Slaughter House Five By Kurt Vonnegut Jr
This review starts with the words "This book is a curse" and ends with "Poo-tee-weet?"
This book is a curse. Once you pick the thing up it stays in your hands until the curse is eventually broken, and you finish the damn thing. There is no plot, there are no real characters, there isn't any time, no suspense, nothing noteworthy in any sense. But it curses you all the same. Roughly every page and a half you are brought to a different time and place in the life of Billy Pilgrim, and he comes along with you, fully aware of the time travel. So it goes.
This is a time travel story. Many time travel stories deal with changing events in the past so that the future is improved. Vonnegut has said that this "assumes we know more about life than we really do" that there are no good or bad events, there are just events, and there are some that are pleasant and some that are unpleasant.
Vonnegut has said that being a POW in Dresden, Germany in 1945 was the best thing that had ever happened to him. That year Allied Forces poured jellied gasoline over the heads of the residents of Dresden, killing 500,000. Vonnegut, surviving the massacre by sheltering in an underground meat locker called Slaughter House Five, returned home knowing he had to tell the story. So it goes. The story became the novel, Slaughter House Five or The Children's Crusade his most widely acclaimed and highest selling novel of his career.
The book's bleak view on causality and responsibility is that everything will always happen as it always has happened, and you will always do what you have always done. So the appeal of the book is not to find out what happens at the end. . There's no need to get to the end, and because of this you can enjoy every word of this master work. So I don't have to be worried to spoil this one. The book ends with "Poo-tee-weet?"