Book review: Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut Jr

[dotinthesky]

Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I’ve discovered in my old age that I don’t like zany humour.

I first read “Cat’s Cradle” in university. It was one of those novels that other students knew, and that everyone loved. Over the years, the only thing that stayed with me was the religion of Bokononism, founded by Bokonon (an old black calypso singer) on the Caribbean island of San Lorenzo, and some of its zany (which I thought at the time “smart”) concepts: that we all belong to karasses (groups of random people that are here on the planet for a particular reason which they are not aware of), that life is ironic and absurd, that we are always a step away from utter destruction. That was the 90s, the fall of the Berlin Wall felt like yesterday, and some of “Cat’s Cradle’s” themes still seemed current. But now… in a world as crazy and surreal as ours, Vonnegut’s satire seems quaint and even soft.

The novel is narrated by Jonah, before his conversion to Bokononism, and charts his adventures in the pursuit of writing a book about the day the first atomic bomb was dropped on Japan. (Kurt Vonnegut was a soldier during WWII and survived the bombing of Dresden by the Allied forces – his war experience stayed with him and affects most of his work, from what I understand.)

Jonah ends up meeting the three children of the man who invented the bomb, and finally lands in San Lorenzo, where things become even more zany – involving a dictator, Bokonon and a new weapon of mass destruction called ice9.

Chapters are short, characters talk a lot about things that are meant to be funny but ring flat, subplots unfold within subplots then disappear altogether. Something about the Cold War, something about humanity being prone to self-destruction, something about the futility of love.

Margaret Atwood’s “The Year of the Flood”, which also features songs from a new post-apocalyptic religion, may have been influenced by “Cat’s Cradle”. I think Atwood’s black humour can be very Vonnegut, but more current.

Kurt Vonnegut once said: “here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.” Well, I found at least two of them in this novel.


View all my reviews