Search Results

“... Kurt Vonnegut’s latest book, and, according to its author, his last, is almost impossible to appreciate without extensive knowledge of his previous work. As far as I can tell, this is deliberate and it can be considered a flaw or a virtue depending on one’s view of writing in general and Kurt Vonnegut in particular ...”

“... For decades​ , Kurt Vonnegut was an unshakeable, if unconventional, part of the American literary canon: even if his books didn’t find a lot of traction in academia, they were in every high school library. That’s where I first encountered him, some time in the mid-1980s, when I was supposed to be getting a head start on my homework before track practice ...”

“... Kurt Vonnegut will be 70 this year. At this age he would indeed be a remarkable writer if his latest book – which is a collection of occasional pieces in the vein of the earlier Wampeters Foma and Granfaloons (1975) and Palm Sunday (1981) – had broken much new ground. In that sense his detractors and his admirers need not fall out on this occasion ...”

“... In a recent interview, Kurt Vonnegut rated his latest novel, Deadeye Dick, at B-. The gesture is disarming, and no doubt his critics will conclude that he has got it just about right. But if we start from the tacit assumption that Deadeye Dick is not a masterpiece, whether or not it becomes a best-seller, we can concentrate our minds on what it is that makes Vonnegut’s style of storytelling so distinctively beguiling ...”

“... up to entertain us. But America undoubtedly does exist, her problems are often akin to ours, and Vonnegut is a novelist to be taken seriously. It is true, of course, that no comment on recent events in Britain is intended in Jailbird. And, while a serious comment on America is intended, the novel has another aspect which requires some discussion first (and ...”

“... Kurt Vonnegut’s new novel finds him on old ground. All his hallmarks are prominently here: the cute narrative manner belying an apocalyptic message (the end of the world is once again nigh); the little ‘so it goes’ tics of style (here an asterisk placed before the names of characters about to die); comic-scientific periphrasis (marriage is ‘biologically significant copulation ...”

“... like the narrative egoism which says that if Yossarian is going to die, everyone is going to die. Kurt Vonnegut appears in this book as well as Heller himself, because Lew was in Dresden when Vonnegut was, but the best literary jokes involve the repeated appearance of the enigmatic figure with red hair and a straw hat ...”

“... much, we need the opposite of what we want, so that we can live our lives.’ This idea – which Kurt Vonnegut suggested so many years ago in Cut’s Cradle, his book about an island divided into two warring countries by its leaders, who recognise that their people need the idea of an opposition – is as profound as it is familiar. Indeed, if it is so ...”

“... cicadas, scented air, the physical drama: all the sense-heightening Mediterranean stuff. Kurt Vonnegut, a house guest, had disappeared: his photographer wife, Jill Krementz, couldn’t find him anywhere on the eight acres of the Vidal estate. Vidal, who seemed to know something about Vonnegut his wife ...”

“... cell in my body shakes with ravenous applause’ – fell back exhausted upon the prose style of Kurt Vonnegut, who describes his starving POW licking a spoonful of malt syrup: ‘A moment went by, and then every cell in Billy’s body shook him with ravenous gratitude and applause.’ But only a professor could end his lecture on Success with a tone of ...”

“... can draw fanciful conclusions from the fact that Hitler was addicted to the ersatz Westerns of Kurt May, and even as President of the US, Ronald Reagan looked as if he’d just walked off the Death Valley set). The Man of the Forest (1921) is one of the more ‘scenic’ of Grey’s novels, set in the White Mountains of Arizona. The Mysterious Rider ...”

“... virtuously impressive. It remains to ask two questions. The first may seem a bit academic. Why did Kurt Vonnegut, as reported in one of these reviews, call the central figure of his novel Galapagos ‘James Wait’ – a name pre-empted long before, and with good reason, by an even better writer? Somebody must know, and I’d have expected Amis would ...”

“... have been something Dovlatov did to make the works more intelligible to Anglophone readers. After Kurt Vonnegut sent him a fan letter, Dovlatov wrote back: ‘However much I might publish in English, nobody will ever write about my language … and that is the only thing, as I am brash enough to believe, that is of any interest.’ Fortunately, he was ...”

“... to be promised by this section is an internal contradiction with a beneficially bracing effect. Kurt Vonnegut pursues a similar strategy in Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), where a thought experiment about time clashes richly with one of the book’s core assumptions. Vonnegut’s experience of the firebombing of ...”

“... novelists from Henry Miller (‘I don’t care whether he’s a Fascist … he can write’) to Kurt Vonnegut (‘every writer is in his debt’) to Philip Roth (‘Céline is my Proust!’) have declared their loyalty to his radical voice. Normance was probably unknown to these writers, but its style and ambitions would be largely familiar. We need ...”