Today is the birthday of Kurt Vonnegut, the American novelist. Salman Rushdie wrote about Kurt Vonnegut in the June 13th issue of the New Yorker magazine. The article discusses Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five in the context of another war novel, Catch 22 by Joseph Heller. He says that he read the two novels in the same year and both of them had an incredible effect on his young mind. Later in the article he also shares his experience of reading another war novel. Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.” As a student in England, Rushdie remembers how he was part of the anti-war efforts. He says that both Slaughterhouse-Five and Catch 22 treats the theme of war seriously and comically. He sums up his observation in this line “If Heller was Charlie Chaplin, then Vonnegut was Buster Keaton”. Rushdie describes Kurt Vonnegut as a sad faced comedian. He further says that Kurt Vonnegut “was present for a great horror and lived to tell the tale.” Kurt Vonnegut is praised as the writer of American counterculture particularly influencing the students of the 60s and 70s who carried copies of his book in the back pockets of their jeans.
Slaughterhouse-Five is based on the Second World War firebombing of Dresden in February 1945. The attack destroyed the city and its inhabitants. Rushdie uses a phrase from the novel which is used to describe death. The phrase “So it goes” is used in the novel every time someone dies. He describes the novel as “a great realist novel.” According to Rushdie “Slaughterhouse-Five” doesn’t tell the reader how to stop wars, it informs that wars are hellish which is something we all already know. Slaughterhouse-Five was published in 1969 when America was facing three challenges, the Vietnam war, racial unrest and cultural and social changes.
Reference:
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/what-kurt-vonneguts-slaughterhouse-five-tells-us-now
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/11/books/11cnd-vonnegut.html
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