As I left my building at 5:45 this morning, I saw a text message on my phone from my friend Roberto: "So it goes," it said. I thought, "Hmm. Who died?" First I thought it might have been his grandmother, who has been in ill health, but as I walked to the el, I decided it had probably been Kurt Vonnegut, and, indeed, it was. I gave R a copy of "Player Piano" last year, because he and I have been talking about embodied knowledge, and there's a passage in that novel that perfectly captures the aspects of the notion that interest me.
My father went to the public library in my hometown every week or two, to exchange one stack of books for another. I often went with him, and, when I was about 12 or so, I started wandering into the adult fiction shelves. ("Young adult" fiction made me crazy--the books for girls were always about how the girl who felt like a misfit eventually got a boyfriend after all, so there!, and I knew none of that was going to work in my life, for one thing, and the stories were insipid, for another.) For some reason, I pulled "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" off the shelves and added it to my stack.
Reading it changed my life.
I could no longer tell you any salient detail from the novel--the media has been rife with recountings and quotes, but that doesn't count--except the presence of Kilgore Trout and Mr. Rosewater Although I own a bunch of Vonnegut paperbacks, I don't have that one. But it did, in fact, change my life: I don't claim to have understood completely what I read, but I wanted more--of Vonnegut, of whatever it was. I worked my way through the rest of the Vonnegut that the library had, and for several years I kept my eye open for the latest one. (I didn't find the short stories until later, and I admittedly didn't have the reaction to "Welcome to the Monkey House" that many of Twisty's readers had, though I probably should have.) The thing about it was, he played with language, he told stories that weren't straight lines but still had points, and the point he was often making had to do with the brutality of patriarchal, war-mongering, capitalist society. And to my adolescent, small-town, social-outcast self, it was a revelation. It opened a side door that I didn't even know existed, and the very existence of the door, much less anything I might find on the other side, changed my sense of the possibilities. So, yes, Kurt Vonnegut changed my life; thank you, Mr. Vonnegut.
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*So it goes. In Italian, or so says BabelFish.
4 comments:
Slaughterhouse-Five is the one I remember best, though I had a teenaged Vonnegut-reading phase.
Anecdote from last year—The folks from the crossword documentary had a screening in NYC with some board of reviewers group that included Vonnegut. He called one of my friends a "freak," as in an admirable freak of nature. Aren't we all a bit jealous, that somebody else could be singled out for a snarky bit of attention from the esteemed writer?
It seems like a lot of people read Vonnegut for the first time when they were teens. Do you think it makes sense to try his novels for the first time when you're an adult?
I've never read anything by him, and I'm just wondering if there's something in there that I'd miss, that's directed towards a mindset I no longer hold.
I've never read Vonnegut, either! I thought I was the only one.
it might be an age thing, in the sense that, when I first read him, in 1970, we were deep in the Viet Nam war, there was a (so-called) generation gap, media were MUCH more limited than today, and what media were out there were no more confrontational of power than they are today (though, I'd argue, for somewhat different reasons). Vonnegut challenged a lot of it, pointed out its absurdities, and for a small-town, working-class, misfit like myself, it was a revelation. I have no idea whether it would stand the test of a re-read. And, as Twisty & her commenters noted, he didn't really get the "women are humans" thing so much, at least not til later in life.
I don't really know. I'd start at the beginning and work my way forward, were I going to recommend anything to y'all, but I don't know if it'll translate.
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