Tag Archives: war

Book Review | ‘Slaughterhouse 5’ by Kurt Vonnegut

18 Tuesday Oct 2011

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Slaughterhouse 5: Or, the Children's Crusade, A Duty-Dance with DeathSlaughterhouse 5: Or, the Children’s Crusade, A Duty-Dance with Death by Kurt Vonnegut

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds. And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like “Poo-tee-weet?”

People keep saying that this is the story of Billy Pilgrim; World War II veteran, optometrist and time-traveller. I wish they wouldn’t do that, because that is not true.

This book is about TRYING to write about the unspeakable horrors of war (in this case, the Dresden bombing) and discovering that you simply cannot. It is about how when a mind is trying to draw on suppressed terrors, will constantly be diverted to other more manageable things like stupid insignificant moments of life.

‘Slaughterhouse 5’ is a story about failing to write about Dresden. Anyone knows that in order to write about something, one must first make sense of it. Yet the problem with wars is that almost all of them are pretty senseless. It is a proven fact that after a certain point, nobody really knows what is going on anymore. Vonnegut underlines this, and points out how this is true of every other bombing in world history including Hiroshima. ‘Slaughterhouse 5’ is about the madness of men, the wars they create and how those touched by it eventually turn to that madness for comfort. As Vonnegut put it, there are no actual characters in the story. Fine, we have Pilgrim and his comrades Roland Weary, Paul Lazzaro and poor Edgar Derby; a school teacher who is eventually executed for stealing a teapot. There’s also porn-actress Montana Wildhack and the reclusive science-fiction writer Kilgore Trout.

But, there are no characters. Because the only star of the show should be the EVENT; whose gaping absence (in this case) could also be a presence of such. Because a writer’s only chance of getting near such an event is to talk around it, through populating it. Which is why we have Billy Pilgrim and characters who are not actually meant to be there, but have to be, because (ironically) their presence provides the closest, most comfortable focal point for our eyes to rest on. Any closer, and it might all be a bit too much.

“Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.
    So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.
People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore.
I’ve finished my war book now. The next one I write is going to be fun.

This one’s a failure, and had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt.”

Time is a flexible thing in Vonnegut’s world; one can be dying one minute and be born the next, only to die again. Vonnegut shows us the big events in life. The ones that jar our conscience and even our sanity. But what about the little bombs that are peppered along the path of life? Every laughable, silly character in this book is a ticking bomb in their own right who trigger other bombs. It is how all these events play out that make ‘Slaughterhouse 5’ such an enjoyable and deeply resonant book.

If you’re looking for a read that explores BIG themes, like birth, sex, death, war, humanity and the meaning of life then don’t bother reading this. You will be disappointed. However, if you are looking for a short, concise novella who right from the start understands the futility of such an undertaking and humbly admits as much, then this is for you. And who knows? I mean, you might actually arrive at a better understanding of those big themes through this scrawny little book. Like I did. And start to pay a little more attention to bird-song. Especially ones that go ‘Poo-tee-weet?’

Because when put into perspective, birdsong makes more sense than the bloodlust of humanity. Or so it goes.

For other great Vonnegut books check out my reviews of ‘2BR02B’ and ‘Cat’s Cradle’.

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Book Review | ‘The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society’ by Mary Ann Schaffer

05 Friday Aug 2011

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The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie SocietyThe Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“That’s what I love about reading: one tiny thing will interest you in a book, and that tiny thing will lead you to another book, and another bit there will lead you onto a third book. It’s geometrically progressive – all with no end in sight, and for no other reason than sheer enjoyment.”

Written as a series of letters, this heart-warming story is about the love and magic of literature, and how one book can bring a whole set of strangers together as a family. Juliet, our feisty protagonist, is an intelligent quick-witted journalist who spent the bleak, war-torn years writing a column under a pseudonym. As the war draws to a close, her days of trying to add a bit of comic relief to the horrors of the German bombardment also come to an end. Instead, she casts about for new material and one day receives a letter out of the blue from Guernsey. This unlikely correspondence grows, and begins to shed light on how some of the islanders managed to survive under the German regime thanks to a fake ‘book club’.

What I loved about this book was how easy it was to read and understand each character. The fact that it was written in letter-form (epistolary), did not hinder things like character/ plot development. In fact quite the opposite, the action was always on the go, and the characters all had their own distinct voices. In this seemingly narrow perspective, Schaffer does such a wonderful job of bringing Guernsey to life. I have heard it said that sometimes a person can fall in love with a place before they’ve been there, and that’s exactly what’s happened to me. Schaffer has managed to capture the wild, unrestrained beauty of island life, and the endearing oddities of an enclosed village-like society even though the story is set during a dark historical moment.

I think Juliet was a wonderful protagonist, and I heartily applaud Schaffer for giving her female characters some pluck. And make no mistake, there are a lot of strong, brave and selfless ladies besides Juliet who all contribute to the story. Elizabeth and Isola are probably my favourite characters as they both represent very different yet essential sides of womanhood. This novel is so many things besides a simple historical romance. It explores the concept of friendship, comradeship and sacrifice. It looks at the importance of stories, why we have them and their many functions in our lives. Sometimes a book can offer escape, at other times valuable advice. Sometimes it can even save lives or help dissolve the wall of prejudice between captive and invader. Books are very human objects, and in times of war it is most often that human touch that we most crave.

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Teaser Tuesday 26/7 | War Time Reads…

25 Monday Jul 2011

Posted by in Excerpts, Meme

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Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

  • Grab your current read
  • Open to a random page
  • Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
  • BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
  • Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Now I’ve taken some time out from novel-writing, I’m happy to be back doing Teaser Tuesdays again. This week I have noticed my reading to be a bit ‘themed’. On one hand I have the charming “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society” by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows and on the other “When We Were Orphans” by the master of understatement, Kazuo Ishiguro. Both are set around WW2, but cover vastly different perspectives.  They both came highly recommended, and rightly so.

When We Were Orphans

“It was the summer of 1923, the summer I came down from Cambridge, when despite my aunt’s wishes that I return to Shropshire, I decided my future lay in the capital and took up a small flat at Number 14b Bedford Gardens in Kensington. I remember it now as the most wonderful of summers.”  – Page 3

 The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
“I’m going to run through the wild-flower meadow outside my door and up to the cliff as fast as I can. Then I’m going to lie down and look at the sky, which is shimmering like a pearl this afternoon, and breathe in the warm scent of grass and pretend that Markham V. Reynolds doesn’t exist.” – Page 143

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Book Review | ‘The Cellist of Sarajevo’ by Stephen Galloway

13 Wednesday Jul 2011

Posted by in 50 Books A Year, Book Review, Excerpts

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The Cellist of SarajevoThe Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“He knows the sniper will fire again, but he isn’t afraid. At this moment fear doesn’t exist. There’s no such thing as bravery. There are no heroes, no villains, no cowards. There’s what he can do, and what he can’t. There’s right and wrong and nothing else. The world is binary. Shading will come later.”

It is as if I have read this book before. The story, the people within it, their strife seems so very familiar, so very ‘close’, that all through the book I couldn’t shake off that feeling of deja vu. I see within it echoes from every war novel/ film I have ever come across. From the first lyrical chapter right through to its devastating end, ‘The Cellist of Sarajevo’ is a fictional masterpiece. Do not let the leanness of the prose fool you, nor the sparsity of its characters, for each sentence may at first feel like a random spray of shrapnel, but it is far from it. Every point Galloway makes, his observations about the ‘war machine’, the blood-crazed generals, the ‘men-on-the-hills’, their victims and the unsung heroes in the midst of this war-torn city all hit the bullseye. Like his character, the legendary sniper “Arrow”, Galloway never misses his literary mark.

“A weapon does not decide whether or not to kill. A weapon is a manifestation of a decision that has already been made.”

Galloway’s aim is not to show war in its’ terrible mechanical glory, but rather to humanise it as much as he can. War is a difficult concept to understand; however the siege of Sarajevo is even harder, as the city quite literally caved in on itself and Galloway makes this painfully clear to us as he leads our eye down to street-level. And it is here that we are made to understand the confusion and fright of ordinary people, through the geographical decimation of their home town.

The narrative structure is simple. It alternates between three characters: Dragan (a baker), Kenan (husband and father of two) and Arrow (a young student-turned-sniper) and each tells a different side to the conflict. With Kenan we make the deadly journey to the only water supply in the city, dodging the random bullets from the ‘men on the hills’ while Dragan picks his own perilous way across shell-shocked streets and mortared bridges to his job at the bakery. Both men feel like ants who constantly fear the shadow of the boot above them. ‘Arrow’ on the other hand allows the reader to access the mind behind the cross-hairs that threaten the citizens of Sarajevo. While she is determined not to become like the ‘men on the hills’, she is however haunted by the question of just exactly who it is that she is becoming.

At the midst of this chaos is the Cellist, who at 2 o’clock every day sits out in the street and plays an adagio for every person that was killed by a mortar attack as they lined up for bread one morning. Twenty-two people were killed; for 22 days he chooses to risk his life to honour the memory of those who died, by placing himself in full glare of the snipers.

Needless to say, there are some shocking scenes of death and mutilation. But Galloway deftly picks through the rubble of a wrecked city, pushing aside torn limbs and broken bodies to find the wonderous speck of humanity amongst all the horror. What he does unearth and hold out for all to see are the incredible acts of bravery that can only be the product of a still-beating heart, a heart which will only reveal itself in the challenging glare of death.

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