Product Description

Slaughterhous-Five is one of  the world's great anti-war books. Centering on the  infamous fire-bombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim's  odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey  of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning  in what we are afraid to know.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #16155 in Books
• Published on: 1991-11-03
• Released on: 1991-11-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 224 pages

Amazon.com
Kurt Vonnegut's absurdist classic Slaughterhouse-Five introduces us to Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes unstuck in time after he is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. In a plot-scrambling display of virtuosity, we follow Pilgrim simultaneously through all phases of his life, concentrating on his (and Vonnegut's) shattering experience as an American prisoner of war who witnesses the firebombing of Dresden.

Don't let the ease of reading fool you--Vonnegut's isn't a conventional, or simple, novel. He writes, "There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick, and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters..." Slaughterhouse-Five (taken from the name of the building where the POWs were held) is not only Vonnegut's most powerful book, it is as important as any written since 1945. Like Catch- 22, it fashions the author's experiences in the Second World War into an eloquent and deeply funny plea against butchery in the service of authority. Slaughterhouse-Five boasts the same imagination, humanity, and gleeful appreciation of the absurd found in Vonnegut's other works, but the book's basis in rock-hard, tragic fact gives it a unique poignancy--and humor.

From Publishers Weekly
"Listen: Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time." So begins Vonnegut's absurdist 1969 classic. Hawke rises to the occasion of performing this sliced-and-diced narrative, which is part sci-fi and partially based on Vonnegut's experience as a American prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany during the firebombing of 1945 that killed thousands of civilians. Billy travels in time and space, stopping here and there throughout his life, including his long visit to the planet Tralfamador, where he is mated with a porn star. Hawke adopts a confidential, whisper-like tone for his reading. Listening to him is like listening to someone tell you a story in the back of a bus—the perfect pitch for this book. After the novel ends, Vonnegut himself speaks for a short while about his survival of the Dresden firestorm and describes and names the man who inspired this story. Tacked on to the very end of this audio smorgasbord is music, a dance single that uses a vintage recording of Vonnegut reading from the book. Though Hawke's reading is excellent, one cannot help but wish Vonnegut himself had read the entire text.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From AudioFile
Here it is in all its glory: the book that has baffled high schoolers for two generations. From Dresden to Tralfamadore and all the places in between, Vonnegut tells a story that's impossible to put down. To make matters even better, the book gets star treatment from narrator Ethan Hawke, who immerses us in the author's words. Hawke almost whispers his way through the text as if letting us in on a big secret, and he is marvelously effective. He uses impeccable diction and effective pauses to create an atmospheric world that gives the book an authentic otherworldly feel. By the end, Hawke has taken us on a journey that both illuminates the author's words and reflects our understanding of them. R.I.G. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Customer Reviews

Crazyness
The book jumps all over the place in a captivating way. I wouldn't necessarily call it SF though.

The Why of Tralfalmadore
Like a lot of people who love this book, I first read Slaughterhouse Five when I was a teenager. I was young, unsuspecting, and worse yet, innocent. Many years have now gone by. But unlike Billy Pilgrim, I did not need prompting from a flying saucer to become unstuck in time. I did it with my own free will. By itself, the feat was easy. All I had to do was dig out my old pocket size copy of the novel. It has chew marks in the upper left corner, left by a beloved dog. He's long gone, too. Tralfalmadorean years. Earthling years. So it goes.

Time does have a strange effect on someone rereading Slaughterhouse Five. This isn't nostalgia so much as a renewed conviction of that book's contribution to literary culture. After all, it introduced the Planet Tralfalmadore. What's lovely about the creatures who live there is that nothing much bothers them--not bombs, not hunger, not crowds, and least of all, history--although Billy Pilgrim is plagued by them all. That's because unlike Pilgrim (an Earthling), the Tralfalmadoreans don't believe in free will. They don't even believe in Time. They claim it's all in our minds. To help us understand this, they compare Time to bugs trapped in amber. At any given point, "here we are, ...trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why."

Upon getting sucked into the Tralfalmadoreans' flying saucer, Billy Pilgrim is compelled to relinquish his Earthling traits of free will and time stuckness. This is a mixed blessing mainly because he gets to relive the horrors of a prisoner of war train in Germany, and subsequently, the carpet bombing of Dresden.

From billions of possible Earthlings, Billy Pilgrim was selected for no explicable reason by Tralfalmadoreans who don't need reasons. In fact, they are deeply perplexed at the Earthling compulsion to explain things. For example, I like to figure out why I like this writer or that one--then write about it. I'm getting better, though. I'm learning from the Tralfalmadoreans to say, "I just do." Ironically, I'm still tempted to explain, at the very least, why I love this particular writer, Kurt Vonnegut--the best Tralfalmadorean translator we have. It's his gift for irreverence, second only to his talent for inventing absurd names. Take the porn star, Montana Wildhack. There's no improving on that. Montana, by the way, was abducted by Tralfalmadoreans. In captivity she was kept in a zoo and mated to the most hapless Earthling her captors could find--Billy Pilgrim. So it goes.

Vonnegut joked that he didn't know if people read his books after high school. With that in mind, trying to get re-acquainted with Slaughterhouse Five can bring up a vague feeling of dread. I didn't think I'd be able to enjoy the book as I did when I was nineteen, assuming the inbetween years have left me as jaded as Earthling years do. Back then, Slaughterhouse Five had been endearing (buffoonish, but endearing). But other than the funny parts, what I remembered most were the parts that made me cry.

Goofery aside, there are profound moments in this book. They tend to involve violence. In the German prison camp, a guard takes offense at a remark uttered by one of the American soldiers--and roughs him up. The prisoner is stunned, having intended no harm by what he said. Likely, though, it implied self-pity. Rising from the ground with two teeth missing, the boy asks, "Why me?" Shoving him back into the prisoner ranks, the guard replies, "Vy you? Vy anybody?"

Along with the raging humanity, Vonnegut offers self-mockery to spare. A bit turns up in the fictitious, embittered science fiction writer, Kilgore Trout. By happy coincidence, Trout lives in the same home town as Billy Pilgrim--one of his most avid fans. The problem is that the literary hero is a hack. "His prose was frightful. Only his ideas were good." So it goes.

Slaughterhouse Five is still best read with a dose of innocence. It is innocence, after all, that inspires a nineteen-year-old to sign personal letters, "Yours Truly, From Tralfalmadore." I haven't done that in years (more evidence that I truly am jaded). This is, of course, a time thing. All I know is that quite a lot's gone down in the amber since Dresden, enough accumulated calamity to leave even the Tralfalmadoreans in awe--if they believe in calamity, that is. It just so happens they don't. For Tralfalmadoreans, everything just is.

But there's a warp and I'm back on Earth again. More hours have gone by, which bestows on me the privilege of reporting "I done it" (a phrase I will forever connect with Kurt, see his short story, "Great Day" in Armageddon In Retrospect). I've reread Slaughterhouse Five and still manage to laugh. Better yet, the big sleep of adulthood has not altered Tralfalmadorean love as much as I thought it would have. I appreciate (and need) the wisdom of those creatures as much as ever. It might be faith, denial, or blindness. Some say there's not much difference. I have a deeper suspicion. It's the Tralfalmadorean spell. Time passes, and doesn't. The glob of amber is real.

A great book
This is a great book and an interesting insight into Kurt's world. The long awaited Dresden Novel that he claimed to be working on for so many years. I didn't find it funny, but sobering. There are many many great quotes to be taken from it and I'm sure they have been taken many times. It is worth reading for it's history alone, but deeper still there are tidbits of meaning and reality for the reader. The ending is a bit different than I would have expected, but I really enjoyed it, and consumed it in less than a day ( as I did also, with Mother Night). It is sobering and somber, but a great book, either way. It deserves it ranking with the top 100 novels of all time, and should be allowed in High Schools as required reading with or without the cussing.
I am happy to have added it to my collection. But sad that there will not be more books like it.