davidaguilarrodriguez 's review for:

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

4.75

challenging dark funny sad medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Complicated

Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

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There’s nothing new I can say about Slaughterhouse-Five, and whatever great things have already been written about this book — they’re true.

It’s a darkly comic tour de force. A surreal, sci-fi-infused war novel about the futility of violence, the wreckage of PTSD, and the impossibility of narrating horror. Vonnegut lived through Dresden. He saw the unseeable. And somehow, miraculously, he turned that experience into a book that is hilarious, devastating, absurd, philosophical, brutal, and tender all at once.

The time jumps, the aliens, the mordant black humor, the flat affect, the sudden bursts of raw feeling — it all works. It shouldn’t, but it does. Vonnegut pulls together all these disparate threads and somehow creates something unified, something with its own weird gravity. It feels both emotionally raw and coolly resigned — like watching the end of the world through a cracked mirror while cracking a joke.

I was surprised at how cohesive it felt, given how fragmented it is. This is absolutely one of the great American novels.

There’s no real reason this shouldn’t be a 5-star book. It really is. The only thing holding me back is that, for personal taste reasons, I’m less drawn to war stories and philosophical fatalism than other themes. But that’s about me — not the book. It’s brilliant. It’s iconic. It absolutely hits the mark on what it sets out to do.