Slaughterhouse Five

Kurt Vonnegut “Slaughterhouse Five: Or The Children’s Crusade,” 1969, Delacorte Press, 205pp.

Over the years I have come across a reference here or there to this book; apparently this book became a big item in colleges, after I had left. So I finally read it. When I was about half way through I began to reflect that this book is much like some modern art that I do not like. When standing in art galleries looking at that puzzling stuff you get the feeling that you will just show your ignorance if you criticize any of it. You would think I would speak up because as a child I had the story read to me about the emperor and his clothes problem. I guess I will just maybe speak up a little this time.

The main character in this book is Billy Pilgrim who is captured in the Battle of the Bulge and is held in a Dresden slaughterhouse during the February 13, 1945 bombing. (Kurt Vonnegut was a prisoner of war in Dresden when it was fire bombed; 135,000* people died, twice the fatalities of Hiroshima.) Dresden was one of the prettiest cities in all of Europe and had no military targets other than being a transportation hub. The bombing was a military secret for many years after the war: we probably did not want the Germans who lived there or the Russians who occupied it to find out. This story deserves to be told but this book does not do that story justice.

Below from Wikipedia kind of explains what I don’t like about the book, this extraterrestrial excursion(s) kind of put me off:

Billy has come "unstuck in time" and experiences past and future events out of sequence and repetitively, following a nonlinear narrative. He is kidnapped by extraterrestrial aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. They exhibit him in a zoo with B-movie starlet Montana Wildhack as his mate. The Tralfamadorians, who can see in four dimensions, have already seen every instant of their lives. They say they cannot choose to change anything about their fates, but can choose to concentrate upon any moment in their lives, and Billy becomes convinced of the veracity of their theories.

Vonnegut does write well and I will probably try one of his other books in spite of my disappointment with this one.
'* Vonnegut’s 135,000 deaths seems quite exaggerated but I have seen this number before: Reputable estimates vary from 25,000 to more than 60,000 dead, although the official German report (TB47) at the time refers to 25,000 expected dead, and historians now view around 25,000-35,000 as the likely range