2024 the best classic novels review

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Slaughterhouse-Five is the now famous parable of Billy Pilgrim, a World War II veteran and POW who has, in the later stage of his life, become "unstuck in time" and who experiences at will (or unwillingly) all known events of his chronology out of order and sometimes simultaneously.

Traumatized by the bombing of Dresden at the time he had been imprisoned, Pilgrim drifts through all events and history, sometimes deeply implicated, sometimes a witness. He is surrounded by Vonnegut's usual large cast of continuing characters (notably here the hack science fiction writer Kilgore Trout and the alien Tralfamadorians, who oversee his life and remind him constantly that there is no causation, no order, no motive to existence). The "unstuck" nature of Pilgrim's experience may constitute an early novelistic use of what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder; then again, Pilgrim's aliens may be as "real" as Dresden is real to him.

Struggling to find some purpose, order, or meaning to his existence and humanity's, Pilgrim meets the beauteous and mysterious Montana Wildhack (certainly the author's best character name), has a child with her, and drifts on some supernal plane, finally, in which Kilgore Trout, the Tralfamadorians, Montana Wildhack, and the ruins of Dresden do not merge but rather disperse through all planes of existence.

Slaughterhouse-Five was hugely successful, brought Vonnegut an enormous audience, was a finalist for the National Book Award and a best seller, and remains four decades later as timeless and shattering a war fiction as Catch-22, with which it stands as the two signal novels of their riotous and furious decade.

Reviewer: David R. Anderson
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: So It Goes
Review: TIME magazine ranked "Slaughterhouse-Five" twelfth on its list of the 100 best novels of the 20th Century ("Gone With the Wind" was eleventh, "Lolita", thirteenth). It is an important achievement by any standard, the most significant of Kurt Vonnegut's work. If a review is in order at this point in time (thirty-six years after its publication) it ought not deal with its merit, that's a given, but should address some aspect of the work that makes it relevant today. At a time when our country is war-logged, tired to death of the war in Afghanistan, "Slaughterhouse-Five" reminds us of all that is wrong with depending on the military to sort out the world's problems.Billy Pilgrim, the hapless World War II Chaplin's Assistant whose experiences toward the end of the war are at the center of Vonnegut's tale, could not have been less suited for active duty. Separated from his unit virtually from the time he reached the front at the Battle of the Bulge, he never got his bearings and soon came to grief. Hurting, in way over his head, Pilgrim wanted to be left to die, but couldn't manage even that. Roland Weary, a buddy, refused to leave him behind, and bullied him along. When captured, Weary and Pilgrim were in such sad shape that their captors published photographs of them "as heartening evidence of how miserably equipped the American Army often was." Vonnegut, whose actual World War II service provided much of the raw material for the book, never lets the reader forget the reasons for his antiwar views.These become most clear in the account of the aftermath of the bombing raid on Dresden, the centerpiece of the book. In gross violation of the rules of war, the raid was designed to immolate Dresden's civilian population in the course of burning the city to the ground. Winston Churchill is said to have approved the raid because he wanted to deal with Stalin at the upcoming Yalta Conference from a position of strength. The fact that adverse weather conditions delayed the planned attack until after Yalta did not persuade Churchill to back off. The great old city of Dresden, a place of no military value, one which the Red Cross considered an open city, i.e. one that would not be bombed, was wiped out.Billy Pilgrim was part of a small group of American prisoners who were housed (as Vonnegut had been) in a deep underground meat locker, Slaughterhouse-Five, away from the city center. It is where Pilgrim (and Vonnegut) spent the night of the bombing. "There were sounds like giant footsteps above. . . . There was a fire-storm out there. Dresden was one big flame. The one flame ate everything organic, everything that would burn. . . . When the Americans and their guards did come out [the next day], the sky was black with smoke. The sun was an angry little pinhead. Dresden was like the moon now, nothing but minerals. The stones were hot. Everybody else in the neighborhood was dead. So it goes."For practical purposes, this gut-wrenching account was for a great many Americans their first accurate look at what had happened to Dresden at the hands of our Eighth Air Force. "Slaughterhouse-Five" not only revealed the extent of the atrocity, it makes clear Vonnegut's contempt for our government's efforts to conceal it from us. As Vonnegut writes "Even then [back in the days fairly soon after the War] I was supposedly writing a book about Dresden. It wasn't a famous air raid back then in America. Not many Americans knew how much worse it had been than Hiroshima, for instance. I didn't know that either. There hadn't been that much publicity." See the End Note.Vonnegut uses the phrase "so it goes" to emphasize the finality of death. It appears at least 84 times in the book including the one quoted above. The editors of the 2009 Dial Press trade paper edition missed a great chance to use it to good purpose in the brief biographical note on the book's back cover. It ends: "Mr. Vonnegut passed away in April 2007." If Vonnegut had been alive to compose that note, he would have added "so it goes."End Note. Midway through Chapter 9 of "Slaughterhouse-Five" the narrator, alter ego for the author, states "the thing was, though, there was almost nothing in the 27 volumes [of the "Official History of the Army Air Force in World War Two"] about the Dresden raid, even though it was a howling success." So true. The account of operations for the night of February13-14 simply says "461 B17s are dispatched to hit the marshaling yard at Dresden (311)." The number in parenthesis apparently refers to the number of targets destroyed in the marshaling yard-- a place where"railway [cars] are shunted and made up into trains and where engines, carriages, etc. are kept when not in use." Contrast that with the account of operations in the Pacific on August 6, 1945: "The world's first atomic attack takes place. . . . At 0915 hours (0815 hours Japan time) the atomic bomb is released over Hiroshima from 31,600 feet (9,632 meters), it explodes 50 seconds later. 80+% of the city's buildings are destroyed and over 71,000 people (Japanese figures say from 70,000 to 80,000) are killed."

Reviewer: Ryan Sean O'Reilly
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Post-traumatic stress, time-twisting alien abductions, mid-life crisis meltdowns, and a meta-story on life.
Review: There are a few plot threads in this book, but they all weave around the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim. The stories converge on Pilgrim from various times in his life. Having been abducted by aliens, the protagonist jaunts back and forth through various experiences of his life in a non-linear fashion. This might seem jarring, but Vonnegut’s straight-forward writing style makes the whole experience very manageable—no slogging through the muck here.From a science fiction perspective, the book has some neat passages about time travel, the fourth dimension and how life would be if time was perceived as a nonlinear experience. The result, in Vonnegut’s opinion, is a sort of melancholy yet content, fatalistic attitude.Contrasting Pilgrim’s time traveling adventure is the ever-present sense of claustrophobia. The protagonist is captured during World War II (as the actual author was in real life) and loses control of his mobility as a prisoner of war. He is also held in an exhibit at a “zoo” on a faraway planet, where he can be gawked at by the local alien population. In other scenes, while convalescing, he is bed-bound at a hospital. At times, Pilgrim expresses feeling trapped in his career as an optometrist and his marriage. Even as a widow, his daughter is constantly challenging his freedom. The time-travel experiences seem to be the only thing that transport Pilgrim out of these feelings, and give him a broader perspective.The aliens (Tralfamadorians) have a completely different perspective on time. They know all the horrible parts of life and all the good parts at once. They can cope with the bad by focusing on the good. Many parallels can be drawn between this and dealing with combat trauma.The jumping around of the plot, feels like flashbacks and sometimes there are flashbacks. However, there is also time-travel. The disjointed narrative seems to emulate symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, which the character is experiencing and the reader is brought into (due to the structure of the book). Stories within stories, within stories hopping back and forth over Pilgrim’s timeline.Yet, there is a cohesive story underlying all the shifts in time and space. The framework of a life. And, maybe that’s what life is. A series of disjointed events that might not make sense individually, but when put together form an arc. When focus is pulled back and perspective is given, the entire story can be realized.While reading this book, it is hard not to think about how the author might have felt, surviving a horrific bombing in WWII as a POW “trapped” underground in a slaughter house. A situation Vonnegut was also not in control of, yet one that was deemed to be his own. Is this book trying to make sense of that experience—or perhaps the experience of all people caught in war?There is much made of this being an anti-war book, and certainly there is that aspect within the pages. Yet, the storyline, to me, seemed to be more along the lines of pointing out that in life, sometimes things are just really really really messed up. Sometimes things are bad and the reasons are not always so simple and straightforward or make a lot sense. Lines blur. Lives are lost. Vonnegut doesn’t seem to say we should not care about this. Instead, he seems to say that we must recognize these difficulties and give them there due. Reflect on them. Perhaps try to do better. Focus on the good.As others have noted, this story is told in Vonnegut’s characteristic style of simple declarative sentences. A breeze to read. And yet his writing is a perfect compliment to this non-linear device of story-telling. Billy Pilgrim comes unstuck in time, and you will too as you read this thoughtful tale of dark reflective humor.Podcast: If you enjoy my review (or this topic) this book and the movie based on it were further discussed/debated in a lively discussion on my podcast: "No Deodorant In Outer Space". The podcast is available on iTunes, YouTube or our website.

Reviewer: jimboinaz
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Vonnegut Pens an Enjoyable Style
Review: This was a straight-forward and "fun" book to read, and it kept me entertained from start to finish.Slaughterhouse-Five was not laden with ancient language terms or obscure references - so I was able to leave the thesaurus closed and enjoy the novel as I would imagine the author intended.Thank You

Reviewer: Israel Mar Martinez
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: It was an awesome book, I enjoyed it a lot.

Reviewer: Jens Roedler
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Nobody writes like Vonnegut or Henry Miller anymore. Deeply satisfying read and perfect description of the warped human mind.

Reviewer: RGM
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: I hadn't read SL5 for 40 years, originally as an undergrad. It is as good or better than I remembered it, with the short, vignette-like episodes that make it almost impossible to put down (much like Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut's other great novel). There is a plain-spoken, everyday humour that somehow makes a book about something as heart-rending as the massacre of an entire city remarkably humane and even funny. Structurally, the book takes the events of one man's life and shuffles them like a deck of playing cards; it is tribute to KV's genius that the result is brilliantly coherent and logical, and easy to follow. It stands as the best and most empathic novel about trauma I have ever read, and KV was well ahead of his time in crafting the interplay between trauma, dissociation, re-experiencing and emotional distancing the are now recognized as part of PTSD. Vonnegut is one of the great American novelists of the 20th century; it is important that his work is not lost in the passage of time. I highly recommend SL5.

Reviewer: Binding is not upto the mark. Pages are almost coming out as I read.
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Binding is not upto the mark. Pages are comingout as I read.

Reviewer: Raquel
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Me gusta mucho esta autor. Recomendado 100%. Buena edición.