Best book blurbs. Ever.

I was cleaning out a closet the other day and I came across my high school copy of Slaughterhouse Five. I liked the book--there are two great scenes in the book, among my favorites in fiction--but what I really liked were the two review quotes on the cover. Because of them, for a few months, I badly wanted to be a novelist.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. has written one of the major novels of the year . . . haunting . . . irresistible reading . . . poignant and hilarious, threaded with compassion and, behind everything, the cataract of a thundering moral statement . . . work of art.  --Boston Globe.

Splendid art and simplicity . . . nerve-racking control . . . a funny book at which you are not permitted to laugh, a sad book without tears, a tale told in a slaughterhouse.  --Life Magazine.

"[T]he cataract of a thundering moral statement . . ." Lord, at age 16 I loved the sound of that.

I still do.

Comments

[kyle8]

hhhmmmmm, sorry, I didn't think it was all that great, and I certainly thought Vonnegut was, as a writer, overrated.

Of course there was a certain power to it when you knew that he was partly writing from his own experience in the air raids.

But his style was thick and wandering.

But don't mind me, I have yet to read any of the so called "modern American Classics" that I thought could hold a candle to the writing of the nineteenth and very early twentieth century. Or, for that matter, the average science fiction novel.