Item: Slaughterhouse 5
Rating: 3.00
Author: shelfleigh

by Kurt Vonnegut

Read Kurt Vonnegut's powerful masterpiece, which is as timely now as when it was first published.

'An extraordinary success. A book to read and reread. He is a true artist' New York Times Book Review

Billy Pilgrim - hapless barber's assistant, successful optometrist, alien abductee, senile widower and soldier - has become unstuck in time. Hiding in the basement of a slaughterhouse in Dresden, with the city and its inhabitants burning above him, he finds himself a survivor of one of the most deadly and destructive battles of the Second World War. But when, exactly? How did he get here? And how does he get out?

Travel through time and space on the shoulders of Vonnegut himself. This is a book about war. Listen to what he has to say: it is of the utmost urgency.

'The great, urgent, passionate American writer of our century, who offers us a model of the kind of compassionate thinking that might yet save us from ourselves.' George Saunders

Billy Pilgrim reflects on his life, including World War II, in this oddly fascinating novel from Kurt Vonnegut.

I’m not sure what I expected. My husband loves Kurt Vonnegut and suggested this novel as my first read. While I enjoyed passages of it, I don’t necessarily think I liked the whole of it. The book is very disjointed, especially once time travel is introduced into the mix. Time becomes fluid, zooming around from one experience to the next without any real cohesion. It’s not character-driven nor story driven, but idea driven.

The structure of it may not suit me, but the ideas were fascinating. Vonnegut does a fantastic job deconstructing war and religion, illustrating the faceted complexity of these two societal constructs. I would have enjoyed it more if it had been labeled non-fiction instead of fiction. The narrative structure of fiction kept me from engaging in the ideologies of the author.

tl;dr While I didn’t enjoy the story itself, I found the ideologies within to be fascinating.

Slaughterhouse 5 (MOST RED)

by Kurt Vonnegut

Reviewed by Leigha on Sep 8, 2019

Reading updates