Just in case anyone is keeping track, I finished Slaughterhouse-Five<\/i> the other night. It was the first time I’ve ever read it, and the more I think about it, the more I think I liked it. I’m not prepared to say much about it yet — I’m afraid my brain’s literary-analysis lobe has atrophied quite a bit since I finished college and embarked on a steady diet of non-fiction and lowbrow genre crap — but I plan to write more after I ponder it for awhile. In the meantime, however, I recommend this classic American novel for those who, like me, missed reading it in school.<\/p>\n
I’ve now moved on to a collection of Vonnegut’s short fiction called Welcome to the Monkey House<\/i>. As with Slaughterhouse<\/i>, I’m enjoying it. Some of it, anyway; I find short-story collections are, by their very nature, pretty hit-and-miss, with some stories doing more for me than others. There are enough hits happening, however, that I think I’m becoming a definite admirer of Kurt Vonnegut. But there is one thing about him that I’m not getting. All the cover blurbs on these ’70s-vintage paperbacks of mine rave about how funny he is, and I’m afraid I just don’t see it. Humor is, of course, highly subjective and, I believe, often dependent on historical context — in other words, I’m suggesting that maybe this stuff was knee-slapping in the era of Vietnam and Watergate but no longer carries the same punch. Or maybe it’s just me. Either way, I’m not laughing much at Vonnegut’s writing. I find his words truthful, elegant, frequently powerful, often clever, but not funny. He does have a way with an image, though. Consider this line from his story “Who Am I This Time?”:<\/p>\n …his eyes (were) still on her. Those eyes burned up clothes faster than she could put them on.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Oh, yeah, I like that. It’s got a little noir<\/i> flavor there, which makes sense in the story’s context, it perfectly converys the man’s expression, and it’s a line that stays with you after you read it. Very nice.<\/p>\n But I still didn’t laugh.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Just in case anyone is keeping track, I finished Slaughterhouse-Five the other night. It was the first time I’ve ever read it, and the more I think about it, the more I think I liked it. I’m not prepared to say much about it yet — I’m afraid my brain’s literary-analysis lobe has atrophied quite […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-971","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-bookshelf"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/971","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=971"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/971\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}