Word: vonnegut
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...spring holds less flamboyant promises, as well. John Cheever has finished Bullet Park, a chronicle of fathers and sons and the communications chasm in suburbia. Kurt Vonnegut has found a subject that will support any amount of black humor and white rage, fire-bombing of Dresden-which he lived through as a war prisoner. In Pictures of Fidelman, Bernard Malamud writes of an impoverished painter who outwits a gang of forgers who force him to turn out a new Titian. From Paris comes The Fruits of Winter, the new Prix Goncourt winner that was the occasion for enough scheming...
...occasionally wonder if Vonnegut's writing will lose its appeal a few ages hence. Certainly life will continue to become even more complex and our minds will want to identify that this is happening to us. But will people drift out of the particular absurdities they now languish in and start speaking in a new idiom different from the one Vonnegut's characters used to speak? And would such an occurrence make the then readers unable to recognize the truth in the writing and hence not laugh? Well, fundamentally I believe that it is the cliches that will never change...
...offer an example of Kurt Vonnegut's explanation of human behavior, this is how he explains why Jones in Mother Night could seem perfectly normal and yet lead the insane "Iron Guard of the White Sons of the American Constitution...
...KURT VONNEGUT told us when we talked to him this fall that he had a new book coming out in the spring called The Slaughterhouse Five which was about war. He was, he said, in the infantry in France during the Second World War. They were over-run in the Battle of the Bulge, and most of the men around him were either shot or blown up during the action. Vonnegut and 45,000 other allied soldiers were taken prisoner and put in jails all over Germany...
...being kept in Dresden the day allied bombers came over with a huge incendiary bomb attack that started a fire storm which killed 135,000 people. Vonnegut survived because he was in a cool meatlocker under a slaughterhouse. It all provides the base for his war book; it also is probably the basis of a lot of his other thoughts...