Welcome to the Monkey House: Stories
by Kurt Vonnegut
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Book Summary Information
Author: Kurt VonnegutEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1998-09-08
ISBN: 0385333501
Number of pages: 352
Publisher: Dial Press Trade Paperback
Book Reviews of Welcome to the Monkey House: Stories
Book Review: a series of thought experiments
Summary: 3 Stars
All told, I had fun reading the collection and will recommend it to others, though that recommendation will be tempered with commentary on the characters:
What struck me about reading this collection--and, mind, it could be on account of being spoiled by having recently read Alice Munro and several other women masters of the short story form--is that the characters are all very if not entirely flat--they are stereotypes of themselves. I suppose it could be that I am misunderstanding Vonnegut's strategy[, ideology(?), etc.,] for writing [short stories] if I think that the flatness of his characters is cause for alarm. After all, as the title of this review indicates, I see Welcome to the Monkey House as a series of thought experiments and furthermore I think that these thought experiments are mostly very successful.
Yet, unfortunately, they remain at the level of idealized thought experiment rather at the level of comment on the problems of such thought experiments which might take the form of rich characters inhabiting the idealized space and through their presence "tainting" that space; this sort of story would not only serve as a criticism of certain general, universal, masculine, etc., modes of thought (i.e. by indicating that such modes of thought must necessarily break down in any particular situation) but would additionally serve to show what happens to certain rich characters that we care about when they enter the idealized space.
Now, even though I cannot think of a single exception to this criticism, I do not mean that the stories were emotionally dull (and, by the way, I think that they are engaging in the same way that much science fiction is engaging--"Whoa! Cool! ...what if..?") as several of them definitely got to me and were able to make an interesting statement despite that statement's uncomplicated nature--I think here of the story involving the boy raised in an orphanage in Germany who goes looking for his father in the form of a sargeant in the US army who is also black, of the story involving the new father who is able to appreciate the value of his new son's life despite the crushing indifference of everyone else. But despite the author's efforts to the contrary in the story of the Geman orphan, Vonnegut still creates a situation in which [patriarchal] racist modes of thought are reinforced by the lack of complexity in the emotional responses of the boy and the sargeant. And despite his efforts to take seriously the holocaust in the second short story I mentioned above, he simplifies the situation in a problematic way.
It could be that I simply did not take up the short-story-reader's mantle in the way that a friend of mine indicated that I was not only able but obligated to do. It could be simply that I failed to imagine the complexity of the characters. But I believe that the short stories--which permit and obligate the reader to imagine and empathize--my friend had in mind are those in which enough is said so that one can begin to imagine the characters' depths after having brief glimpses of those depths revealed by the author; the stories in this collection are not of that sort--rather, they are of the sort in which the reader would have to imagine those depths in entirety on her/his own because those depths are not spoken and, I suspect, not even thought by the author.
Summary of Welcome to the Monkey House: Stories
Welcome to the Monkey House is a collection of Kurt Vonnegut?s shorter works. Originally printed in publications as diverse as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and The Atlantic Monthly, these superb stories share Vonnegut?s audacious sense of humor and extraordinary range of creative vision.Humor Books
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