Slaughterhouse 5

>>9402603
more like kid's catch-22 which is kid's gravity's rainbow

I have a pretentious friend who says this book is a masterpiece and one of the greatest works of literature ever written

>>9402603
Vonnegut has his place. Not everything has to be experimental maximalism.

>>9402603

Vonnegut has always been Pynchon lite for try hards who are too frightened to touch Pynchon.

>>9403139
Why are they frightened? Do they know how to read?

You have to admit, that was one lucky pony.

>>9403132
This

>>9403536
Its not the most accessible book out there

>I would instead here single out what for me is the central interest in Pynchon’s paradoxical patience. I mean something beyond the rocketry’s metaphorical connection with eventual unity and with the sexual arc of a death-wish that offers, but may anesthetize and erase the experience of, a whole reality fulfilled in death as Rilke conceives it in the Tenth Elegy which Pynchon quotes with uncertain force. No: beyond this, but using it, as he so often uses difficult knowledges -- binaries divided by interface, or chemistries divided by a human will to use them and their blank and secret power to use us -- is the deeper thing where metaphor dissolves into identity, and this huge narrative tries to show forth the process of which human life is an instance; tries to show that process not in order to turn away from our shallow or deep surfaces but to see (or, in some conceptual clarity that is also our own capillary collaboration with them, to break down) the plasmic structures of ourselves to find in their nonetheless continuing life and form their reality. I no more have “patience” with those who dismiss Gravity’s Rainbow for its maze or its subject matter, than with those who would disparage the twelve-hour length of Robert Wilson’s dance opera, The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin. In that work, one of the greatest created for the stage in this century, certain movements often pass so slowly from one side to the other than they seem part of a system of energy which includes its own contemplation yet is but partly emergent somewhat as the mingled crescendoes of speech at some points in the work are unclearly overheard -- in turn like the atomized fantasia of scattered events that constitute Pynchon’s characters in Gravity’s Rainbow. His patience is paradoxical in that it is a potent, intelligent will, yet always driven into some parallel or passivity of obsessional elaboration. The paranoia so explicit in all the elusiveness of The Crying of Lot 49 is here both more analytically explicit and often not paranoia at all, but the feeling of terror and passivity bravely returning to their real causes in larger systems that control while being out of control.

>>9402603
Well anon, I don't know if you liked it. If you have to ask, then you probably weren't too attached.

I'd say that it's not really a kid's GR, though Vonnegut is a lot like a less Pynchon-y Pynchon, if that makes sense (less maximalist, but a similar mixture of comedy and the bizarre).