#11 - Slaughterhouse Five

This one was one that I was truly excited to read. Since the inception of the idea, this quest, I had been harangued to read the books that a Miss Amy Oldfield wanted me to read. We bartered over how much influence - every 5 books, every 10 books - and eventually settled upon every 8 books being an Oldfield Option. The first was from the original list, albeit from somewhere in the 50s. It was a book she loved by an auther she loved written in a style she loved and I was going to love it dammit. Luckily, I did.

Slaughterhouse Five, of The Children's Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death, is certainly not as complex as an Iliad or a Moby Dick. In some ways it is more complicated. The plot is disjointed, there are characters introduced just to disappear and the entire premise seems to not make sense. However, I bulldozed through it in the course of a day. The language is simple, and the font was large and spread out on the page. But even after I finished, my head was buzzing softly. Not too badly, it certainly wasn't going to explode. But there was that contented fullness in my brain, and for that I can thank Vonnegut.

Now how can I explain this plot? Billy Pilgrim is a loony who has become unstuck from time. So he jumps between his early and late life from Ilium, his time as a POW in the war...and his time with the Tralfamadorians, an alien race that lives in four dimensions. These storylines jump and blend, leaving the main character of Billy Pilgrim as one of the strangest, most complete characters I have ever seen yet. A neat bit of double narration is done, as Vonnegut throws in his own input on what Billy sees, which reminds me of Conrad's techniques in Heart of Darkness.

There were lots of funny little bits. The literary references were nice and not overdone, showing where he came from and perhaps where Billy's insane ideas stemmed from. The repetitions of "and so it goes" were sometimes funny, sometimes poignant. I was always able to follow along, I was always interested and entertained. There was never a boring section, and even if there was, they were always short enough to get me to keep reading until it jumped away again. So thank you Amy, I bow to your prowess in book determining. I eagerly await your next Oldfield Option.

8/10