Читать книгу Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five: Bookmarked - Curtis Smith - Страница 8

So it goes. . . .

Perhaps the most often-quoted line from American literature, or at least a close second to Melville’s “Call me Ishmael,” Vonnegut’s melancholy refrain is readily expressed by anyone reacting to bad news on a scale so large and devastating as to be abstract. No author has managed to wring so many levels of meaning and allusion, or trigger so many different feelings, from the repetitive statement of three simple words as Vonnegut has in Slaughterhouse-Five, arguably the novel for which he is best known. It’s a musical motif that falls just short of being a chant, the echo to each instance of death and decay that appears in the novel’s dark pages—over 100 times in scarcely more than 200 pages—a memento mori that reverberates among the numerous storylines and punctuates the author’s absurdist sense of humor.

The book is a bit of a Trojan horse: its slim spine denies it the heft of those works typically anointed classic status, and on those few pages swims an abundance of white space, too, leaving room for scribbled illustrations no more detailed than doodles. A reader can be forgiven for thinking going in that here’s a novel that can be sped through in a couple of hours for a quick fix of entertainment—maybe provocative entertainment, going on what people say about Vonnegut’s writing—but entertainment nonetheless, and hopefully a few laughs along the way. The text encourages us to read in that way, the narrator/author opening his tale with a series of jokes and limericks and dismissive commentary on what he has prepared for us to read. And then he gets us, lightly alluding to the inescapable processes of war and inscribing in precise strokes of detail horrific images of mankind’s inhumanity to itself—even as he maintains that superficially breezy tone. Our eyes slow down to make certain we don’t miss anything. Billy Pilgrim has been cast out of linear time and thus we’re in a jumble of past-present-future along with him, with nothing to hold on to save a tenuous faith in our charming, intermittent narrator. It’s the kind of novel that can transform what a reader expects from the category, widening yet again the scope of the umbrella that covers all texts classified as The Novel. And it’s fun. Moreover, if one is open to such possibilities, the story of Billy Pilgrim and the Trafalmadorians (who can sense and observe in four dimensions and see time as one simultaneous present) can change how one views the world.

It helps to be young and impressionable. For Curtis Smith the encounter came in his early teens, as he makes clear early on. As best as he can remember it, at least—he confesses to being unable to recall the day he bought the novel (the original copy of which he still owns, bound with tape and rubber bands). In this far-ranging exploration of Vonnegut’s novel and its ramifications and repercussions in his own life and the wider world, Smith goes all-in Trafalmadorian himself, half imagining, half remembering his first reading of Slaughterhouse-Five and using it as the springboard from which to dive into many of the threads and themes presented in the novel. A history of destruction, and our intrinsic talent for cruelty; the effects, form, and nature of memory, and the love between parent and child; the moral and ethical betrayals we all endure and try to evade as we each attempt to build a life of our own, preferably without destroying the lives of others.

In a spirit similar to that of his literary subject, Curtis Smith draws on the unavoidable and blunt pain of the world in history, from the smiting of Sodom to the invasion of Iraq, as material for constructing a resonant work of contemplative art.

It makes for an excellent introduction to the Bookmarked project, a series of brief volumes in which we look to showcase authors who offer a unique consideration of a single classic literary work, preferably one that has helped shape their own writing and sensibility; not necessarily an essay readied for the academic audience—no theory required here—but an offbeat approach to literature’s expansive conversation, an example of how books can form (and inform) the visions of those who write them.

Kirby Gann

Series Editor

February 2016