Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) by Kurt Vonnegut

I'm not sure this book is so much about war as it is going with the flow and finding the beauty in your fate, inexorable as it is. Billy Pilgrim embodies this philosophy; he rolls with the punches, liking (or at least not disliking) and wanting to please everyone he comes across, even those who don't deserve such treatment. Billy stoically absorbs the disturbing things he's witnessed until they fester within him and lead to the decay of his mental health. Or perhaps he really was abducted by aliens and traveling through time. Vonnegut leaves it open to our interpretation and humorless, skeptical bore that I am, I choose the more concrete explanation.

Since I'm the personification of a cardboard box, Slaughterhouse-Five is not really my style. Vonnegut's whimsical and zany work is popular with the irony-obsessed hipster crowd of the 21st century, and it's no wonder considering Slaughterhouse-Five is the Wes Anderson version of the anti-war novel. There's a lot of oddballery in these pages despite it being set during the most devastating war in the history of human civilization. The incongruence of its simultaneous focus on zany sci-fi humor and the horrors of total war along with Slaughterhouse-Five's constant shifting of time period and setting could have been a pretty jarring, difficult read if penned by a more uptight writer (cough Pynchon cough), yet this is one of the easier reads I've had this year. I was surprised to realize I hadn't noticed how disjointed the narrative was until after I finished and thought back on the book to write this review. It's pretty impressive.

Classics don't get much more likable or approachable than this. Not really to my taste but appreciable nonetheless.

⭐⭐⭐