Book Review: Kurt Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle

I know it's very cliché to like Kurt Vonnegut these days.  (Actually, scratch that - it's cliché and hipster to like Slaughterhouse-Five, and only because of that one line every smelly hipster photoshops onto their tacky, unattractive rubbish photos - "Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt".  It's a nice sentiment and all, but they're missing the point entirely.  But these are hipsters - what else is new?  But I digress.)

So maybe it's NOT that cliché to like Vonnegut.  At any rate, I've recently started devouring his oeuvre, starting with Slaughterhouse-Five (hey - I was reading it as a seminal anti-war novel, not to please some inner dirty hipster), and moving to Breakfast of Champions, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, and right now I'm in the middle of Mother Night.  But the one I've most recently finished is Cat's Cradle - and what a ride it was.

Like so many of Vonnegut's works, it's hard to classify.  Part science fiction, part post-apocalyptic morality tale, part comedic farce, and part message of spirituality, you're never quite sure what to make of it until you get to the last page, put the book down, and are trapped in thought for the next however-long-until-you-absolutely-have-to-function-as-a-human-being-again.  You walk away from it part pessimist, part pragmatist, and part Bokononist.  I found every page of it filled with nuggets of wisdom regarding human relationships, human foibles, and just plain old human stupidity.

It's a story of a writer, who stumbles upon the story of the father of the atomic bomb and his three children, each of which has a terrible secret legacy unwittingly handed down by the father, and each of which is rife with their own problems.  But it's so much more than that - Vonnegut creates an entire religion in the mouth of the prophet Bokonon, as well as weaving the most bleakly beautiful vision of the destruction of the world I've yet read.

It is hard for me to pick a favorite Vonnegut book - from the time-spinning of Slaughterhouse-Five to the Unamuno-channeling visit between himself and Kilgore Trout in Breakfast of Champions, but I think Cat's Cradle may take the prize.  It's a painfully funny book.

Final verdict: Adore it
I really do love Vonnegut, and not just because I'm going to be attending the school he taught at in a couple of months.  Between him and Phillip Dick, a truly horrible and horribly plausible future is presented - one that overflows with dreariness and joy, simultaneously.  They are, in my humble opinion, the two most important American writers of the second half of the Twentieth Century, and Cat's Cradle is as good an example of Vonnegut's power with the imagery and savagery of the English language as any other.