We are what we pretend to be: the first and last works
Description
Along with the two works of fiction, Vonnegut’s daughter, Nanette shares reminiscences about her father and commentary on these two works—both exclusive to this edition.
In this fiction collection, published in print for the first time, exist Vonnegut’s grand themes: trust no one, trust nothing; and the only constants are absurdity and resignation, which themselves cannot protect us from the void but might divert.More Details
9780306822780
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Published Reviews
Publisher's Weekly Review
Bookending Vonnegut's career, the two semi-autobiographical stories contained in this unpolished posthumous collection are in print for the first time here. "Basic Training" is the author's earnest first novella, written a few years before Player Piano and never published. In it, an orphaned, wet-behind-the-ears city kid is dispatched to a farm to live with a trio of opinionated female cousins under the watchful eye and iron fist of his uncle, whom he calls "the General." A series of outlandish mishaps and numerous missteps, including an unrequited love and a madcap hitchhiking adventure with a delusional and murderous farmhand, invoke a slightly unhinged Mark Twain. "If God Were Alive Today," unfinished upon the author's death in 2007, raises Vonnegut's signature existential critique of America's warped values and corrupt political climate to a fevered pitch via the uncensored standup routine of his twice-institutionalized protagonist, comedian Gil Berman. Berman's rapid-fire potshots-from the "war on drugs" to global warming ("The farts of our internal combustion engines have wrecked the atmosphere as a protective shield, and as anything a mother would want her child to breathe")-couched in Vonnegut's page-long rants are sometimes tiresome but will make readers wonder what a completed (and edited) novel might've amounted to. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Publishers Weekly Reviews
Bookending Vonnegut's career, the two semi-autobiographical stories contained in this unpolished posthumous collection are in print for the first time here. "Basic Training" is the author's earnest first novella, written a few years before Player Piano and never published. In it, an orphaned, wet-behind-the-ears city kid is dispatched to a farm to live with a trio of opinionated female cousins under the watchful eye and iron fist of his uncle, whom he calls "the General." A series of outlandish mishaps and numerous missteps, including an unrequited love and a madcap hitchhiking adventure with a delusional and murderous farmhand, invoke a slightly unhinged Mark Twain. "If God Were Alive Today," unfinished upon the author's death in 2007, raises Vonnegut's signature existential critique of America's warped values and corrupt political climate to a fevered pitch via the uncensored standup routine of his twice-institutionalized protagonist, comedian Gil Berman. Berman's rapid-fire potshots—from the "war on drugs" to global warming ("The farts of our internal combustion engines have wrecked the atmosphere as a protective shield, and as anything a mother would want her child to breathe")—couched in Vonnegut's page-long rants are sometimes tiresome but will make readers wonder what a completed (and edited) novel might've amounted to. (Oct.)
[Page ]. Copyright 2012 PWxyz LLC