 |
|
Title: Armageddon in Retrospect
ISBN: 0399155082
Author:
Kurt Vonnegut
Publicate Date: 2008-04-01
Publish: 2008-04-01
List Price: $24.95
Average Customer Rating: 4.0
Format: Hardcover
 |
|
|
|
|
Amazon Lowest New Price: $10.99
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $9.50
Amazon Merchant Price: $16.47
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Customer Review: |
|
1: Beating a dead horse
Let me start off by saying that I am a huge Kurt Vonnegut fan.
However, this posthumous volume leaves the reader wanting something more. I believe the reasons are twofold. First, this is not Vonnegut's best writing. Some of the short stories included are so trite in their style and theme that one hopes that they were novice pieces that Vonnegut wrote while he was maturing into the great writer he was. The second reason for this text's limited appeal is because all of the pieces deal with variations of the same theme. That in itself is not a bad thing, and the thematic links for this book are the issues of war and peace, which have great possibilities. However, a thematic collection only works if the entire collection is up to par. There are too many weak links in this text, and the total work suffers as a result.
Favorite pieces in the text are Kurt's letter home after being rescued from a POW camp and his final speech. The Vonnegut "voice" is in evidence in these selections. In so many of the other pieces it is not discernable. The stories "Guns Before Butter" and "Happy Birthday, 1951" have a resonance that sticks with the reader afterwards. Again, the problem is that the collection as a whole does not.
If you are a Vonnegut fan read it, how could you not, but if you are a Vonnegut novice, pick up some of his other works. You'll be glad that you did.
|
2: A Respectable Final Volume
This collection of previously unpublished works should provide satisfactory closure for Vonnegut fans and admirers. Fiction and nonfiction, dealing with war but more generally with violence and suffering, they are of great interest considering their author. The pieces vary in quality and in tone, from a grim description of the bombing of Dresden to the odd light humor of the title work. The introduction by the author's son is interesting, and the book is sprinkled with Vonnegut's own illustrations. I'd recommend this book for the substance of its more serious pieces, and to better understand the very important author Kurt Vonnegut.
|
3: Setting Up The Fall, Vonnegut-style
Made In Hero
Maybe some subjects are difficult to talk about without a dose of juvenile humor. Talk about honestly, anyway. For Kurt Vonnegut, one of those subjects was war. He seemed to feel that war was meaningless, although writing about it wasn't. His son Mark observed, "The reader's time and attention were sacred to him."
As a tribute to the legacy of Kurt Vonnegut, this volume of previously unpublished writings is bittersweet. It begins with Kurt's army repatriation letter, addressed to his family from a processing station at the end of WWII, which begins "Dear people." It goes on to explain what he'd been up to in the prior months as a POW in the custody of Germans. We can see that even at age 22, Kurt Vonnegut had the deadpan delivery and dark humor of the man who was destined to invent Billy Pilgrim and the Planet Tralfalmadore. We can see the sadness, too.
In "Great Day," the narrator is a green recruit in a futuristic Army of the World. For every manic order barked at him by the burly sergeant, the recruit replies "I done it." Repeated often enough, the phrase becomes a chorus, and the story a song. If Vonnegut didn't invent this technique, he might as well have. Few others do it so well.
A few stories are feats of Vonnegutian magic realism-a unique mix of grit, war and the surreal. A nice example is "Happy Birthday, 1951"-a satire on the human fascination with war and its hardware. In a quasi-post Apocalyptic setting, an old man and a boy survive in a subterranean shelter beneath the rubble of a bombed and occupied city (which could be Dresden, could be anywhere). The old man picks tomorrow as the day to celebrate the boy's birthday (the actual date being unknown). For a gift, he builds a cart from scrap tires he managed to scavenge. The pair display the sort of ragamuffin innocence often found in survivors. The combination is not merely affable and idyllic-but deceptive and ominous.
Many of the stories in this volume are disturbing. Vonnegut knows how to set up the fall, and willingly, we go there. If the point of fiction is to create alternative universes, Vonnegut makes frightening ones. But they have a Vonnegutian redemption, too, so much that we like them better than the actual worlds we live in.
|
4: Let's Be Honest
Okay I'm sure some people will be upset with this but this collection is good enough in the respect that it has a recurring theme and some of the stories toward the middle are actually very good. Otherwise this is a substandard collection from Kurt Vonnegut, the title story being almost unreadable (not usually a good place to pull your title from) and ultimately continues in the tradition of the frankly awful stuff Vonnegut put out toward the end of his life (Timequake anyone?). Overall I appreciate the posthumous collection for what it is but would never recommend it to anyone.
|
5: A Few Last(?) Things From the Master
A collection of stories and essays by one of my favorite authors. Most are based on his experiences as a POW in Dresden, and in the time right afterwards. Several seem like attempts to craft his experiences into a story of some sort, and as the stories are undated, you wonder if these were early attempts to get a handle on it all - which he did in Sluaghterhouse Five. Or maybe they were later variations on this major and life-altering experience. Either way, they are very good, but not his best work. Still, it's good to read anything by this great American writer.
|
|
|
|
|
