I can’t believe I’m starting with this, so please, bear with me. If you’re not familiar with Kurt Vonnegut or his work, a critic’s pullquote from the book jacket of 2008′s Armageddon in Retrospect sums him up quite nicely. To wit:

” Gripping…demonstrates Vonnegut’s mind-boggling evolution as a writer, the manner in which he learned to cloak his rage in hilarity, to cop to his immense despair without surrendering to it.”

The quote is supposed to be about the book, but—as with many things Vonnegut—it ends up being about him. He’s too big; like with HS Thompson or or Burroughs, there’s a cult of personality swarming around him, and one is hard-pressed to look at any of his books on their own without seeing it as just the next set-piece in which this giant of words has chosen to play. It does (the quote), however, give you a pretty good idea of what you’ll find in Armageddon in Retrospect, or even Slaughterhouse-Five, if you’re completely new to this stuff.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was in Dresden (as a POW of the German Wehrmacht) when the Allied forces firebombed it and killed—in Vonnegut’s words—”over one hundred thousand human beings.” This event deeply scarred Vonnegut, and I personally haven’t read anything of his that doesn’t carry his feelings of rage, guilt, and disgust about this event that he considers to be the horrible fate of a certain “priceless World Heirloom.”

I had read Slaughterhouse-Five (which is, arguably, the definitive Vonnegut work…if you can only read one of his, you HAVE to read that one) so I was a bit prepared for this particular brand of sneer, so settling into the predominantly war-torn setting(s) found in Armageddon was quick and easy for me. Not a full novel, Armageddon in Retrospect is a compilation of short stories and essays that was published posthumously after Vonnegut’s death in 2007. I realized while reading this book that I actually read a lot of these little short story collections…but then I immediately realized how unique this book is: EVERY story is riveting. Every story is indispensable. Each vignette brings a different slant on similar themes, and every story is supremely crafted.

The book opens with a chilling letter from Vonnegut to his family, c. 1945 after the end of the war and then a speech that Kurt had prepared to deliver at Clowes Hall, Indianapolis in late April 2007. He died in early April, and his son Mark Vonnegut delivered the speech for him. In the introduction, Mark sums his father up well by saying “He had an extra gear language-wise”, and Kurt’s speech doesn’t disappoint this claim:

“My advice to writers just starting out? Don’t use semicolons! They are transvestite hermaphrodites, representing exactly nothing. All they do is suggest you might have gone to college.”

Classic Vonnegut. Delivered by his son. To thousands of people. A few weeks after his death.

The rest of the book—as mentioned previously—takes the reader into different settings and different situations that all tend to gravitate towards Vonnegut’s classic ideas. “Wailing Shall be in All Streets” is a scathingly bitter essay about the firebombing of Dresden; “Great Day” is a little piece of sci-fi heaven; “The Unicorn Trap” is a genius piece of storytelling that paints a Medieval palette onto a purely Vonnegut sentiment:  “The wreckers against the builders! There’s the whole story of life!”; and “Just You and Me, Sammy”, which made me feel about as uncomfortable as I’ve ever felt reading a book.

This book is amazing. Sure, it’s one of those books that you can pick up and feel ‘good’ about reading something ‘important’, as Kurt Vonnegut’s writing is truly important to American Literature. Still, it’s not JUST that…these stories are absolutely entertaining. They make you think, yes, but in a good way. One hopes.

I realize that I’ve spent much more of my time here selling Vonnegut than the book in question, but to give it one last go, I’ll end with a quote, from the last page, that more or less loops back and confirms the chucklehead pullquote from the cover:

“Where do I get my ideas from? You might as well have asked that of Beethoven. He was goofing around in Germany like everybody else, and all of a sudden this stuff came gushing out of him. It was music. I was goofing around like everybody else in Indiana, and all of a sudden stuff came gushing out. It was disgust with civilization.”

So it goes.

- Hateball