Kurt Vonnegut

Flying to a favorite uncle's funeral, a middle-aged Kurt Vonnegut daydreams of one-hundred-year-old Wilbur Oriole-11 Swain, pediatrician and past United States President, who wrote history's most popular child-rearing manual and sold the original Louisian

Or, Lonesome No More!

Slapstick

Patrick Book

Long a personal favourite, rereading this has reminded me why. Vonnegut transforms his love for his late sister into a bitterly touching story of alienation, loneliness, and misunderstandings. He shows us his sincere belief that family can exist wherever you find it, and I can't think of many things more beautiful than that.

lala

I enjoy reading Slaughterhouse-V and had some idea about how this book is going to play out. In the prologue, Vonnegut explains that it's as closest as he can write to an autobiography and is it bad to say that the prologue hits more to home than the whole book? Slapstick explores a dystopian world where most population of America has been wiped by The Green Death, with it's titular character, Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain, a former president of the United States. I enjoy reading about Wilbur's reminiscence of his twin sister, Eliza Swain. I like how the story plays out, how Wilbur's childhood unravels to what he did as the president of the US. It is a bit hard to get your head wrap around because Wilbur is supposed to be not a normal human, and so does his sister. But at the end of the day, Wilbur channels his longing for his sister through the policy he made as the president. I also like how it's described that when Wilbur is with Eliza, they become a single genius. This book is weird at times but it's still enjoyable. The short chapters kind of worked-- we don't get too consumed by a single time story, but as I said, it is a little hard to wrap your head around it.

Slapstick Or, Lonesome No More!

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