Kurt Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1950-1962: Player Piano / The Sirens of Titan / Mother Night / Stories Author: Visit Amazon's Kurt Vonnegut Page | Language: English | ISBN:
1598531506 | Format: PDF
Kurt Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1950-1962: Player Piano / The Sirens of Titan / Mother Night / Stories Description
About the Author
Sidney Offit, editor, has written novels, books for young readers, and memoirs including, most recently, Friends, Writers, and Other Countrymen. He was senior editor of Intellectual Digest, book editor of PoliticsToday, and contributing editor of Baseball Magazine. He wrote the foreword to Look at the Birdie, a collection of Kurt Vonnegut’s unpublishedshort fiction.
- Series: Library of America (Book 226)
- Hardcover: 864 pages
- Publisher: Library of America; First Edition edition (April 26, 2012)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1598531506
- ISBN-13: 978-1598531503
- Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.1 x 1.1 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
The first Library of America volume of Vonnegut's work contains his best known novels written between 1963 and 1973. The latest LOA entry includes the author's first 3 novels, among them, Sirens of Titan, my introduction to the Vonnegut canon and my personal favorite.
His first novel was written in 1952. Player Piano is a dystopian tale of life in Ilium, New York, where the triumph of technology has led to a uniform life of dreariness and boredom. in his foreword, Vonnegut, says that the novel is "mostly about managers and engineers." Dr Paul Proteus is the manager of Ilium Works, drawing upon upon Vonnegut's early experience at General Electric. Proteus helps lead an unsuccessful revolution against this brave, new world. Hopeful that men can learn to live without any machines, he watches as his followers become sidetracked repairing a soft drink machine.
Sirens of Titan is the first novel written in the irreverent and satirical style that characterizes Vonnegut's novels up through Breakfast of Champions. In this book, he first introduces the planet Tralfamadore, to which Billy Pilgrim will ultimately be exiled in Slaughterhouse 5. Sirens is an extended lesson in man's largely unimportant place in the universe. Many of man's greatest accomplishments, from Stonehenge to the Palace of the League of Nations, were coded messages to a native of Tralfamadore who is stuck on the moon awaiting a replacement part for his spaceship. The Great Wall of China is built to tell Old Salo "Be patient. We haven't forgotten about you." So it goes.
Mother Night approaches similar themes of personal responsibility using a more serious setting. Howard Campbell stays in Germany when his parents escape.
In a review for the previous LOA collection of Vonnegut's work, I groused about them releasing his mid-career material first. I felt, and still feel, that THIS collection should've come out first. Why? Because you can see how Vonnegut developed as a writer. Vonnegut spent years toiling away in what is referred to as the "sci-fi ghetto" before hitting it big with "Slaughterhouse Five." You can see why because, with the exception of "Mother Night," all the novels and stories in this collection are science fiction in nature. Not that it's bad science fiction, but some folks aren't hip to that genre and might be turned off by that. To each his own. I feel that if you look past the science fiction aspects of these stories, you will find some truly perceptive commentary by the man buried within.
Take the first novel "Player Piano" as an example. On the surface, it reads like a story of man trying to rebel against the machines that rule his life. Look deeper and you'll find that it is a commentary about man trying to regain his sense of worth and dignity in a society that no longer has a place for that sort of thing. It's about man being consigned to the scrap heap of menial labor for the rest of his life because machines have determined, as the result of being IQ tested as a youngster, that is where you belong. Or because machines can do your job more effectively than you can with technology being so advanced. Yet you can't go through advanced training to upgrade your skills to keep up with technology. No second chances. No attepts to reform. No other options whatsoever. It also skewers the importance of corporate hierarchy as well. Change some of the references regarding the technology of the time and it almost feels like a commentary on what is happening in our society today.
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