Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Trafalgore, the cock of a Shetland pony, Billy Pilgrim, So it goes, po-te-weet. It’s all still here. It’s all still really powerful.
It’s funny to look back on the time-slicing and the filmstrip technique of bombers running backwards and realize how innovative this was at the time. In a post-David-Fincher and JJ Abraham’s world each of these bits of narrative trickery seem obvious, already done. But Vonnegut didn’t have a battery of post-effects editors and suites filled with gear. Nothing but a pencil, maybe an Underwood, and the power of the word.
Picked this one up to reread just one passage. Ended up reading the whole book. (It fit so nicely in a coat-pocket!) Ended up tearing through a whole stack of tiny little Vonnegut paperbacks in the next week, mostly on the road and crappy inns of the Alaskan Highlands.
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