Glutted

A programme entitled Between Time and Timbuktu was my introduction to the work of Kurt Vonnegut (Junior, as he was then.) I suppose that was when I was sixteen since the useful Chronology of the writer's life provided in the LoA editions dates the first broadcast of the programme as being in March 1972, in America that is. As far as I can remember I'd read the first six novels by the time I went to university, though I could be wrong about this. I do know I started with Cat's Cradle and finished with Slaughterhouse Five. Oddly I stopped there, though Breakfast of Champions had obviously been published by then, but I can't for the life of me remember why. I've got a feeling I looked down on novel number seven, but it's a mystery to me why I should have done so. Had I read some scathing reviews? Had I simply had enough of Vonnegut? Certainly Slaughterhouse Five takes his work to a kind of perfection. I felt that then, and having just read it a few days back after God Bless You, Mr Rosewater, I feel the same way.

Funnily enough, I read a few pages into Champions and stopped a couple of days ago. It felt a bit tired and possibly I've glutted on my favourite humourist overmuch. But I didn't face any difficulty with Rosewater, which, frankly, is an incredibly ill-constructed mess. I just enjoyed the messiness. I suppose my stalling on Champions is related to our forthcoming trip to Medinah and Makkah. I decided some time ago, before our aborted attempt in June, that my reading for the duration of the trip would be largely devotional and I see no reason to change my mind. I think I need a rest from fiction, even in its most enjoyable form.

When I watched the Timbuktu broadcast I recall being excited at the sheer fecundity of KV's ideas and general inventiveness. Reading the first six novels again much later in life I still get that sense, but I now recognise a paradoxical weariness about his work, a sense of disillusion with the absurdity of it all that translates into an almost quietist desire for withdrawal. The tension between these two elements of his work seems to me to be deeply characteristic. One example: the way the story of poor Edgar Derby, shot simply for stealing a teapot in the aftermath of the Dresden bombing, is never actually told as such is extraordinary. On one hand you have the inventiveness of a narrative structure that tells you precisely what is going to happen to a character as soon as you meet him; on the other you have a narrative that refuses to give you the details you assume will be forthcoming as if it's simply too painful to do so.

I see Vonnegut as an intensely and honestly contradictory writer, and I think that's what makes him, if not great, then very, very good indeed. And, frankly, who cares about such distinctions, anyway? Mr Vonnegut taught me not to a long time ago.