"high on clouds of sunlight floating by"
I just spent the evening reading Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. An excerpt from the summary is as follows:Unstuck in time, the hero of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five -- an unforgettable Everyman named Billy Pilgrim -- is never sure what part of his life he is going to have to act in next.
Vonnegut's wildly imaginative, witty and affecting novel tells Billy Pilgrim's story in just that fashion. It spins back and forth through time, layering in the elements of Billy's life, which begins, chronologically, in 1922 in the upstate New York town of Ilium, and ends over 50 years later, when he is a successful middle-class optometrist with a wife and two grown children. Like Vonnegut himself, Billy was a World War II draftee and a prisoner of war in Dresden when the Allies firebombed the city early in 1945. All of these facts are significant, and the novel emerges as a powerful anti-war statement, dominated by the experience of surviving the Dresden nightmare.
There is not much to say but that it is...general and specific about everything. I very much like it.
Vonnegut's wildly imaginative, witty and affecting novel tells Billy Pilgrim's story in just that fashion. It spins back and forth through time, layering in the elements of Billy's life, which begins, chronologically, in 1922 in the upstate New York town of Ilium, and ends over 50 years later, when he is a successful middle-class optometrist with a wife and two grown children. Like Vonnegut himself, Billy was a World War II draftee and a prisoner of war in Dresden when the Allies firebombed the city early in 1945. All of these facts are significant, and the novel emerges as a powerful anti-war statement, dominated by the experience of surviving the Dresden nightmare.
There is not much to say but that it is...general and specific about everything. I very much like it.