Inside powerful forces that they cannot fathom

Nice job by Li Wang. Very nice.


BOOK REVIEW
Sunday, May 06, 2007
BY LI WANG
Of The Patriot-News

The darkly comic author Kurt Vonnegut died on April 12, reason enough to revisit his work.

I chose "Slaughterhouse-Five, or the Children's Crusade," because the novel is his crowning achievement and he wrote it surrounding his firsthand experiences of the bombing of Dresden, Germany, during World War II. The attack killed hundreds of thousands of civilians.

Like my last Book Club pick, Joseph Heller's "Catch-22," "Slaughterhouse-Five" illustrates the absurdities of war through a clever non-linear narrative structure that combines his own memories with science fiction elements. By revisiting how Vonnegut, as well as his friend Heller processed the events surrounding war, the hope is that the observations and questions raised in these works can help us process the strange circumstances that led to our current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Can we really change our course?

In "Slaughterhouse-Five" the lead character, Billy Pilgrim, is a prisoner of war that is forced to stay in an underground meat locker, the place where the book gets its title. Pilgrim gets "unstuck in time" as he's captured by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. He is able to travel through time to revisit stages in his life, especially the events in Dresden.

Vonnegut writes of the hopelessness of people who are caught inside powerful forces that they cannot fathom. As with his other works, the larger questions of man's existence linger over the proceedings, which makes the alien abduction a natural device to explore issues that are beyond this Earth.

What stands out about "Slaughterhouse-Five" is its easygoing prose. The book combines bleak imagery (collecting burned bodies) with humor (the phrase "so it goes" follows every mention of death) to try to process the senselessness of the death that surrounds him. LI WANG: 255-8168 or lwang@pnco.com