Review: Novels & Stories 1963–1973: Cat’s Cradle / God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater / Slaughterhouse-Five / Breakfast of Champions / Stories

Novels & Stories 1963–1973: Cat’s Cradle / God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater / Slaughterhouse-Five / Breakfast of Champions / Stories by Kurt Vonnegut
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A boy had his dog still leashed to him.

(from Wailing Shall Be in All Streets, page 801)

CAT’S CRADLE (****)

There was a quotation from The Book of Bokonon on the page before me. Those words leapt from the page and into my mind, and they were welcomed there.
The words were a paraphrase of the suggestion by Jesus: “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s.”
Bokonon’s paraphrase was this:
“Pay no attention to Caesar. Caesar doesn’t have the slightest idea what’s really going on.”
(page 69)

“What makes you think a writer isn’t a drug salesman?”
(page 102)

My soles, my soles!
My soul, my soul,
Go there,
Sweet soul
(page 136)

“What Can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?”
…
This is it:
“Nothing.”
(page 162)

Eventually:

Hazel said, “One good thing anyway, no mosquitoes.”
(page 182)

GOD BLESS YOU, MR. ROSEWATER (***)

If you would be unloved and forgotten, be reasonable.
(page 240)

Question: What are people for?
Answer: I love mankind… It’s people I can’t stand!! (by Linus - post-nietzschean boy)


SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE (*****)

It is a painful a tragic spectacle that rises before me: I have drawn back the curtain from the rottenness of man.
…
I call an animal, a species, an individual corrupt, when it loses its instincts, when it chooses, when it prefers, what is injurious to it.

(The Antichrist, 6, by Nietzsche)

Very, very important: listen to the audio-book narrated by Ethan Hawke (drinking black coffee...).

I had two books with me, … One was Words for the Wind, by Theodore Roethke, and this is what I found in there:
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
(page 358)

“That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim, Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. …”
(page 396)


And Billy had seen the greatest massacre in European history, which was the fire-bombing of Dresden. So it goes.
So they were trying to re-invent themselves and their universe. Science fiction was a big help.
(page 412)

Rosewater said an interesting thing to Billy… He said that everything there was to know about life was in The Brothers Karamazov, by Feodor Dostoevsky. “But that isn’t enough anymore,” said Rosewater.
(page 412)

BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS (****)

I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.
(pages 504-5)

1492
The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them.
(page 508)

The women all had big minds because they were big animals, but they did not use them much for this reason: unusual ideas could make enemies, and the women, if they were going to achieve any sort of comfort and safety, needed all the friends they could get.
(page 608)

Not even
the Creator
of the universe
knew what
the man
was going to say next

Perhaps the man
was a better universe
in its infancy.

R.I.P.

(page 638)

They were doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books.
(page 666)

“It’s all like an ocean!” cried Dostoevski. I say it’s all like cellophane.
(page 680)

“For all is like an ocean, all flows and connects; touch it in one place and it echoes at the other end of the world.”
The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevskij.

WELCOME TO THE MONKEY HOUSE (****)




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