Essential for Vonnegut completists, of course—and budding writers can always learn a thing or two from the sardonic master.
A sterling collection of the late Vonnegut’s corpus of short fiction, with several unpublished pieces to balance better-known published and anthologized work.
As volume editors Klinkowitz and Wakefield note, the 98 stories gathered here come mostly from magazine work of the 1940s and '50s, some later collected in books such as Welcome to the Monkey House, as well as unpublished pieces posthumously gathered by Vonnegut’s executor and a few retrieved from Vonnegut’s papers at Indiana University. The editors nicely complicate the collection by breaking it into eight thematic groups—war, science, and so forth. Vonnegut being Vonnegut, the stories do not always neatly fit into these categories: the deftly ironic “Just You and Me, Sammy” has elements of war story, spy story, and murder mystery all rolled up into one. Given Vonnegut’s experiences in World War II, many of the stories are death-haunted; in one plainspoken tale, meaningfully called “Out, Brief Candle,” he writes of a woman who “felt old because her husband, Ed, who really was old, had died and left her alone on the hog farm in northern Indiana,” the Hoosier State being a favorite setting. Some of the stories seem written to dutiful formula, but even when he is writing more or less conventionally, Vonnegut sneaks in some pet themes—time travel, say, with one wonderfully strange yarn featuring a character who says, “I want you to kill me and bring me back to life,” a request that, naturally enough, has odd consequences. His trademark existential despair is here in spades, and even if nothing quite dazzles in the way of Cat’s Cradle or Slaughterhouse-Five, nothing clinks, either. There’s plenty of humor worthy of O. Henry, too, as when he writes of a high school band class, “C Band set out in its quest for beauty—set out like a rusty switch engine, with valves stuck, pipes clogged, unions leaking, bearings dry.”
Essential for Vonnegut completists, of course—and budding writers can always learn a thing or two from the sardonic master.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-60980-808-2
Page Count: 911
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
PERSPECTIVES
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.
Ware (In A Dark, Dark Wood, 2015) offers up a classic “paranoid woman” story with a modern twist in this tense, claustrophobic mystery.
Days before departing on a luxury cruise for work, travel journalist Lo Blacklock is the victim of a break-in. Though unharmed, she ends up locked in her own room for several hours before escaping; as a result, she is unable to sleep. By the time she comes onboard the Aurora, Lo is suffering from severe sleep deprivation and possibly even PTSD, so when she hears a big splash from the cabin next door in the middle of the night, “the kind of splash made by a body hitting water,” she can’t prove to security that anything violent has actually occurred. To make matters stranger, there's no record of any passenger traveling in the cabin next to Lo’s, even though Lo herself saw a woman there and even borrowed makeup from her before the first night’s dinner party. Reeling from her own trauma, and faced with proof that she may have been hallucinating, Lo continues to investigate, aided by her ex-boyfriend Ben (who's also writing about the cruise), fighting desperately to find any shred of evidence that she may be right. The cast of characters, their conversations, and the luxurious but confining setting all echo classic Agatha Christie; in fact, the structure of the mystery itself is an old one: a woman insists murder has occurred, everyone else says she’s crazy. But Lo is no wallflower; she is a strong and determined modern heroine who refuses to doubt the evidence of her own instincts. Despite this successful formula, and a whole lot of slowly unraveling tension, the end is somehow unsatisfying. And the newspaper and social media inserts add little depth.
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3293-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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