A song
by Al Stewart, encapsulating the somewhat obscure 1959 Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
sci-fi novel of the same name.
I
hadn’t read the book since the early 70’s, when I got into Kurt Vonnegut
because I read “Miracle on 33rd Street” by Phil Berger about the New
York Knicks’ first NBA Championship season and it mentioned that Bill Bradley had
read “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” on a team tripbus. My high school basketball
teammates called me “Doc” sometimes because I read on the team bus to away
games (Crown High School in the 60’s and 70’s belonged to the Tri-County
Conference. Every team in it was at least a 1 hour drive from Carpentersville,
so the bus rides were long and boring and I brought along such “intellectual”
books as “After 1903-What?”, by Robert Benchley.
I read “God
Bless You, Mr. Rosewater”, and then “Slaughterhouse Five”, and then I bought
the paper backs of everything I could find of Vonnegut’s, i.e., ”Welcome to the
Monkey House,” “Mother Night,” “Player Piano,” “Cat’s Cradle,” and “Sirens of
Titan.”
I just
finished re-reading “Sirens of Tian” and realize how little I remember of it
from the 70’s.
It’s a
wonderful read, Vonnegut creates a world that is at once funny , yet
ultimately, in my reading, sad,, since all of human existence turns out to be a
giant cosmic joke, which leads me to think of Douglas Adams’ “The Hitchhiker’s
Guide to the Galaxy.”
And
when I look up “Sirens of Titan” on Wikipedia, I see a quote from Adams’, confirming
his appreciation of the book. I can hear echoes of “I was victim of a series of
accidents, as are we all” from “Sirens of Titan” in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to
the Galaxy.”
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