Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut (11 November (1922)—†11 April (2007)) is an American writer and a top-favourite author of Fabrice.

Favourite works include the everybody's best-loved Slaughterhouse 5, Cat's cradle and the Sirens of Titan, but one cannot truly enjoy or even understand Vonnegut without reading his other works. Among those, I have special admiration for Breakfast of Champions, Mother Night, Jailbird and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. The first book I read was Cat's cradle, c. 2010, which I did not fully understand then. The best first book to read of Vonnegut is probably Slaughterhouse 5 or the Sirens of Titan. I read again Cat's cradle during our Icelandic trip (2024) and it got me crying.

Vonnegut is often hailed for his dark humour, but this is missing the point entirely. Humour is in his work only because humour is everywhere of quality regarding human affairs that are deep enough. Vonnegut is really about humanity. His work describes the grip of man against everything that is inhumane: the violent, the ugly, the painful. For this reason, war has a particularly central role in his work, and his success (from Slaughterhouse 5) is largely due to the anti-war sentiment from the then ongoing Vietnam war, but as for the dark humour, war is an accessory or by-product only of his thinking. Vonnegut is much deeper than that. This is also why many of his novels have a science-fiction component. A technically minded person (as he was, having a background in biochemistry), he found the real world too narrow to capture the human spirit and had to stretch in both spiritual, religious and science-fiction dimensions to get closer to his subject. It is remarkable how he came to distrust machines and a society of robots (already evident from his very first novel, Payer piano). In this sense, Vonnegut belongs with Authors like Bernanos, Giono, Gheorgiu and to a lesser extent, Orwell and Burgess.

Novels

• Player Piano (1952) 2024
• The Sirens of Titan (1959) 2018
• Mother Night (1962)
• Cat's Cradle (1963) 2nd read in August 2024
• God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965)
• Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
• Breakfast of Champions (1973)
• Slapstick (1976)
• Jailbird (1979)
• Deadeye Dick (1982)
• Galápagos (1985)
• Bluebeard (1987) September 2024
• Hocus Pocus (1990)
• Timequake (1997)

Nonfiction

• Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons (1974)
• Palm Sunday (1981)
• Nothing Is Lost Save Honor: Two Essays (1984)
• Fates Worse Than Death (1991)
• A Man Without a Country (2005)

Post mortem

• Armageddon in Retrospect the first posthumous collection of his previously unpublished writing, possibly the most important one too
• Kurt Vonnegut: The Cornell Sun Years 1941–1943 (2012)
• If This Isn't Nice, What Is?: Advice to the Young (2013)
• Vonnegut by the Dozen (2013)
• Kurt Vonnegut: Letters (2014)
• Pity the Reader: On Writing With Style (2019) with Suzanne McConnell
• Love, Kurt: The Vonnegut Love Letters, 1941–1945 (2020) Editor Edith Vonnegut

There is a complete stories collection (which we own), which content is well detailed on the Wikipedia (for instance it's missing two stories from Welcome to the Monkey House or one from Armageddon in Retrospect)