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A review by sackofbeans
Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage by Kurt Vonnegut
3.0
I prefer to alternate back and forth between fiction and non-fiction in order to maintain my interest in reading and so that I do not get burned out on one genre or another.
Having just read a clinical psychology text, I was craving some existential bittersweet human-condition material and figured it had been awhile since I read such a Vonnegut story. So without really glancing at the cover I picked Palm Sunday off of my shelf.
Oops! This one's an auto-biography. Well, sort of.
Mr. Vonnegut describes this book as a "blevit", his description of a genre that is neither fiction nor non-fiction but is both at the same time, kind of.
I'd still mainly put it in the non-fiction camp. He explains in detail his ancestry, his parents, his life as a young child in Indianapolis, his time spent during the firebombing of Dresden during World War II (which he sort of re-told in a strange sci-fi time travel narrative in his novel Slaughterhouse Five), his children and adopted children, and his more recent life in Cape Cod and New York. You understand from all this why he wrote the way he did.
There's also some interviews and speeches he had given... and some some he never gave, but relates any way what he would have said had he been given the opportunity.
There's also his short stage adaptation of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" that feels like his book Slapstick in that it is something you want to find hilarious because of how absurd it is (Mr. Hyde is a giant human chicken?) but it just doesn't quite work.
Oh, and there's the inclusion of his short story "The Big Space Fuck", the story which he describes as the most vulgar thing he's ever written. Basically, a rocket full of a select few's sperm is being launched to the Andromeda galaxy to "fuck it". As someone now working in the space industry I suppose I could say I appreciated this story a little more than I would have otherwise.
Perhaps the neatest things in the book were how he shows the shapes of stories on graph paper (which you can get the gist of here), and his personal report card reviewing his previous novels. He gave my personal favorite novel of his Mother Night an 'A', and my least favorite (so far) Slapstick a 'D', and this book itself a 'C', which I suppose I could agree with.
I did love this quote though:
"If a lover in a story wins his true love, that’s the end of the tale, even if World War III is about to begin, and the sky is black with flying saucers."
Having just read a clinical psychology text, I was craving some existential bittersweet human-condition material and figured it had been awhile since I read such a Vonnegut story. So without really glancing at the cover I picked Palm Sunday off of my shelf.
Oops! This one's an auto-biography. Well, sort of.
Mr. Vonnegut describes this book as a "blevit", his description of a genre that is neither fiction nor non-fiction but is both at the same time, kind of.
I'd still mainly put it in the non-fiction camp. He explains in detail his ancestry, his parents, his life as a young child in Indianapolis, his time spent during the firebombing of Dresden during World War II (which he sort of re-told in a strange sci-fi time travel narrative in his novel Slaughterhouse Five), his children and adopted children, and his more recent life in Cape Cod and New York. You understand from all this why he wrote the way he did.
There's also some interviews and speeches he had given... and some some he never gave, but relates any way what he would have said had he been given the opportunity.
There's also his short stage adaptation of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" that feels like his book Slapstick in that it is something you want to find hilarious because of how absurd it is (Mr. Hyde is a giant human chicken?) but it just doesn't quite work.
Oh, and there's the inclusion of his short story "The Big Space Fuck", the story which he describes as the most vulgar thing he's ever written. Basically, a rocket full of a select few's sperm is being launched to the Andromeda galaxy to "fuck it". As someone now working in the space industry I suppose I could say I appreciated this story a little more than I would have otherwise.
Perhaps the neatest things in the book were how he shows the shapes of stories on graph paper (which you can get the gist of here), and his personal report card reviewing his previous novels. He gave my personal favorite novel of his Mother Night an 'A', and my least favorite (so far) Slapstick a 'D', and this book itself a 'C', which I suppose I could agree with.
I did love this quote though:
"If a lover in a story wins his true love, that’s the end of the tale, even if World War III is about to begin, and the sky is black with flying saucers."