Kurt Vonnegut has given me a headache

[tribdog]

Okay, I just finished Slaughterhouse 5. I'm not blown away by it. I liked Cat's Cradle better, mostly because it had a religion I can really get behind.

 

[Moonbear]

I like Vonnegut, but I don't really know why any of it counts as "literature." Then again, I've never really been sure why anything makes it to that category instead of just fiction or non-fiction or whatever it is. I think it's called "literature" if your English literature teacher likes the book.

There's something about Vonnegut's books that leave you feeling a bit off-balance when reading them (or at least, that's how I feel). I suppose I could see someone not liking them for that reason.

 

[turbo]

MB, the closest we have to Vonnegut in traditional Am Lit is Mark Twain. Writers who were willing to lay out complex situations in plain language and allow the readers to draw the ethical/moral distinctions. Twain is not good because of his writing - he is good because of the thinking behind his writing. Vonnegut's got that in spades.

 

[russ_watters]

I agree. That's why I dropped Ayn Rand after a brief love affair.

I've been meaning to read some of her stuff, but I don't know if I can handle 1000 pages unless I can really get into it (and I'm not sure if I can). I should try though.

 

[Evo]

Trib, watch Slaughterhouse 5 the movie. You'll love the movie.

 

[russ_watters]

Yes, it's called fiction. That's the point. Please tell me I'm not the first one to introduce to you stories that are not based in reality.

You misunderstand my issue with it. What bothers me isn't that it is fiction/fantasy, it is that despite being fantasy, it is supposed to have a message. It is supposed to be saying something profound about the world, but IMO, it is a shallow point.

It wasn't easy to figure out = it's not literature. Gotcha.

There was nothing difficult to figure out about the message of Slaughterhouse 5. That's not the point. The point is the message was not meaningful because the argument was empty.

I just think that a book that is intended to say something meaningful about reality should base the argument on reality. You can't convince me of something about reality by presenting me with fantasy. Simple as that.

 

[russ_watters]

I like Vonnegut, but I don't really know why any of it counts as "literature." Then again, I've never really been sure why anything makes it to that category instead of just fiction or non-fiction or whatever it is. I think it's called "literature" if your English literature teacher likes the book.

Agreed. I feel that way about an awful lot of books. I disliked Catcher in the Rye too, but mostly because I was hoping for something meaningful. I was hoping for literature and just got an ok work of basic fiction.

Quick example: Jane Austin. Her writing is considered "literature", and she didn't have anything particularly deep or profound to say.

Very good example. We had to read some of that in school. Basically, she's just a 19th century Danielle Steel. That's not literature, it's trashy romance novels. But then people were more 'respectable' back then, so it isn't as trashy - I guess that makes it literature!

And hey, if that's what you like, fine. I have no problem with it. I'm a big Tom Clancy fan, but I'd never claim the stuff he writes is "Literature".

 

[tribdog]

Okay Evo, I'm now downloading the movie Slaughterhouse Five. I'll watch it tomorrow and see.

 

[TheStatutoryApe]

i read The Man in the High Castle, I thought that was really good.

Bladerunner was based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. The movie is quite different from the book. They more or less just took one of the parallel plots and ran with that. A major plot element they dropped was a religion which ties in with, and really fleshs out, the whole question of defining humanity.

A Scanner Darkly is pretty good. Its darker than the movie (or my impression back when I read it was darker) and may leave you wondering why you just read it. The end note from Dick about his experiences with the drug culture and listing his friends who ODed, commited suicide, and wound up in jail or mental institutions puts it in perspective though. The paranoia and personality split issues are far more present in the book.

A fun one is Clans of the Alphane Moon about a moon colony taken over by mental patients who divide into clans; defining themselves based on their psychological disorders. There's a rather obvious characterization of Dick's failed relationships in the book. This sort of thing crops up a lot in his work. Its amusing though.

Not sure if you were actually looking for suggestions so I'll shut up now. ;-p

 

[Moonbear]

Very good example. We had to read some of that in school. Basically, she's just a 19th century Danielle Steel. That's not literature, it's trashy romance novels. But then people were more 'respectable' back then, so it isn't as trashy - I guess that makes it literature!

And hey, if that's what you like, fine. I have no problem with it. I'm a big Tom Clancy fan, but I'd never claim the stuff he writes is "Literature".

That was my impression when reading Jane Austin too. Then again, my literature instructor didn't hide that fact. She was a militant feminist (as opposed to the normal kind who just wants equality, she was over-the-top...one of those women who doesn't shave her legs and wears what looks like men's clothing and always has a rant about oppression of women or some such) and had chosen a series of books more for the progression of themes regarding women rather than because of literary value. She was quick to point out that for the time, they were just dime store rags, the same as picking up a modern day romance novel. I didn't object since I was taking it as a summer class and it was the sort of book I could just sit out on a lawn chair and read in the sun without giving a lot of thought. For all her weirdness, I actually respected her more as an instructor for not trying to pretend these books were really something special or better than the romances you could pick up off the shelf for now, but more that it was popular because for the period it was written, it was highly scandalous...the sort of book nobody admits to reading but do anyway.

 

[Evo]

I've never read an entire book by Vonnegut, I did enjoy the movie Slaughterhouse 5 as science fiction. I guess I'm shallow as I have never read a book for any "meaning" either it was enjoyable at face value or I didn't read it (except for required school reading). If an author was trying to make a statement in any of their books, it was entirely lost on me.

Trib, since you read the book, it may ruin the movie for you.

 

[OrbitalPower]

Trib, since you read the book, it may ruin the movie for you.

This is true. The book differs from the novel in several key and minute but annoying respects:

Lazzaro doesn't tell Billy at the start of the book that he fed a bunch of sharpnel to a dog; he doesn't tell Billy that at all in the novel and is speaking to the older gentleman who gets killed. This also apears half-way through the book, not at the beginning.

The conversation when Billy is in the hospital with the conservative author and scholar is completely different and in the movie I think you miss how Billy actually takes the line that all of the bombings were necessary. The way he shrugged it off is different in the book.

The interaction the POWs have with the British camp is entirely different in the film. You also miss several key scenes there as well.

Billy-Pilgram NEVER kills Ronald Weary directly by stepping on his feet. In fact, it is Ronald Weary himself who decided to bring Billy along and it was he who ended up with the unfortunate footwear that ended up giving him gangrene and making him sick - this was Ronald's own doing and he led the way to being captured, it had nothing to do with billy.

That what's his face kills him anyway is thus more proof that he was crazy. I have no idea why they rearranged this.

Vonnegut's intro is completely missing.

The movie ends differently than the film, whereas the film ends with Billy looking at a bird that says Poo-tee-wet. I don't think the quote from Reinhold Nieburh was properly displayed, either.


And so on.

 

[Evo]

It's like "one flew over the cuckoo's nest" everyone said what a great movie it was, but they hadn't read the book. I read the book years before the movie was made and I couldn't bear to watch more than a bit of the movie. The book was excellent.

Vice versa, if I've enjoyed the movie before I've read the book, then I'm critical of the book.

 

[turbo]

It's like "one flew over the cuckoo's nest" everyone said what a great movie it was, but they hadn't read the book. I read the book years before the movie was made and I couldn't bear to watch more than a bit of the movie. The book was excellent.

Ditto on that. The movie was just tolerable because the book was great and my expectations were very high. Still, everybody who hadn't read the book was raving about how great the movie was, so I'll still recommend it when someone asks for DVD rental suggestions.

I thought I'd be disappointed with the movie Dune, because after reading the book a couple of times, I thought that there was too much that might be lost. Strangely enough, I liked the movie - yeah, there was a lot of stuff changed or glossed over, but much of the book came through. Slaughterhouse 5 was not a good movie, compared to the book. Catch 22 was an OK movie because they had a perverse kind of fun with the book, IMO.

I've read the Lord of the Rings several times over, and enjoyed the movies enough to prompt me to get the DVDs, though they are no substitute for the books. The film version of The Exorcist was tame and flat compared to the book. I saw it in a theater when it came out and was quite disappointed.

 

[TheStatutoryApe]

It's like "one flew over the cuckoo's nest" everyone said what a great movie it was, but they hadn't read the book. I read the book years before the movie was made and I couldn't bear to watch more than a bit of the movie. The book was excellent.

A friend of mine told me that in earlier editions of the book the last scene was in itallics indicating, if you were paying attention, that it was a dream sequence and this was supposedly lost in the movie and perhaps inadvertantly changed in later editions of the book.

I thought I'd be disappointed with the movie Dune, because after reading the book a couple of times, I thought that there was too much that might be lost. Strangely enough, I liked the movie - yeah, there was a lot of stuff changed or glossed over, but much of the book came through.

I liked the movie too though I was sure to watch it before I read the books. Another friend of mine tells me that lynch was very particular about attemting to retain as much of the book as possible. Apparently if you pay close enough attention you may note 'significant looks' and the like in the movie that are supposed to correspond with paragraphs worth of unspoken material from the book.