Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut - Review

"I do not say that children at war do not die like men, if they have to die. To their everlasting honor and our everlasting shame, they do die like men, thus making possible the manly jubilation of patriotic holidays."

"Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything."

I'm not sure what Cat's Cradle is about, exactly. Or, rather - I do know what it is about, in the sense that I knew what things the words it contained referred to.

Vonnegut is a brilliant writer. Cat's Cradle feels honest, in the same sense that a Hemingway novel feels honest; somehow, you begin to feel that you are an observer not of feelings and of interpretations but of things, real things happening in the world. And this is really the only way you can navigate the absurd and wonderful world that Vonnegut dreams up - midgets, clarinets, made-up religions, atomic bombs, apocalyptic ice crystals, geniuses happily housed in corporate research institutions.

The narrator in Cat's Cradle reminds me of a certain class of narrator that I remember reading in Murakami - ones that are passive observers of their own destiny (or their zah-mah-ki-bo, to use the Bokononistic term), being violently sloshed around by the forces that be. They don't coerce their story into fitting a grand unifying narrative as to keep themselves a safe distance from reality. Paradoxically, it seems that Vonnegut's voice in this sense is closer to reality than most, while simultaneously being some of the most hopelessly imaginative I've read. A short, fun book.

A language model could never!