Slaughterhouse Five
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4.2 • 148 Ratings
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- $0.99
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- $0.99
Publisher Description
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time, Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world's great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous firebombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim's odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we fear most.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Listen: Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time." So begins Vonnegut's absurdist 1969 classic. Hawke rises to the occasion of performing this sliced-and-diced narrative, which is part sci-fi and partially based on Vonnegut's experience as a American prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany during the firebombing of 1945 that killed thousands of civilians. Billy travels in time and space, stopping here and there throughout his life, including his long visit to the planet Tralfamador, where he is mated with a porn star. Hawke adopts a confidential, whisper-like tone for his reading. Listening to him is like listening to someone tell you a story in the back of a bus the perfect pitch for this book. After the novel ends, Vonnegut himself speaks for a short while about his survival of the Dresden firestorm and describes and names the man who inspired this story. Tacked on to the very end of this audio smorgasbord is music, a dance single that uses a vintage recording of Vonnegut reading from the book. Though Hawke's reading is excellent, one cannot help but wish Vonnegut himself had read the entire text.
Customer Reviews
Confusingly brilliant.
I found this book hard to follow but in the end the author is able to evoke feelings in the midst of, at times, unintelligible story lines.
Great Book, Terrible Copy
It lacks drawings, signs and illustration that are required to understand the book.
call my crazy
tldr; i was hesitant, but in the end i was able to fall in love
i read this on a whim because i saw a musician i admire talking about it. i hadn’t taken the time to read any of vonnegut’s stuff before, so i decided, why not?
at first the narration was a bit off for me. very dry, in ways. when i write my own stuff, i like to be really flowery and descriptive. i use a lot of metaphors to describe the characters’ feelings.
kurt doesn’t do that here, and while it took me a minute to get used to it, i found myself absolutely falling in love with it. he’s descriptive in other ways, and gets across points without needing to embellish. the use of colors and specific phrases to throw back to other points of the book (“bobbing up and down, and up and down”) just tickles a certain part in my brain in the best way.
i could get really far into analyzing the overall meaning, but i’m already waffling on enough as it is.
the point here is that i LOVE this book. it became my favorite before i was ever done with it.