"I don't know what's going on . . . and I'm probably not smart enough to understand if somebody was to explain it to me. All I know is we're being tested somehow, by somebody or some thing a whole lot smarter than us, and all I can do is be friendly and keep calm and try and have a nice time till it's over."
Boaz
to himself
The Sirens of Titan
by Kurt Vonnegut
I'm moving slow like Uncle Joe on my Vonnegut Chronological-ish Oeuvre Trek, but I've got a lot of distractions, literary and otherwise. But I am most assuredly enjoying the hell out of The Sirens of Titan. I don't know if I properly appreciated just how good this book is the first couple of times I had my way with it. For one thing, the distance between this Vonnegut and the Player Piano Vonnegut is just imfuckingmense. I'm going to have to go back at some point and see what happened to him between 1952 and 1959. My guess would be that he wrote a shitload of short stories and started honing his style, because in The Sirens of Titan he is full-blown Vonnegut.
He also introduced quite a few set pieces in this novel . . . like the Tralfamadorians, Wanda June, Stony Stevenson, Kazak, & the chrono-synclastic infundibulum. Maybe some other stuff that I have overlooked or haven't gotten to yet (about a hundred pages left to go). And it's FUNny. I'll never forget my dad reading this book (I gave him a copy of it and Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons) and laughing really hard when Vonnegut talked about the exACT thickness of the iron field on Mars. Good times.
Man, I miss my dad.
Man, I miss Kurt Vonnegut.
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