Kurt Vonnegut is dead
Kurt Vonnegut is dead. He was 84, yet I find myself filled with a strange saddness. It’s been years since I last read his work, but his writing had a profound impact on me. “Slaughterhouse Five,” which tells the story of a man come unstuck from time and forced to relive the events of his life in random order, is perhaps one of the greatest comments on post-war America. More memoir than novel, it gets to the core of how hopeless our lives have become.
Between the news that the Bush administration has systematically turned the federal bureaucracy into a Republican patronage operation, to the endless drip-drip-drip of war news (more Americans killed by IED’s, a bomb in the Iraqi Parliament), it’s hard not to feel like we ourselves have become unstuck in time, forced into some terrible nightmare where everything we took for granted about our country is gone.
Vonnegut practically foretold the world we’re living in, possibly even more so than George Orwell. He was among the great 20th Century writers, more important than elitist blowhards like Gore Vidal and Tom Wolfe, and more humane than Norman Mailer. As withdrawn as he was from the media scene in recent years, I will miss the occasional essay or interview that would illuminate current events so vividly.
We’ve lost something great, here, and it’s sad to say that he has no true successor.
Farewell, Mr. Vonnegut.
Uncategorized | jeff | 12 April 2007 |
