ralentina reviewed Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
War makes no sense, and neither does postmodernism
4 stars
I had read this book as a teenager, and loved it, though I'm now unsure whether I had paused to contemplate what the author was trying to say. This time around, I was somewhat turned off by its misogyny, especially considering the book is meant, in a way, as a critique of macho militarism. It isn't 'just' that the book wouldn't remotely pass the Bechdel test, but also that virtually every woman described in the book is reduced to her attractiveness or lack thereof and, more often than not, characterized as stupid. The partial exception is Montana Wildhack, a (porn?) film star, who is not explicitly denigrated, but whose only function in the story is to have sex with Billy while they're both imprisoned in an alien zoo. Billy is very good about it because he waits until she enthusiastically consents, which strikes Kurt as both exceptional and admirable.
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I had read this book as a teenager, and loved it, though I'm now unsure whether I had paused to contemplate what the author was trying to say. This time around, I was somewhat turned off by its misogyny, especially considering the book is meant, in a way, as a critique of macho militarism. It isn't 'just' that the book wouldn't remotely pass the Bechdel test, but also that virtually every woman described in the book is reduced to her attractiveness or lack thereof and, more often than not, characterized as stupid. The partial exception is Montana Wildhack, a (porn?) film star, who is not explicitly denigrated, but whose only function in the story is to have sex with Billy while they're both imprisoned in an alien zoo. Billy is very good about it because he waits until she enthusiastically consents, which strikes Kurt as both exceptional and admirable.
War makes no sense, and neither, one could say, do postmodernist plots. The protagonist -Billy Pilgrim - was/is a young, inept soldier during WWII, who witnessed the Dresden bombing as a prisoner of war, returned to the states to marry the rich daughter of an optometrist mogul and became himself rich. Billy can travel through time, intentionally or not is hard to say. Or, to be more precise: since being kidnapped by aliens, he has learnt to see time the way they do: as a series of moments that coexist, just as peaks of the same mountain range, next to one another. And if time is not consecutive, then it logically follows that things just happen because that's how a given moment is structured, there is no cause and no consequences. So, children are sent to fight in Europe, ill-equipped and frightened, mostly against forcibly conscripted German farmers who would most certainly prefer to do something else. And then they kill each other, and so it goes.