Slaughterhouse 5 Kurt Vonnegut Jr

Slaughterhouse 5 by, Kurt Vonnegut


Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 is the life story of Billy Pilgrim, a character which by himself is not so unusual but the events of his life and how he experiences them are rather extraordinary. As readers, we witness his time as a prisoner of war in Dresden during World War II, his time on the planet of Tralfamadore after being held captive by its alien inhabitants and his life as an average American citizen. Billy experiences the events of his life in a sequence that is “unstuck in time” meaning they don’t happen chronologically. Just like Billy, the readers are consistently tossed back and forth from the wretched conditions of the abandoned Slaughterhouse 5 where he was held prisoner, to the idealistic conditions that exist on Trafalmadore, to the mundane, everyday life of small town America. Billy’s unassuming and fatalistic character makes it easy for the reader to be accepting of the odd way in which Billy experiences life, as a pilgrim through time. Constantly he is put in situations that he never sought out, yet he confronts these challenges with a dignity that is natural due to the simplicity of his character. Vonnegut has crafted a powerful novel reflecting three states of living: miserable, tolerable and idyllic through the three settings of Slaughterhouse 5, Illium New York and Trafalmadore (respectively). All three states of living complement each other and blend well together in the novel resulting in a beautifully tragic yet optimistic work. The book leads many of us to the same conclusion about our own non-fictional lives.

Eliz

Wittgenstein's Mistress - David Markson

Certain questions would appear unanswerable.

The narrator of this book is a woman who seems to be the last living thing on the planet. (There is some ambiguity as to whether she's nuts, though not as much as the jacket flap seems to proclaim.) After years roaming the globe, she's settled into a house on a beach and started tapping out her thoughts on a typewriter, which is what you end up reading. As such, the thoughts are meant to seem spontaneous, as if she is simply putting ideas down on paper as they come to her. It's a cute conceit, and she manages to be pretty charming, at times, and a little obsessive compulsive at others.

I had several problems with the book. First and foremost was that I had trouble reconciling the fact that, while the narrator's thoughts are meant to be spontaneous, supposed to seem to bleed together in imitation of how a person might think were they simply writing down each fleeting idea that occurred to them at any given time, it's clear that there is a guiding intelligence ordering the ideas, creating resonances and echoes, and generally composing the whole thing. It seems absurd to say this of this book, but it seems unbelievable. Or, rather, it would be better to say I didn't buy it.

That being said, the book is enjoyable. As I said above, Markson made an interesting narrator. It's easy to sympathize with her; she's all alone in the world and she seems to have had suffered some sort of tragedy when the world was still normal. And her descriptions of her experiences in the world after all the living things have disappeared show a wry and creative mind at work. For example, she lives in the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a while, taking down the paintings and separating the frames from their canvases, to burn, and nails the canvases back in their original places on the wall; she drives from city to city, getting in random cars, driving them until the gas runs out, and then finding another to continue on her pointless journey; she rolls tennis balls down the Spanish Steps; basically, quirky ideas of what one would do were the world an empty playground and you had absolutely nothing to do--you'd fuck around.

The narrator also alludes to many famous people, both ancient and contemporary, as well as works of literature, classical music, and a lot of paintings. This is what I liked about Reader's Block, and it was why I was interested in reading this book (Markson first wrote WM, and then ended up writing four more novels in a similar style--heavy on the allusions, packed with short, precise sentences), and while I got the same feeling of edification from this book as Reader's Block (due in great part to the constant allusions), I felt that Reader's Block was a better book.

Of course, there is the matter of the title, and the dreaded Wittgenstein. For that, I refer you to David Foster Wallace's review of the book, from an issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction (which you should subscribe to if you don't already!). To be honest, I really can't stand DFW's prose, so I only read enough of it to get an idea of what he's saying, and it basically confirms two things that I had already thought: a) Wittgenstein's Mistress is a very ambitious, intelligent book and b) it's not a successful work of fiction.

I guess what I struggle with generally, and with this novel in particular, is the idea that an idea perfectly executed can result in an imperfect book. When I first finished the book, I felt rather irritated, partly because of a severely limited understanding of Wittgenstein, and partly because the book had left me feeling quite empty. (Perhaps that was the point.) But I don't doubt that Markson has, with this book, fleshed out a convincing novelistic take on the idea of utter loneliness as an emotion that has nothing to do with other people, or that the state of feeling alone in the world would not be greatly exacerbated by literally being alone in the world. There is an aching poignancy to the narrator's predicament, and to her probing, with short, seemingly effortless yet incredibly precise statements, to achieve an accurate description of her emotional state, be it madness or pure sanity.

Maybe--and in this, I have no idea, given that I have only a vague, third-hand understanding of Wittgenstein's life and philosophy--Markson has shown how a person living Wittgenstein's philosophy would behave and go insane (which is what I gather DFW was saying in that essay). Certainly, in Correction, that was the impression I got. But I think in this respect Bernhard's book is the better one, because it doesn't seem as contrived. At its worst, Wittgenstein's Mistress is a thought experiment heroically attempted. At its best it's a novel which fails because of the rigid confines of the experiment. Or something like that.

I'm not sure if that makes sense, though I would, in closing, say that you should definitely give Markson a try. Also, apologies for the length of the post.

Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

I'm not totally finished with this book yet, but I've got to rip on it. I love Fuentes, who, as part of the magical realist crew, usually keeps his absurdity fresh. I've read most of his books, and this one is the first that's disappointed me. It is way self indulgent and borders of babble.

1) He makes constant allusions to the deeds of Mexican politicians who no one else has ever heard of
2) He can harp on words that sound like other words until Mexico City becomes Mess I Go Shitty
3) The Plot, though there is one, is rarely mentioned and is in no way an important part of the work
4) The importance of the work comes from Fuentes's archetypal characters and dream-like sense of reality as it is seen by Christopher, the unborn narrator

Christopher is conceived by his parents in order to win a contest. The Christopher Columbus contest. Mexico's politicians have decided that a child born on the day that Christopher Columbus set foot in Mexico, who is semi-related by blood to Columbus, will be given an award and become the symbol of hope for doomed Mexico. Christopher narrates the entire story from inside the womb. He talks about his parents, their families, Mexico's Prime Minister, revolutionary, albino truck drivers, S&M whores, etc. While all this is great, the form of the novel is so ridiculous that it seems superfluous, and Fuentes seems to just be jacking off on the page.

I say clean it up and read The Old Gringo or Terra Nostra, or even better, the intoxicatingly short and sweet Aura.


----------Mattie