Farewell to Kurt Vonnegut

They say Kurt Vonnegut died Wednesday, April 11, but maybe he just became unstuck in time. Maybe it’s we who live linearly who have passed through the moment of his death and come out the other side. He could be looping back around to his childhood.

Cool kids in the 70s walked around with Vonnegut paperbacks sticking out the butt pockets of their jeans. I wasn’t a big Vonnegut fan; I’ve read only four of his books. His early science fiction books are too science-fictiony; his later books are too hip.

Thankfully I didn’t start with those. The first one I picked up was Vonnegut’s life-changing Slaughterhouse-Five, one of the great works of anti-war art in any medium. Its protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, travels time, popping into and out of his life, some of it lived on another planet, some of it lived in Dresden on the day in 1945 when the Allies firebombed the city.

Slaughterhouse-Five is a memoir of World War II and a commentary on Vietnam. The book’s message has, unfortunately, been nearly continuously relevant since it was written in 1969. The library owns copies of it and of other Vonnegut books, as well as these classic anti-war volumes:

All Quiet on the Western Front
Remarque, Erich Maria

Johnny Got His Gun
Trumbo, Dalton

A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam
Sheehan, Neil

Catch-22: A Novel
Heller, Joseph

The Red Badge of Courage and Other Stories
Crane, Stephen

Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl
Frank, Anne

A Farewell to Arms
Hemingway, Ernest

Hiroshima
Hersey, John

Slaughterhouse-Five: Or, the Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death
Vonnegut, Kurt