kurt Vonnegut?

Question

Hey just wondering what peoples opinions are on this author,
Do you like/dislike his work?
What do you think of his political views and opinions?
What do you think of him as a person?
Do you know any interesting facts about him etc...

Answer 1

I find Kurt sometimes a tad boring, but almost always find the way he unravels things to be fascinating. The way he writes the humor in the book is so bizarre and so dark gritty young old, I have to say that Kurt is my favorite Author. Same with Kilgore. I have tried many times to press people to read him and I have found that they are either too dumb or mainstream to understand his humor or they think they are so smart and so unique that they consider him boring. So I like his books, it suits me perfectly.

Answer 2

I enjoy most Vonnegut to some extent.

How's that for a qualified answer?

I really like some of his short fiction, especially to see how his writing was pigeonholed and constrained by the needs of corporate and commercial publication. These negative influences are often found as major themes in his novels. He is also one of the more interesting authors to read with a view to how he developed and changed his style over time. The man is definitely adaptable, yet also timeless.

My favorite novel would have to be Cat's Cradle. Loved his take on religion despite the fact that I'm a minister! I also think he makes some great points about how we so often and so easily get caught up in great big false ideas of identity that so easily lead to destruction.

Interesting fact about him...there was a college graduation address that was attributed to him several years ago, but it was neither written nor delivered by him, despite sounding very much like him.

Answer 3

Ive read most of Kurt Vonneguts books,ive really enjoyed them all,i think he is definately a great writer,Humanity,Humour and compassion,slapstick comedy,whatever you like really. I believe Kurt was a POW in Germany in WW2,he was in Dresden when the British totally destroyed the city by bombing,killing 555,000 people,his first book(Slaughterhouse 5),is related to his war experiences. A great writer,and id be very surprised if anyone had anything negative to say about the man

Answer 4

Mr. Vonnegut is one of my favourite authors, and one who, I believe, will be read many, many years in the future. I love his work.
Since I'm something of a "liberal", I tend to agree with his political views and opinions. But he can't be "pigeon-holed" into any label; his story, Harrison Bergeron, for example, carries the attitude of some "liberals" to the point of absurdity - and of tragedy. Basically, I guess I'd call him a humanist - but one whose view of humanity is predominantly a sad one, rather like Mark Twain (whom he resembles) in his later years. However, unlike Twain, I don't believe Vonnegut has ever become mired in cynicism.
As a person, well, hard to say, having never met him. But judging by his work, he's someone I'd love to meet and talk with, someone I'd love to have living next door.
As for interesting facts about him, perhaps the best place to go would be to his "official web site" (see the link below) where there's a bio.
Here's an excerpt:
"Most readers interested in the fantastic in literature are familiar with Kurt Vonnegut, particularly for his uses of science fiction. Many of his early short stories were wholly in the science fiction mode, and while its degree has varied, science fiction has never lost its place in his novels.
Vonnegut has typically used science fiction to characterise the world and the nature of existence as he experiences them. His chaotic fictional universe abounds in wonder, coincidence, randomness and irrationality. Science fiction helps lend form to the presentation of this world view without imposing a falsifying causality upon it. In his vision, the fantastic offers perception into the quotidian, rather than escape from it. Science fiction is also technically useful, he has said, in providing a distance perspective, "moving the camera out into space," as it were. And unusually for this form, Vonnegut's science fiction is frequently comic, not just in the "black humor" mode with which he has been tagged so often, but in being simply funny.
Less generally familiar than the fiction, however, are Vonnegut's creations in the graphic arts. These reveal the same postmodern heterogeneity of mode and subject found in the fiction-realism and abstraction, the fantastic and the mundane, sentiment and irony, humor and melancholy.
Vonnegut's vision of the fantastic in daily life surely must have been influenced by some of the extraordinary events that occurred while he was still a young man, such as the suicide of his mother on Mother's Day 1944 while he was home on leave; his surviving as a prisoner of war the Allied firebombing that destroyed Dresden; the death of his sister Alice from cancer within hours of her husband's death in a train crash. His fiction struggles to cope with a world of tragi-comic disparities, a universe that defies causality, whose absurdity lends the fantastic equal plausibility with the mundane. Much the same outlook pervades the graphic artworks that have increasingly occupied Vonnegut in recent years."


And so it goes.

Answer 5

I read Slaughterhouse-Five last week and can believe how great it was. I think his views on war are accurate and the suffering that his character went through are exactly what a lot of veterans experience.I know that he was in the bommbing on Dresden, Germany and this influenced his writings.

Answer 6

Kurt is an old, old friend of mine. If there were an "Illuninati" in this 21st century celebrity worshipping world Kurt would be the CEO. He's timelessly pertinent, always.

Answer 7

in my opinion his work is a bit simplistic but breakifast of champions and slaughterhouse five will change the way you see/define the world.. all i know is that he was at dresden when the english did their own hiroshima.. the means shall justify the end...but i think it sometimes is a tad more complicated than that.. everybody should read slaughterhouse five.. biog on wikipedia is good

Answer 8

I love his work and strongly recommend it. He shreds politics and society into little pieces of confetti and sprinkles them from the printed page. I do not know him personally, nor do I have any interesting facts to share.