Vonnegut

Vonnegut is a genius.

He can tell you things you don’t want to hear and make you smile at the same time.

He can get you to laugh when your insides want to cry.
That’s because he knows how to touch you in ways that you didn’t think you could be touched. It is his art to be able to tell you a truth that you may not admit to yourself and yet appreciate his having exposed you to it.

Vonnegut stylistically knows how to prod you towards an idea that is so powerful and compelling it leaves you simply staring and wordless. Why is it that you never thought of that before? The answer’s easy: Vonnegut can connect words in such an effortless way that most of us marvel at his syntax. It simply decimates any residue of fussiness or contrivance. It is his power to use words in such a simple and straight forward way to reach powerful conclusions that you often have to stop and think about how he managed to leave you without any other conclusion.

He is a master who cons you to the point where you think you are ahead of him and then he races around your assumptions and confronts you head on and you wonder how his “a” plus “b” equaled “c.” He is so masterful that you have to acknowledge his ‘truths’ if only with a smile and a simple nod of the head. He is that good!

Beware, Vonnegut’s genius is too easily taken for granted. Because his humor and incisiveness are gentle, they may not be recognized for the kind of arguments he can build on piece of this or a sprinkling of that . He makes it look simple; yet, his views are so incisive that his conclusions become your own without realizing it.

Vonnegut is also easy to trust. You feel that he doesn’t have an agenda; he speaks to truth in a way that you can believe in him. Even though these truths, when fully realized, might jar your assumptions. At 82, he is still surprisingly fresh and vibrant. In fact, it sometimes feels as if he’s conjured up his visions from some primordial heap that he is always re-working to reflect new insights that may have been denied to us until he dredged them up in his restless pysche.

In Man Without a Country, his new book, we find that he has lost none of his quickness or ability to surprise. And this time, he has taken on the country’s leaders and its self-proclaimed Monarch for having used his good will to seduce the free world and inverting it for their own self-interested ends.

But in the mind of Vonnegut, it is nothing new; and barely a leap from those who claimed to offer the people of the Weimar Republic freedom and liberty.

For anyone looking for a good, fast and entertaining read, it is hard to find better than Vonnegut, whose irreverence, wit and insights may not provide us with the simple solutions we seek, but at the same time, are somehow reassuring that just maybe we are not crazy and not alone in some alien cosmos…

Les Aaron