabbits, we are told, have mercifully been provided with short memories because they are so constantly prey to the threat of being killed. They would go mad with fear and despair if they could remember the past. Men seldom realize it, Kurt Vonnegut suggests in his latest novel, but they have more in common with rabbits than they like to think. Except that men forget on purpose, and are a prey to one another...
...occasion for these and other reflections is an agonizing, funny, profoundly rueful attempt by Vonnegut to handle in fable form his own memories of the strategically unnecessary Allied air raid on Dresden that killed 135,000 people. The book's narrator, like Vonnegut, lived through the raid as a prisoner of war in an underground slaughterhouse. Like Vonnegut, too, he has spent more than 20 years trying to mark out the limits of its metaphoric meaning in a book...
...presents his publisher with the jumbled chronicle of another American prisoner who also survived the raid, as well as some of the horrors of peace and prosperity. Too archly named Billy Pilgrim, the second survivor is hardly a real character-"there are almost no characters in this book," Vonnegut says, "because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces." But he does very well as something between a consumer-age Candide and a Vonnegut Everyman figure...
...spring holds less flamboyant promises, as well. John Cheever has finished Bullet Park, a chronicle of fathers and sons and the communications chasm in suburbia. Kurt Vonnegut has found a subject that will support any amount of black humor and white rage, fire-bombing of Dresden-which he lived through as a war prisoner. In Pictures of Fidelman, Bernard Malamud writes of an impoverished painter who outwits a gang of forgers who force him to turn out a new Titian. From Paris comes The Fruits of Winter, the new Prix Goncourt winner that was the occasion for enough scheming...