Cat's Cradle: A Novel
by Kurt Vonnegut
|
List Price: Our Price: $8.50 You Save: $6.50 (43%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $3.34 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of Cat's Cradle: A Novel
Book Review: Vonnegut's Best Work
Summary: 5 Stars
I know everyone tends to claim that Slaughterhouse-Five is Kurt Vonnegut's pinnacle work. I would suggest, however, that Cat's Cradle is instead his peak, quite possibly the best thing he has written to date. Being a huge Vonnegut fan, I believe there is some truth to this opinion. His main character begins by claiming he is writing his masterpiece, a book entitled "The Day the World Ended," a story about the atomic bomb being dropped on Japan. Instead, it is a whimsical foreshadowing of events to come and indeed events do unfold.Vonnegut is even rather Tolkien-ish in his writings by creating a new culture along with its own language of sorts, really a dialect of extremely bastardized English. It really proves the intelligence and total command over the language that he possesses. Along with said culture comes a new religion, Bokononism, which emphasizes the pharsical and absurd. After reading the book, you might want to convert to Bokononism yourself! I know I was ready to.
Without giving away too much of the plot, let me summarize briefly. What if a scientist, say one who worked on the a-bomb, devised a way to make things different, namely a new way to freeze water? What kind of a man would do that? What could his family possibly be like? How about a midget, a model-builder, and a freakishly tall woman? Now imagine you are a writer trying to track down the mystery behind the man and the stories from his family. Follow then the trail of Jonah, the protaganist, through a wild chase that takes him to the heartland of America all the way to a remote island nation with a large hook as the punishment for any offense. Truly a tale of the mad and the absurd. Vonnegut fans eat this one up. Laugh, wonder, be amazed, and enjoy the tale as told as only the master himself could tell it. Worth every penny and on a personal note one of the few books I still find myself re-reading at regular intervals. I still can't put it down!
Book Review: Doomsday was never more fun
Summary: 5 Stars
This early classic was one of the books that made Vonnegut famous, and probably the first book where he really found successfully his particular style of black comedy. (He aimed for something similar in Sirens of Titan, but that book, with some fine moments, is uneven and significantly less successful.)The first persom narrator is known only as Jonah, although his first sentence is the allusive, "Call me Ishmael." He is writing a book about the atomic bomb that leads him to research on the late Dr Felix Hoenneker, a brilliant scientist who viewed science with pure curiosity. Never caring about the practical implications of his work, Hoenneker made no distinction between working on the atom bomb and investigating how turtles retract their heads.
Seeking to learn more about Hoenneker from his surviving children, Jonah follows them to the impoverished island nation of San Lorenzo, loosely based on Haiti. There he is introduced to Bokononism, the dominant religion of the island which, among its many unusual features, openly proclaims that it is a fraud. A good part of this rather short novel is a detailed discussion of Bokononism, which is one of Vonnegut's most memorable creations.
While on the island, Jonah also learns more about ice 9, the final project that Hoenneker worked on. Ice 9 is ice with an entirely different crystalline structure from regular ice, which has the trait of freezing at normal temperatures. Thus, if you mixed ice 9 with any body of water, it would promptly freeze. Jonah soon finds reasons to doubt his assumption that ice 9 could not really exist.
Jonah's adventures come to a grim if strangely appropriate finale - I don't think Vonnegut has ever written a novel with a happy ending. The moral of the story is, it seems, that life is entirely without meaning or purpose. And yet, the humor and vitality of the novel give it an energy and even joy strangely at contrast with its depressing message.
Book Review: Very nice and entertaining, but a "classic"?
Summary: 4 Stars
In style and reader engagement "Cat's Cradle" has held up very well over the last 5 decades. Vonnegut was undoubtedly an original writer with a sharp wit. He manages to constrain the characters (narrator excepted) within the two-dimensional paper dolls expected of satire while running a thread of mystery through each. Even the awkwardly shallow Mrs. Crosby has a line or two that give us pause.
Nevertheless, both Vonnegut and the mysterious Caribbean guru of his creation preface their words repeatedly with an explicit warning not to take any of it seriously. This clouds the book's foggy voyage to deep meaning. Typical Vonnegut fans seem to brush aside the self-effacement as sardonically clever when granting high accolades, but accept a paradox when taking his deconstructionist ideas to heart . Does anyone really "get" Vonnegut's message, or is he inwardly laughing at those gullible enough to ignore it? Does the emperor have no clothes?
Someone else's comparison between Bokononism and Scientology struck an agreeable chord. Both are obviously the figment of a modern mind and seek to reorder human psychology across cultural boundaries, alluding only to vague cosmological bases. Of course Hubbard was real and institutionalized, but either belief system could fill a spiritual longing unmet by the weekly grind of the church routine when the clergy loses touch with people or rebellion seeks an outlet. "Cat's Cradle" might capture the hearts of an audience in that delicate stage of personal growth when one begins to question the beliefs of their parents and community, but hasn't the knowledge or courage to study the more robust and well-established alternatives closely. It is a fine book with amusingly honest observations on the plight of humanity, but I sincerely hope people come to understand that satirical pop philosophy and the serious masterworks of world literature have distinct literary forms and ends.
Book Review: The twisted brilliance of Vonnegut...
Summary: 5 Stars
This book isn't for everyone, that's for sure. The central theme is a fictional religion based around the principal that everything is a lie. The first line makes that clear. Characters include a midget, an introverted modelmaker who forced bugs to fight one another in his younger years, a man who is forced to make bicycles for blind people in Afghanistan, an insane elevator operator, a maniacal dictator, a sex symbol from a fictional island, the man who helped invent the atomic bomb (and has an odd fascination with turtles), a particularly destructive nihilist, and a doctor named "Breed", believed to have an affair. Some of the most memorable scenes involve all possible meanings of the term "Mayonnaise", fun with indexing, and a twenty-foot phallus used as a gravestone. Oh, and there are 127 chapters, each of them a page long on average.
If all that just strikes you as weird, then Vonnegut really isn't the guy for you. The fact that this is normal in comparison to my favorite Vonnegut book, Breakfast of Champions, should say a lot about him. After all, this guy has one of the strangest senses of humor in literary history. His work really is inaccessible.
I think he's great, though. He's got the same absurdist sense of humor as I do, and he's a social critic to rival the best of them. Especially here, where he mocks both science and religion, two very different fields. It's a hilarious book, but there's more to it than just the humor. There's also the underlying social and political implications, which is really what makes it fly.
This isn't a good book in the traditional, "descriptive setting, fleshed-out characters" sense. I don't think it was meant to be. Instead, it's a wild, fast-paced ride, which moves from one biting indictment of society (he takes on everything from patriotism to nihilism). It's hilarious, it's enlightening, it's distinctive... it's pure Vonnegut.
Book Review: Vonnegut
Summary: 5 Stars
Cat's Cradle is by far the best Vonnegut novel that I have yet read. Blending his patented wry humor with acute social insight presented in an absurd fantasy world, Vonnegut has written an exceptional novel of love, lies, and the self destruction of mankind. The story centers around the narrator, Jonah, who is called by name once in the entire book. We are told in the beginning that he is writing a book on the events of the day the first atomic bomb was dropped on Japan. His research leads him to a correspondence with Newt Hoenikker, the midget son of Doctor Felix Hoenikker, father of the atomic bomb. After meeting with Newt, destiny leads our protagonist to the impoverished island republic of San Lorenzo, where among other adventures, he finds religion, falls in love, and becomes president. All of this by itself would make for a very entertaining book, but it is not in the story line that Vonnegut's genius lies. Cat's Cradle is rife with painfully accurate insights into the institutions that our society holds so dear, such as, religion, politics, and science. Vonnegut invents for the inhabitants of San Lorenzo a brand new religion based completely and admittedly on "foma", or lies. This wouldn't be so shocking, except for the fact that this "bokonism" seems to make perfect sense. Other Vonnegut ironies pervade the book and are too elaborate to go into. Kurt Vonnegut is my favorite author of all time. Cat's Cradle is one of his funniest, most absurd, and frightening novels. This book truly causes one to stop and think about the things that one holds as unquestionably true. All of the incredible people, places, things, and ideas in Cat's Cradle are intricately woven into a perfect tapestry that sums up and spells out many of mankind's self-created problems in 191 pages. --This text refers to the Mass Market Paperback edition.