What is /lit's opinion on Kurt Vonnegut?

>>9910650
Breakfast of Champions is great.

>>9910657
I'm reading that one now

He's considered Reddit garbage here, I've liked the two books I've read by him (Slaughter House 5, Cat's Cradle).

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is not his best work, but it is my favorite.

Breakfast of Champions, Slaughterhouse, and Cat's Cradle, as mentioned above, are all great.

he's a good and easy postmodernist, but the problem is that vapid girls keep getting so it goes tattooed on themselves after highschool reading, so any mention of SH5 here sends out tumblrwhale/reddit signals.

Cat's Cradle is my favourite but Sirens of Titan is a close second, and most of his other works are worth picking up.

Bluebeard I think is probably his most underrated, but it's also about visual postmodernism, so ymmv if you're in it for the aliens. It does have one of the artists from BoC as the main character

Breakfast of Champions has a Bruce Willis adaptation, they change some of it, but it works well despite the changes (it might be a bit happier if anything).

God Bless You Mr Rosewater has Mr Rosewater from the arts festival in BoC as the main character if you'd like to follow him instead.

>>9910714
>>9910752
Yeah I understand the basic bitch thing, but it doesn't change the fact that he's a solid author. I have interacted with these vapid hoes before and they really only ruined slaughterhouse for me. If you ask them about any of his other work they are completely vacuous so in my mind his entire body of work is unharmed by this trash species.

>>9910650
It's really funny that /lit/ rejects Vonnegut as "Reddit-tier" when he's much better than their meme authors.

http://www.cosmoetica.com/B1277-DES888.htm

>...perhaps the most cogent comment I read on the book came from an anonymous Amazon reviewer who offhandedly compared Pynchon’s book to Kurt Vonnegut’s lean 1968 masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five- which deals with a great many of the same issues, in the same era, in this manner (I paraphrase): if one views Vonnegut’s book as a world class sprinter running the 100 yard dash, then Pynchon’s book is a fat man attempting to not die while running a marathon. This, more than any other half-assed, mealy-mouthed review by a pseudo-Academic pretending to declaim the book as a masterpiece, gets to the heart of why the book fails colossally.
......Even more telling is my prior claim about comparing Pynchon and Gravity’s Rainbow to Kurt Vonnegut and Slaughterhouse-Five. Both books are said to be ‘comic masterpieces,’ but it’s only true in Vonnegut’s case. First, in, literally about a fifth to a sixth of Pynchon’s book’s length, Vonnegut handles a good five to ten times worth of meaty issues and insights with concision, whereas Pynchon is a devotee of bloat. Second, Vonnegut is actually funny, in his book. Pynchon is not. I recall, while reading Wallace’s Girl With Curious Hair, and researching criticism of it, how claims of Wallace’s being a humorous writer were hurled, yet all I could tell, in terms of humor, was a tale in which Wallace made a pervert out of television game show host Alex Trebek. This is what passes for humor in the minds of literary stripteasers. Vonnegut, on the other hand, actually develops characters that we care for, even when they are inane- such as Billy Pilgrim or his wife. And when he relies on a seeming gimmick, such as a bird chiming ‘Poo-tee-weet,’ there is a reason for it, in that it connects the reader back to the book’s main points, narratively, philosophically, and thematically. Pynchon’s logorrhea is incapable of such humor, concision, and poesy. To succeed, especially on the written page, humor needs an underlying understanding of the thing being needled, made fun of, parodied. In short, there usually needs to be an affection for the thing, however absurd or worthy of being made fun of (i.e- to laugh with something rather than at it). And, in those few cases where mean-spirited making fun of can work, the writing, wordplay, and insight must be spectacular. Pynchon is NEVER spectacular. Nor is he funny- neither in the Three Stooges lowbrow sort of way, nor in the intellectual Woody Allen sense. Hell, he’s not even smirk-inducing, wherein the reader gets the intent of some solipsistic piece of sophistry and says, ‘Ah, yes, that’s what he was trying to do,’ and smirks at even the intended humor. Pynchon is all pretense (much like Joyce in Finnegans Wake), Vonnegut is all substance.

>>9910650
He wrote one book in a dozen different guises. Fun for the first book of his you read, but he's a one-trick pony.

His work is good, but overrated by the general population. Since he's a name-brand author, like Shakespeare, people take him as some sort of pinnacle of human thought, when he's really just a good writer that got escalatored to that level of fame because he was anti-war in the 1970s.

The work that's touted as his major work, Slaughterhouse Five, is basically a weaker version of more difficult books in the same style, Catch-22, etc. People who love it love it because they lack the mental acuity or the experience.

Almost all of his other work, Cat's Cradle, Sirens of Titan, Mother Night etc, is as good, if not better. I think Cat's Cradle and Sirens of Titan are both probably better picks as representative and quality literature of the cold war period.

>>9910973
"I'm converting to Bokonism" - Thomas Pynchon

Vonnegut was definitely an influence on Pynchon. Piano Player and Sirens of Titan. I have no doubt that he admires Vonnegut.

They're both great authors and must-reads. It's a shame lit gets too polarized on easy/difficult; political/timeless literature and can't simply enjoy multiple styles of literature without throwing a hissy fit.

>>9910982
The difficulty of a book does not dictate the substance of it. In my opinion it shows a lack of intelligence when someone discounts something for it being too obvious or easy to read/watch/consume. Just because you've read a harder book doesn't mean that you should ignore a book that has a lot of substance. Intelligence is shown in the analysis of a work not in what work is being analyzed.

>>9911023
>It's a shame lit gets too polarized on easy/difficult; political/timeless literature and can't simply enjoy multiple styles of literature without throwing a hissy fit.

Agreed. A lot of people here seem to be more concerned with proving themselves as intellectuals instead of just enjoying literature and gathering as much out of it as they can. The easiest way for these people to feel intellectually superior is just to shit on books that people like and say that only unknown esoteric literature is worthy of there intelligence.

Reddit trash

>>9911049

I said weaker. I think a greater lack of clarity serves the kind of war narrative both Heller and Vonnegut (and Pynchon) are trying to write.

It's not the substance of the book, but the way the substance is expressed through the style, is made by the style. The less coherent book, the harder to read book, is a much more impactful and true book. It also happens to be less readable, and so it takes a better reader.

>>9910973
I've read Gravity's Rainbow cover to cover, and Slaughterhouse-5, and I think if someone thinks "they deal with the same issues", they didn't make it past the 100 page mark of Gravity's Rainbow. They are totally different books, written in totally different ways, and Gravity's Rainbow is not really a book that can be experienced solely through its "themes". Yes, Vonnegut is a better writer than David Foster Wallace, but in reality that is most writers in existence.

>>9911083
There is certainly truth to this. Although if the goal of both of these books is to critique war then wouldn't the one that is more understandable to the masses be more effective? That is to say that if the goal, ultimately, is to convince the masses that war is not a beautiful victorious thing, the more effective novel would be the one that reached more people.

>>9910788
>Yeah I understand the basic bitch thing, but it doesn't change the fact that he's a solid author

Keep this in mind whenever trying to discuss any authors or books here

>>9910650
i like vonnegut but when somebody tells me he's their favorite author, i usually assume they aren't very well read.

cat's cradle and slaughterhouse 5 are great, breakfast of champions was just alright IMO.