The twisted brilliance of Vonnegut...

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	• Cat's Cradle Kurt Vonnegut Dell Publishing, 1998 - 304 pages average customer review:based on 369 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

No Cat, No Cradle

This book is a strange prayer for peace. Written in 1963, at the height of a country in the throes of nuclear paranoia, Russian Fear, Kennedy's assassination and increasing American interest in the land of Vietnam, it is easy to see why Vonnegut felt compelled to write this book.

He writes, " Perhaps when we remember wars, we should take off our clothes and paint ourselves blue and go on all fours all day long and grunt like pigs. That would surely be more appropriate than noble oratory and shows of flags and well oiled guns."

This book is anti-war, anti-religion and anti- science, for it too, in the form of nuclear bombs and "Ice-9" will destroy the world as we know it.

From the books of Bokonon, a satirical send-up of Religious writings treated as the all-knowing word of god:
" Man blinked. 'What is the purpose of all this?'
'Everything must have a purpose?' asked god.
'Certainly,' said man.
'Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this,' said God.
And he went away."

I would recommend this to anyone who loved Slaughterhouse-Five, for this is how the author arrived at that great story. An evolution of sorts, dealing with the same subject matter.

(Sidenote: Ice-Nine is the name The Grateful Dead chose as it's lyrical publishing company name. Obviously this was a book on the shelves of many far-out kids throughout the 1960's. Just thought I'd mention it.)

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The twisted brilliance of Vonnegut...

This book isn't for everyone, that's for sure. The central theme is a fictional religion based around the principal that everything is a lie. The first line makes that clear. Characters include a midget, an introverted modelmaker who forced bugs to fight one another in his younger years, a man who is forced to make bicycles for blind people in Afghanistan, an insane elevator operator, a maniacal dictator, a sex symbol from a fictional island, the man who helped invent the atomic bomb (and has an odd fascination with turtles), a particularly destructive nihilist, and a doctor named "Breed", believed to have an affair. Some of the most memorable scenes involve all possible meanings of the term "Mayonnaise", fun with indexing, and a twenty-foot phallus used as a gravestone. Oh, and there are 127 chapters, each of them a page long on average.
If all that just strikes you as weird, then Vonnegut really isn't the guy for you. The fact that this is normal in comparison to my favorite Vonnegut book, Breakfast of Champions, should say a lot about him. After all, this guy has one of the strangest senses of humor in literary history. His work really is inaccessible.
I think he's great, though. He's got the same absurdist sense of humor as I do, and he's a social critic to rival the best of them. Especially here, where he mocks both science and religion, two very different fields. It's a hilarious book, but there's more to it than just the humor. There's also the underlying social and political implications, which is really what makes it fly.
This isn't a good book in the traditional, "descriptive setting, fleshed-out characters" sense. I don't think it was meant to be. Instead, it's a wild, fast-paced ride, which moves from one biting indictment of society (he takes on everything from patriotism to nihilism). It's hilarious, it's enlightening, it's distinctive... it's pure Vonnegut.

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Positivist Humor

This book is full of whimsical humor. It's one of the few books that made me laugh out loud. Ironically, it's also incredibly pessimistic. Humanity is doomed by its own depraved nature to a farcical apocalypse. For Vonnegut, the main culprits are scientists who show no concern for the destructive applications of their inventions. Their scientific method is the only road to knowledge but (more pessimism) cannot yield moral knowledge or wisdom. Nothing can, including religion, which is 'all lies'.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

One of Vonnegut's major works, this is an apocalyptic tale of the planet's ultimate fate, featuring a cast of unlikely heroes.

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