Friday, April 19, 2013

fünf - A belated Book Review (Vonnegut's)

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Almost every book by this author is the great American novel during the time he was alive up to around the time of his passing with a book of writings in 2005 or so.  Slaughterhouse Five, a mult - faceted story that refers to the author's capture at a major and conclusive WWII battle in Belgium, by the Germans, and whereby he is taken to prison behind enemy lines to pine away while awaiting his fate.  The author was required to inhabit as a POW  an enemy prison a slaughter house and thus some of the imagery evocative of more sophisticated and zany thematics and turns of this fantastic story relating outer space voyages to the war, to a mental ward, and to things again like a plane crash and an auto accident - just one completely outlandish turn of events after another.  What is the point of literature like this (?), and in reading such things, one is compelled to allow for the primal scream of enemy imprisonment and the thoughts of freedom along with the mortal threats of POW life, and the dream - like existence in the novel of Billy Pilgrim and his interactions with an unpredictable and fragmented surroundings at times.  This is a must read, probably along with Cat's Cradle and one or two other Vonnegut novels that show the great virtuosity of this writer in his interpretation of what are mysteries for many of us, and what is lost to attention and what we believe we see in the interstices that comprise these puzzles sometimes.  Kurt Vonnegut himself might have had some divine tool, a gift, a blessing, that made for his humor as drafted onto the page; and that has us at least make a smile upon even hearing his name or reading of, even moreso directly, what his pen put on paper and then in print.

Part of what he examines in "fünf" people like me know is the Jewish question that other writers have
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penned volumes of investigative and disclosing literature about, though the humor and zaniness, again, of his illustration of this topic is evident in the text.  People like me know Itzak Rabin himself might have read this text, and Jewish leaders like Rabin, while in attempts to place the Holocaust, the Wehrmacht in its different forms, and WWII as an  entirety with respect to the Hebrew race into historical yet memorable context suffered and passed from this life due to repeated prejudice and violence against him personally and as the result of acts of completely humorless if not entirely sad and angry people.  I know as well from having read newspaper articles about the 1990's Yugoslavian conflict, however passed over themselves by policy makers who added to that sinister war at the time, and others indeed, that the methods of the Nazis against the Hebrew race regrettably have survived and have been unfortunately brought to light again in the world of terrorism and other battlegrounds.  The bombing within the past week of the Boston foot race as an attack at a milestone event shows the general cruelty and anti -  everything approach of terroristic perpetrators who have duplicated the terror used against the Hebrew people and who might be, as related to their knowledge of Nazi practices, totally radicalized.  Rabin had solutions for dealing with the effects of the kind of animalistic behavior as shown through numerous sources in Boston, and people like me know his death is related to the assassin maybe first  befriending him in order to be able to recognize him target - wise after his plot had begun.  These circumstances were part and parcel of things to come and the severe radicalization against Americans we are experiencing today.  What happened regrettably and sorrowfully with Itzak Rabin and in Boston only have secondary importance at this point as to blaming and culpability by attribution, and more important with respect to these and similar happenings are how the perpetrators became radicalized and as anti - everything as they are, and how they were allowed / are allowed to continue their destructive and violently animalistic activities.  This is a question proposed without provision for those rationalizing what again happened or will continue as terrorism remains in the collective mind and detracts from constructive activities and the progression of what we know as life at home.

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