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Showing posts from August, 2021

Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse Five

So sorry for the absence of reviews. I caught up with what I had finished, and I've started back for a new school year, so things are super busy, but I finally finished  Slaughterhouse-Five . This once again as a book club read. The BBC has a list of 100 books that they bet most people haven't read, and this is one of them. I had never read this book, so this was my first time through. Billy Pilgrim is unstuck in time. As the story progresses, it is quickly established that the story is nonlinear. At times, Billy is in Germany as a prisoner of war. At other times, he's in his house in 1950, talking with his daughters. At other times, he is on an alien planet called Tralfamadore. These memories all lead up to the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, a real event that Kurt Vonnegut himself lived through. This book is very complicated. It is clear that the nonlinear structure of the novel is very intentional. The order of the experiences we read is exactly how Vonnegut meant them.