Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children's Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death

So much has been written and discussed about this novel over the years that it's hard to come up with anything new. So I'll be brief:

- This book is just as powerful to listen to as it is to read.

- Ethan Hawke does an excellent job as a reader. This audio book is worth the price just for the subtle vocal punch he gives to "So it goes."

- Immediately after the book, there's a short interview with Vonnegut, followed in turn by a performance piece in which Vonnegut reads a short excerpt from the book accompanied by music and storm effects. This is interesting -- but there should have been a gap (1-2 seconds would have been enough) between the end of Hawke's reading and the start of the interview.

This is a powerful story read by a subtly powerful narrator. I highly recommend it.

This book is simply unique. I have not listened to anything like it in style. The movement between time periods could have been confusing but here it added to the excitement of the novel. For a book based on an actual time period but its readability is timeless.

Hawke did a great job of reading and his voice adds to the depth of the experience.

I was looking for an acclaimed classic - know nothing about this book or author. The risk was well rewarded. Given the status of the book - this is a must read for all.

Slaughterhouse Five is probably the best anti-war novel I ever read. By showing the absurdity of human condition in the war time, it builds in readers the strongest aversion to the war and to the pompous war heroism.

It is a surrealistic novel, sometimes skimming on the brink of science-fiction. The title refers to the Dresden's slaughterhouse where American's POWs were kept in the end of the war when Dresden bombing happened.

It's subtitle, "The Children's Crusade" refers to the scene in the beginning of the book, where former II WW soldiers were called babies by the wife of war hero. In some sense the purpose of the subtitle is to despise the typical, pompous, heroic stories of the wars.

The most of the narration is the story of Billy Pilgrim, an American soldier, who is sent by Germans to Dresden, just before the bombing. Billy experiences a mental state called "unstickness of the time" - he visits his past, present and future out of sequence, sometimes in backward direction and often, repetitively. During his time travels, he claims to be kidnapped by aliens and kept as zoo exhibit on a planet called Tralfamadore. These parts of the plot seem to be quite strange, but when you immerse into the text deeply, they play some increadible role - far from typical sci-fi motives in other novels.

In fact they have some philosophical implications. The questions of free will and of time are central here.

The bombing of Dresden is described with scarce details. The infamous "corpse mine", where one of characters dies from vomiting, is the only more detailed part of the novel.

Travelling in space and time with Billy we are faced with almost absolute absurdity of the war, the cold cruelty of men in the wartime, without calling these features by name.

What makes this book special is peculiar climate it creates.

Last but not least - the narration of Ethan Hawke was one of the best I ever experienced.

A book that is 40 years old, that talks about WWII & its aftermath, that retains a flavor of the 1960s, doesn't sound like a book for our time. And yet it is. Vonnegut treats with timeless matters, the nature of war & remembrance, the impact on the soldier (whether than is called shell-shock or battle-fatigue or post-traumatic stress syndrome), the contrast between battle conditions & middle-class life. Vonnegut does this in a wonderful way, a cross between stream-of-consciousness & being "unstuck in time" that draws the reader in, playfully, and then provides a set of subtle hammerblows throughout about the philosophical matters at hand. This is not your everyday, realistic anti-war novel, or truly a left-leaning anti-war novel, as some would have it. It is just a different way of looking at the reality of war, the objectification of one side of the other. It is very timely in today's US/Iraq conflict to stimulate your thinking about right & wrong, and if right (as Billy Pilgrim once opines when asked about the fire-bombing of Dresden), the consequences of being right.

This book is wonderfully read as well. Highly recommended.

Should have listened to it a long time . . . never got around to it and am now kicking myself. Was in the middle of a poorly written book (albeit with good content) and switched mid-stream out of frustration.

The immediate leap in the quality of the prose was SO refreshing! Truly a classic book---it will be read for generations to come. Remarkable.

This is a classic pacifist satire which deserves the attention of the current generation upon Mr. Vonnegut's death (and so it goes) and the state of affairs in the world today. It has been a pleasure to revisit words that helped shape my life when I was a teenager all that time ago. However, Ethan Hawke as narrator needed better direction. Affecting a world-weary, hoarse whisper, he fails to find the voice of the bewildered, uncool anti-hero Billy Pilgrim. Hawke's mispronunciations and butchering of the French and German phrases in the book are just painful. He actually says "nuke-u-lar." Arrrgh. However, it's such a beautiful book that it's worth listening to and forgiving all that. Don't miss the lagniappe at the end of this audio version: a jazz remix of Vonnegut himself reading that amazing passage where Billy comes just a little unstuck in time and watches the war movie in reverse, where the planes take off backwards and the guns suck bullets out of people, leaving them whole and unhurt. A lovely fantasy.

Slaughterhouse Five is a brilliant book that gets better each time I read it. I love the way Kurt Vonnegut crafts words, I love the way he interfaces reality with his poetic idea of what reality is or might be. I love his ability to weave humor into such a humorless subject, and put little touches of humanity here and there in unexpected ways.

I especially love the part of the book where Billy is watching a movie. Billy is either mad because it is his way of dealing with trauma, or he really can move through time in a random manner. He watches a movie one night, but he watches it in reverse because time is going backwards. It is a war movie. It starts with a city on fire but there is a mysterious force that sucks the fires and explosions out of the city and puts it into cylinders which are magnetically lifted into the belly's of passing bombers where they are stacked in neat rows in the bomb bays. The aircraft fly backwards towards Britain. They are damaged but as they fly over France German fighters fly up and suck bullets out of the bombers so that they are suddenly perfect again and no one is injured anymore. Crashed bombers fly up from the ground to re-join their friends. The dead pilots come to life again.

The planes land back in England, and the cylinders are shipped to the United States where workers, mostly women, disassemble them and separate the dangerous contents into safe minerals which are then placed back in the ground where they remain safe forever. All the characters grow younger, including Hitler, until they are all babies and unable to harm anyone. It is a beautiful movie.

This section of the book was read by Vonnegut in 2003 and set to music. It is called Tock Tick. It is reproduced at the end of the book along with Vonnegut discussing the book and its origins. The reader is superb (he is better than Vonnegut himself). It is a provocative book, challenging, and wonderfully well written. Recommended.

This book combines all the guilty pleasures of a Kilgore Trout novel with the sort of thoughtfulness that you would expect from someone who survived the firebombing of Dresden. Even at a distance of sixty years, it is just impossible for the mind really to comprehend the deaths of 130,000 people in a raid that seems to have served no military purpose whatsoever.

Vonnegut's quasi-autobiographical account of the war focuses on the fictional Billy Pilgrim, who survives the firebombing of Dresden but can never quite get it out of his mind in later years. Billy has the peculiar gift of becoming "unstuck in time" -- being able to close his eyes and experience any of the moments of his life in any order -- which allows Vonnegut to juxtapose Billy's war experiences with his earlier and later experiences (including his kidnapping by aliens from the planet Tralfamedore). Many people die throughout the book, as they do in real life, and Vonnegut asks the basic question, "Does it matter?"

Should have listened to it a long time . . . never got around to it and am now kicking myself. Was in the middle of a poorly written book (albeit with good content) and switched mid-stream out of frustration.

The immediate leap in the quality of the prose was SO refreshing! Truly a classic book---it will be read for generations to come. Remarkable.

Fully deserving of its lofty position on the top shelf of 20th century literature, this book is able to take people where perhaps they don't want to go - but need to.

This books tells the story of Billy Pilgrim, a leaf is the maelstrom of 20th century life - taken to war and back again. And again and again.

Vonnegut is the master of contrasts, using ingenious and original literary invention to show us the idiocy of war, the inevitability of death, the quiet terror of safe suburban life - and the personal tale of how we all blunder through - until we don't any more.

The honesty, the humour, the serious lesson underneath - simply brilliant.

Ethan Hawke proves a good reader, a little breathy, though he makes you feel he is taking you into his confidence - and after a while the story stops all thought of the narrator which is as it should be.