Volume 20, Number 9 · May 31, 1973
Dancing in the Dark
By Michael Wood
The Vonnegut Statement: Essays on the Life and Work of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
edited by Jerome Klinkowitz, edited by John Somer
Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence, 286 pp., $7.95
Between Time and Timbuktu or Prometheus 5
by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence, 284 pp., $7.95
Breakfast of Champions or Goodbye, Blue Monday
by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence, 299 pp., $7.95
Kurt Vonnegut's fiction is full of bleak, sour views of our dismal mortal lot. 'Maturity,' a character says in Cat's Cradle (1963), 'is a bitter disappointment'; and the same character thinks of writing a 'history of human stupidity.' There is a dark metaphor hidden in the book's title. A painting described in the text shows a cat's cradle strung between fingers and the narrator wonders whether these small black scratches on canvas are not the 'sticky nets of human futility hung up on a moonless night to dry.'
Review, 4204 words
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