Review: Armageddon in Retrospect

As stated in a previous post, I'm quite embarrassed to admit that I've somehow managed to live twenty-nine years without reading any of Kurt Vonnegut's work. After finishing Armageddon in Retrospect this morning, my embarrassment has blossomed to full on mortification.

A collection of short stories loosely themed around war and many specifically pertaining to the Second World War, this is a fantastic volume that seems to be a perfect introduction to his work, though it is technically his last - published after his death in 2007. It's a lovely volume that I bought for primarily aesthetic reasons - it's a beautiful trade paperback with folding sleeves and original artwork by the author and it screamed at me from the shelves. I've always meant to pick up a volume or two since I have been told many times by reputable sources that I would enjoy his writing. But this volume was the first to ever catch my eye, and so I begin at both the beginning (with his letter sent home as a POW during WWII) and the ending (his final written speech).

I read this book rather quickly, one story at a time every few days. The only exception was the story "Spoils" - one of the shortest but easily the most emotional for me. After reading that story and having a good cry, I held off reading for a few weeks. It's a simple story, but it conveys acutely the pain of losing everything in a war only to realize that there is always something else left to lose. Just thinking of the little boy and his rabbit now makes me tremble and tear up - it's one of those stories that gets under your skin because it's so sad, but also because it's so true. And that, to me, is the essence of what makes these short stories so great. They are sketches of real men, real places, real wars and real suffering. No one is inherently good or evil, right or wrong.

Vonnegut sees the world with the cold gaze of a man who has lived through some of the worst history has to offer, and like many other men of his time he has seen through the haze of lies we weave to soften the edges of the world. He sees the world and its inhabitants for what they are, and he describes them with great integrity. You see his pity, his apathy, his disbelief in every word. And most importantly, you see few heroes and few villains, just people caught on both sides of a struggle to survive. His own account of the war is remarkable, and his letter home voiced with a total detachment from the facts that causes them to play out with a sick humor as he relays the series of events occurring between his capture by the Germans and his release from POW camp. Included in this, and written about in several of the stories, is the firebombing of Dresden.

Though some of his stories, especially those based on the actual events he experienced in the war, hit me with an unexpected strength of emotion, it was his humor I enjoyed most of all. In particular, the final quote in the book: "Where do I get my ideas from? You might as well have asked that of Beethoven. He was goofing around in Germany like everybody else, and all of a sudden this stuff came gushing out of him. It was music. I was goofing around like everybody else in Indiana and all of a sudden stuff came gushing out. It was disgust with civilization."

Now I finally see what the fuss has been about all these years, and why he's remained such a popular author. I can't wait to dig into the rest of his writings, and to make a good thing even better Random House is reissuing all his works in editions designed with his own artwork. Time to clear more space on the shelf!