The mutating event was, as always, brief. Read: The never-ending campaign to ban ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ Slaughterhouse-Five is more in the nature of a superpower that the mutant author had to teach himself to master-and then could use, at full strength, only once. This book is in no way the blossom of a flower. Three? Four? It never gets old, is the point.

So I don’t know how many times I’ve read Slaughterhouse-Five. Build your own little cockeyed canon and then bear down on it get to know it, forward and backward get to know it well. And the older I get, and the more lumps fall off my brain, the more I find that rereading is the thing. And that was the end of it.”įifty years have passed since the publication of Slaughterhouse-Five. So I had a shutting-off feeling, you know, that I had done what I was supposed to do and everything was OK. At the end of Slaughterhouse-Five, I had the feeling that I had produced this blossom. “Flowers didn’t ask to be flowers and I didn’t ask to be me. “I suppose that flowers, when they’re through blooming, have some sort of awareness of some purpose having been served,” he mused horticulturally to a Playboy interviewer in 1973. Rosewater (those twin magnificences) under his belt, was projected into a state of creative culmination/exhaustion by Slaughterhouse-Five. And Kurt Vonnegut, at the age of 46, with Mother Night and God Bless You, Mr. Burroughs, post– Naked Lunch, or Joseph Heller, with the last line of Catch-22 on the page (“The knife came down, missing him by inches, and he took off.”), have tossed their typewriters out of the window? Probably. Had Russell Hoban written no books before Riddley Walker, and no books after it, his reputation today would be exactly the same. There are novels so potent, and so perfected in their singularity, that they have the unexpected side effect of permanently knocking out the novelist: Nothing produced afterward comes close.

Slaughterhouse five full book pdf