I’d like to start off by saying I hadn’t expected to laugh as much as I did. I’d read the back cover, which makes me a prepared reader, and it had a quote from LIFE calling the story “Splendid art…a funny book at which you are not permitted to laugh, a sad book without tears.”
I knew from that, I might be in for a few hard situations and some dark humor, but I never expected to be laughing at prisoners of war.
The author of Salughter-house Five, Kurt Vonnegut, was a prisoner of war himself and this book is his twisted symphony. His revenge, his guilt, and his own story wrapped up neatly into a story I sincerely wish was more than twice its current length and where the line between humor and horror where half as blurry.
No one does it like Kurt, and if you can disprove that, email me. I’d love to laugh that hard again.
so it goes.
8/30/24