A review by newishpuritan
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

3.0

I enjoyed the time-jumping determinism, but not the winking parody of science-fiction tropes that Vonnegut uses to justify it. God forbid that anyone should actually take science-fiction seriously as a literary form (in that respect, the book reminded me of Godard’s Alphaville). But maybe that’s just one particular manifestation of a broader postmodern irony. Other aspects of the book are less excusable. For example, the two female characters are drawn with all the subtlety of a Playboy cartoon. They are respectively: a) fat; and b) a naked sexpot. And Vonnegut seems to think that both these traits are inherently hilarious. I was also disappointed that the promised description of the bombing of Dresden never materialised. I get that this is kind of the point: its horrors are beyond the powers of realism. But it still felt like a cop-out.

The scenes on the train and in the prison camp are very good.