This month is the 50th anniversary of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five – and that’s all the excuse we need to look at this meta-fictional classic here on the reading group.
If you have read the book, you’ll know why I’m so keen to revisit it. If you haven’t, you’re in for a treat – though you’ll have to take my word for it, because this isn’t an easy book to explain. Any attempt to outline the plot is liable to end up sounding ridiculous.
That said, here goes: Slaughterhouse-Five is about a man who is unable to write a book about a terrible trauma he endured in his youth, as well as the story of those events, told through the eyes of a chaplain’s assistant called Billy Pilgrim who has become “unstuck in time” and – possibly – keeps walking through time loops under the influence of aliens called the Tralfamadorians who have been keeping Pilgrim in a human zoo.
You get the idea. Kind of. Except you also need to know that this material is not presented in linear order, and that really it’s about the bombing of Dresden during the second world war. And also that in spite of this tragic and horrific subject matter, Slaughterhouse-Five is also a delight to read. It’s warm, humane and hilarious.
The novel was quickly recognised as a classic. In an early review in 1969, the Los Angeles Times called it “funny, satirical, compelling, outrageous, fanciful, mordant, fecund and at the bottom-line, simply stoned-out-of-its-mind”, while the New York Times said that it “sounds like a fantastic last-ditch effort to make sense of a lunatic universe. But there is so much more to this book. It is very tough and very funny; it is sad and delightful; and it works.” The Guardian reviewer wrote:“How is the mind to cope with an experience like Dresden? The oddest and most directly and obliquely heart-searching war book for years … Devastating and supremely human.”
In case you’re still wondering, take a look at some of the enemies this novel has also made. It has the distinction of being repeatedly banned from schools in the US. When it was taken out of schools in Oakland County, Michigan in 1972, the circuit judge called it “depraved, immoral, psychotic, vulgar, and anti-Christian”.
Better still, a man called Wesley Scroggins in Republic, Missouri told the Springfield News-Leader: “This is a book that contains so much profane language, it would make a sailor blush with shame. The ‘f-word’ is plastered on almost every other page. The content ranges from naked men and women in cages together so that others can watch them having sex to God telling people that they better not mess with his loser bum of a son, named Jesus Christ.”
I’m definitely looking forward to finding out about all that – and I hope you’ll join me. Just in case you need further inducement – and thanks to Vintage - we have five copies of the 50th anniversary edition to give away. This lovely new version of the book contains the incredible letter Vonnegut wrote to his family detailing his experiences as a prisoner of war in Dresden, early drafts of the first chapter, appreciations of the book from Richard Herring, Robin Ince, Kate Atkinson, and more. We’ll give them to the first five people from the UK to post “I want a copy please”, along with a nice, constructive suggestion in the comments section below. If you’re lucky enough to be one of the first to comment, email the lovely folk on culture.admin@theguardian.com, with your address and your account username – we can’t track you down ourselves. Be nice to them, too.
