Title : Slaughter House-Five (also called the Children's Crusade)
Author : Kurt Vonnegut
Hello, we meet again sci-fi.
Here we are with a top rated book, and I hated its guts.
It weaves a story of Billy Pilgrim who tells us about his war experience and also...his love of Trafalmadore. And his time travel episodes.
So Billy Pilgrim shares his journey being a soldier in WW2, experiencing the horrors first hand and coming back to become and optometrist as expected of the family. During a brief stay in a hospital while wounded, he was introduced to Kilgore Trout. Pilgrim became obsessed with the ideas that Trout presented through him (well one can say his time travel is so like our flashbacks that we have everyday) and these ideas created a safe haven where Pilgrim could retreat and be in control of himself again. His stay in Trafalmadore was, I think, a fantasy where he ran away from the confines of reality and even break from normalcy when his wildest dreams come true. Lets see..well, he was some sort of an alpha-male specimen on that planet, and that outrageous notion of having a family with Montana Wildhack clearly explains why.
While it gives a lot of lessons on WW2, bombing of Dresden and the conditions of the war "participants" (basically everyone he met on his war journey), it ticks me off so much by the way Vonnegut writes. His sentence structure and most annoyingly, the repetition of the sentence "So it goes". What?
This books jumps crazily all over the time periods and jumbles up stuff, so much so that its absurdity is comical. Intentional, obviously, but how painful it seems when a topic so serious is discussed this way.
Anyway...while in war, soaps were made out of Jews' fat. Horrifying idea, which after some google-ing was proven untrue. (https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/soap.html)
Enlighten my skepticism, learned ones. But no.
more on the book : http://www.shmoop.com/slaughterhouse-five/
Rating : 2/10
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