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Kurt Vonnegut: Three Novels
Kurt Vonnegut
656 pages (2008); 5.9MB download
Rosetta Books; ISBN: ROSE-00001
Collection includes 3 books ($26.97 if downloaded separately)
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. wrote with a piercingly cynical eye — but one tempered with the dark survivor-humor and empathy of a man who had seen too much wartime carnage. Steeped in satire, black comedy and his freewheeling imagination, Vonnegut’s novels delve into society’s hollow places, politics, the nature of ordinary experience and — repeatedly — the blackness and dissociation that comes with war.
This special value collection features three of Kurt Vonnegut’s best-known novels — Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat’s Cradle and Breakfast of Champions.
Slaughterhouse-Five tells the story of Billy Pilgrim — an everyman unstuck in time. The narrative spins back and forth through time, layering in the elements of Billy’s life from his birth to its end over 50 years later, when he is a successful middle-class optometrist with a wife and two grown children. Like Vonnegut himself, Billy was a World War II draftee and a prisoner of war in Dresden when the Allies firebombed the city. All of these facts are significant, and the novel emerges as a powerful anti-war statement, dominated by the experience of surviving the Dresden nightmare.
Cat’s Cradle is a wild, hurtling apocalyptic tale that satirizes, among many other things, the blithe indifference and goofiness of the people who populate the nuclear science community. The story travels from the home turf of Vonnegut’s imagination — Ilium, N.Y. — to a Caribbean banana republic, as doom (in the form of the substance “ice-nine”) overtakes mankind.
Breakfast of Champions is one of Vonnegut’s greatest successes, a freewheeling meditation on modern American life that draws in some definitive figures from the author’s imagination, such as the hapless sci-fi writer Kilgore Trout and the wealthy Elliot Rosewater — and even the author himself. With a magic that contrasts against the white-hot spell of his previous novel, Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions trips through America’s mindset of the early 1970s, its deadpan irony satirizing the party line on just about everything, from sex and racism to the Vietnam War and the meaning of the American dream.
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