Isn’t it always the way? You go away for a week and when you come back your favorite author has died.

I first read Slaughterhouse 5 when I was on a EuroCamp holliday with my parents when I was 14, over then next 15 years I read and re-read everything else he’d written (actually, I’ve been saving the last 3 stories of the last short story collection (actually a collection of his earliest writing) because I don’t want to run out of things to read). I always meant to write the man a letter to say thank you for all the hours of pleasure his books have provided me over the years but as is the case with most things I never got around to it.

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different

More then any other author Kurt Vonnegut seems to me to capture the spirit of the second half of the 20th century, or at least the American experience of the late 20th century, writing about the hopes and disappointments of a the post war generations, and their political and cultural movements, never shying away from big subjects, always with a melancholy sense of humor.

“You hate America, don’t you?” she said.
“That would be as silly as loving it,” I said. “It’s impossible for me to get emotional about it, because real estate doesn’t interest me. It’s no doubt a great flaw in my personality, but I can’t think in terms of boundaries. Those imaginary lines are as unreal to me as elves and pixies. I can’t believe that they mark the end or the beginning of anything of real concern to the human soul. Virtues and vices, pleasures and pains cross boundaries at will.”

To me Kurt Vonnegut seemed like a kind of literary impressionist, able to conjour a distant crowd with a few deft brush strokes, there is always a blooming of ideas and detail waiting behind Vonnegut’s straight forward conversational style, his fictions are intricately crafted machines for stimulating the readers imagination and sense of wonder.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them in cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks…….When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.

I could go on for ages here, about how I’m fundamentally a socialist because of Vonnegut (specifically because of Jailbird, his novel about a minor Watergate conspirator, the great depression and decline of the trade union movement in North America (and about 100 other things)), about how his treatment of Darwinian theory in Galapagos is amongst the most nuanced and brilliant elucidations of that great work that I know of, effortlessly illustrating the blind random nature of the process and the majesty and hope inherent in the scheme whilst also writing about economics tourism war and making jokes about terrible hereditary diseases, in fact now I mention it, about how he’s pretty much the funniest writer I’ve ever read and how he’s also one of the most tragic, more often then not in the same passages, and about a whole load of other stuff too but in the interests of actually finishing this post at some point I’ll save it for another time. You should just go and read all his books.

• Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) [I put this one first because it’s the most famous and it’s quite short but the first 7 or 8 books in the list are practically inseparable]
• Galápagos (1985)
• Mother Night (1961)
• Bluebeard (1987)
• Cat’s Cradle (1963)
• Jailbird (1979)
• Hocus Pocus (1990)
• The Sirens of Titan (1959)
• Deadeye Dick (1982)
• Player Piano (1952)
• God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965)
• Slapstick (1976)
• Breakfast of Champions (1973)
• Timequake (1997) [this is last because I don’t hitnk it would make a great deal of sense without having read a good portion of the others]