Slaughterhouse-Five

Slaughterhouse-Five is another great book by Kurt Vonnegut. It's very much in his style of dark humor, science-fiction trappings, and self-referentiality. The book is relatively serious for him, while still being generally strange, the narrative is built around his real experience during the bombing of Dresden near the end of the second World War. As far as war novels go, Slaughterhouse really isn't one. It doesn't describe any battles in great deal, as the protagonist is never really in one. It doesn't have page after page of depressing text describing how horrible everything was. Vonnegut is very simple in his writing style, getting to the point early and letting the story move along. This is part of what makes reading his work so addicting, you never get bogged down in overbearing paragraphs. He manages to convey how terrible war can be without getting too preachy about it, which made it an easy book to stomach.

He begins and ends the story talking about his own experience getting around to writing it and how a lot of the things he talks about actually happened. Most of it is made up, although he makes a cameo or two in the story himself. The main character, Billy Pilgrim, has come unstuck in time, traveling willy-nilly to different points in his life. This gives him a unique perspective on life, and an odd tone to the book as he lives through his experience captured behind enemy lines. There are appearances by classic Vonnegut characters Eliot Rosewater and Kilgore Trout, although thanks to the strange order I've been reading his books I'm not sure when they first appeared. Slaughterhouse, like his other work, is very funny, even if you're not supposed to laugh at a war novel. The time-travel gimmick makes for a good story told in an interesting way, and it's a very quick read. It might be his best work, certainly his most famous. It would be a good book whether you're interested in humanism or just some escapism.