Review: Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death by Kurt Vonnegut

Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Narrated by Ethan Hawke
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I really did not enjoy this. I struggled on what to rate it, parts of it were ok, and part of it were just plain weird.  I'm ok with the realm of the weird.  I spent much of my childhood and teen years reading about vampires and aliens, well before Twilight came around.  I've read some weird stuff, but I think it was just way to strange for my liking. It reminding me so much of Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis, where you aren't really sure if the main character is really experiencing the things happening to him in the book or its all in his head but he really believes its happening. I'm just not a fan of these types of books where the plot is a metaphor or analogy for something else and you are left to puzzle out the deeper meaning and find the symbolism.

This book has been around a long time so I'm not going to try to over analyze it.  The story follows Billy Pilgrim during his life, but mainly during his time as a soldier in WWII.  While in Germany, Billy obtains the ability to time travel.  At some point on one of his time journeys, he gets abducted by aliens from Tralfamadore where he has some interesting experiences, most with a porn star named Montana Wildhack.  In his older years he wants to tell everyone about Tralfamadore, but most people just think he's crazy.  Much of the book is disjointed because he's always jumping around to different points of his life.  There are some fairly obscene parts of the book, so I can see why people would want it censored, especially given the time it was published.  Even in today's world, people would still find it offensive.  I just shook my head and kept going.

Having looked a little deeper into the history of Dresden and Kurt Vonnegut, some of the things he describes in the book actually happened, so it is a bit of an autobiographical tale and I understand it a little more.  I read an old interview he did on and based on the transcript, his books were a form of therapy for him.  Billy Pilgrim was inspired by a real man who died in Dresden, who he felt never should have been a soldier.  I can kind of imagine that Vonnegut came up with some of this stuff as a coping mechanism during his time as a POW as a way to survive.  Maybe not the exact sci-fi content of Slaughterhouse-Five, but perhaps some of it or atleast he escaped into his head.

I respect Vonnegut's work here and what he went through. The audio narration was great, and its under 8 hours. This just wasn't for me. I think the genre blending of autobiography, historical fiction, sci-fi, and satire just was too much . I really did appreciate the 10 minute interview with Vonnegut himself at the end of the audiobook with an attorney friend of his about the book and his inspiration for Billy Pilgrim.  I wish that part was longer.

Had I not been working through the Popsugar Reading Challenge, I don't think I ever would have picked this up.  I'm glad I finally got to it.  I want to get to more classics or iconic books that I haven't read that I feel like I should.  This takes care of a book mentioned in another book.  This was mentioned in the first few pages of Beautiful Creatures (by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl), which I read a while ago.