Thursday, April 12, 2007
Kurt Vonnegut dies: 'So it goes'
Kurt Vonnegut has died. I remember being impressed by Vonnegut, particularly his 'searing' anti-war novel Slaughterhouse Five, because my teachers were so wholeheartedly of the belief that it was to be impressed by and I was eager to please. It took me a while to screw up the courage to tell my High School English teacher that I thought the book was full of empty aphorisms, incomprehensible and dull (well, I paraphrase, what I probably said was 'this sucks. I'm getting a lot more out of this Conan book', literary criticism not being my forte. I think Catch 22 by Joseph Heller, a colleague of Vonnegut, was a much better satire of World War 2. But the all time best satirical book on war was Jaroslav Hasek's Good Soldier Svejk.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
6 comments:
I've never read any of Vonnegut's stuff and rather liked Matthew Yglesias's quip about Slaughterhouse Five being the book he most often "pretends to have read". It probably speaks more ill of me than of Vonnegut, but I tend to associate him with politics that I find vaguely annoying.
That said, I enjoyed Mother Night.
Not the book, the film.
Which again, probably says more about me etc.
Ah, David, you are wasted on academia!
It is always interesting when people reveal books they have pretended to read. I once gambled my scholarship in a Russian literature class in which we were to have read Gogol, Lermontov, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Gorky, Turgenev, Solzhenitsyn and Dostoyevsky before the exam. I read the shortest pieces by Gogol and Solzhenitsyn, all of Lermontov (great tales of Cossacks and the Caucasus) and skimmed War and Peace, which I have subsequently grown to love, and hoped for the best. Fortunately all questions on the exam were answerable with the minimal information I had equipped myself with and I passed brilliantly. Actually I've read Turgenev since but have never had the strength to tackle Crime and Punishment for some reason--perhaps I fear it might be too good for me.
A more interesting question I think is what books people HAVE read but would not admit doing.
Well, it's not quite a case of having read something and not being prepared to admit to it, but I am willing to admit to having read all of Dan Brown's book and having *sharp intake of breath* found them all pretty entertaining.
Don't know if anyone is interested, but vaguely related I suppose, the Sunday Torygraph today features a list of the "top 100" books published since 1982, as voted for by the staff of Waterstone's.
Behold:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/
main.jhtml;jsessionid=
HM30N2VEJJQMXQFIQMFCFFOAVCBQYIV0
?xml=/arts/campaigns/
bestbooks/bestbooks_list.xml
Now, in my experience "staff recommendations" from Waterstone's a) tend to have a whif of the fixed about them and b) tend to involve a disturbing amount of Noam Chomsky [stop working at the biggest chain bookseller in the country, which is widely viewed as having monopolistic ambitions, then. Idiots.]. But possibly of interest. I actually suspect it's quite a bad list, but can't really comment too much as at the time of writing I have only read 15 of them.
Unless I've missed something, the only work of history in the list is "Stalingrad" by Antony Beevor. Sigh.
Frankly, Svejk is another "famous" book most people have not read. On top of it, the book has been widely misinterpreted in addition to being poorly translated. To learn more about Svejk, visit SvejkCentral. There is also a new English translation.
Post a Comment