Welcome to the Monkey House is a collection of short stories by Kurt Vonnegut. In addition to the story it got its title from it contains 24 further short stories which are as cool as you’d expect them to be.
I particularly enjoyed the cold-war story The Manned Missiles which consists of letters sent between a Soviet and U.S. dad who lost their sons in a collision in the space race. Quite moving. And making you wonder why the people in power weren’t as accomodating or reasonable. Harrison Bergeron is a great story as well which deals with the downsides about everybody being too equal [text; my comment on the film].
I like Vonnegut, I like short stories, which made this volume an easy pick.
Bookmark: 17-03-2003, National Express ticket Coventry to London.
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Another novel by Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus. In the long list of topics that Vonnegut treats in his one is about the Vietnam warm class differences in the U.S. and the beauty of gloablisation. In his typical style of short chapters, in this case with even shorter sections that are given by the book presumably being written on random bits of paper, each of which gives a section, the protagonist Eugene Debs Harkte introduces himself and an endless number of sidenotes all of which are connected to some other in a unexpected ways.
The book was published around 1990, but Hartke introduces himself in 2001, after the world didn’t end in 2000, and while in prison. From this point of view he tells his life story, that first took him to Vietnam rather than to university and journalism. After being a killer and P.R. person there he goes on to be a school teacher at a school for stupid rich kids. Until some rich parents of stupid kids decide that his thinking isn’t clean enough for their offspring and dire him for other ‘offensive’ reasons. So he starts working at a nearby prison with black inmates which is run by a Japanese company with mostly Japanese workforce, trying to teach the inmates there. Things go well until a great prison break happens. But unlike most others Eugene isn’t really affected by this as the inmates actually like him and don’t hurt him.
But in addition to that there are many side stories and observations which are the more interesting and major part of the book.
OK, I admit it. It really was a whorehouse.
Lyle Hooper’s last words, I think we can say with the benefit of hindsight in the year 2001, might serve as an apt epitaph for a plurality of working adults in industrialized nations during the 20th Century. How could they help themselves, when so many of the jobs they or their mates could get had to do with large-scale deceptions, legal thefts from public treasuries, or the wrecking of the food chain, the topsoil, the water, or the atmosphere?
Bookmark: 17-03-2005 flight KL 1755 from Amsterdam to Bremen on my way back from Cape Town.
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Looking around for other Vonnegut material, of which there is plenty I saw that there also is a film for Mother Night which got quite good reviews. It’s directed by Keith Gordon who also directed parts of the Wild Palms mini series which remains the best way to waste five hours I know of. And it stars a somewhat unlikely Nick Nolte as the protagonist, the writer Howard W. Campbell Jr. – the last free American, speaking to you from Berlin, Germany, the heart of the free world
…
That’s the way he introduces himself in his propagandistic – err, hateful – radio show that is broadcast in English to the world from Nazi Germany. He got to having that show almost innocently because he wanted to stay with his German wife when the war started and was hired to be a spy when it became clear he would stay. But after his wife had died, the war had ended and he had been clandestinely repatriated to New York his life felt empty. And worse than that, his past starts catching up with him. He meets a woman in his house who had survived Auschwitz and who recognises his name.
Later, some odd right-wing American nazi priest finds him and starts contacting him, bringing along the sister of his wife and a few other weirdos who appreciate the job he has done in Germany during the war. That’s odd but Howard accepts their help and protection from people who want to beat him up or kill him. After a short side-story where apart from the local hatred, the American nazis and the Israeli intelligence service also the Russians chase him, he eventually decides can’t take the strain anymore and surrenders himself to the Israelis who lock him up in Israel and let him write down the story before he can get a trial.
Which is where the film begins, in fact. He is locked up in a cell with a neighbour who on the topic of millions of killed jews has nothing to say but I don’t take credit for all of them. I’m sure I could spare you a few.
And he gets a typewriter to write down his story. Strangely this is a Third Reich typewriter in the film – with a QWERTZ keyboard and a handy SS-key – which does make a nice cut in that place but I’d consider highly unlikely to be used by anyone years after the era, particularly outside Germany. While he’s typing it, we re-live the story with him and see how in retrospect it becomes clear to him that even though he was working as a spy he had faded in too well and that he had played his role a little too well. Leaving him with strong feelings of guilt.
Now that I’ve seen the film, I may want to read the book… and listen to some of Arvo Pärt’s pieces again which are used as a soundtrack to the film in many places. Subtle, brilliant and incredibly powerful music.
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The director, George Roy Hill, asked Gould to do the music because the ‘Slaughterhouse Five’ where Billy is imprisoned in the film is in Dresden the bombing of which happens in the book. To capture the city’s baroque atmosphere, Hill wanted music by Bach to go along with it. And so came to ask Gould to play. But in fact, it seems that he had mostly made up his mind already about which pieces would go where in the film and mocked up a preliminary soundtrack with Gould’s records in his studio. So all Gould ended up doing was to OK certain plans, help a little and get a prominent position in the film’s credits. The soundtrack was apparently highly lauded at the time and isn’t bad. But, as soundtracks go, it’s not the main point of the film.
The film’s main point, just as the book’s, is to follow Billy Pilgrim around – through his life, from fighting in the second World War in his youth to being an optometrist and having a family of his own to his death and to the planet Trafalmadore. All this in the ‘unstuck in time’ non-linear order given in the book. Indeed, I found the film to be surprisingly literal at showing what’s written in the book. Much more than I had considered possible. And managing to remain on the serious side of the book without making things like the time discontinuities look silly.
I thought the film was very well done and really does justice to the book and its serious topic while keeping its positive spirit.
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. After having read and liked Galápagos, Breakfast of Champions and Cat's Cradle in the past years, I knew what to expect in terms of style and bitter irony.
Kurt Vonnegut has this special style of a, seemingly naïve, narrative that tells you in a very detached way what is going on. He doesn't say anything bad is happening – it's just obvious to the reader putting the bits together. I like that style.
In Slaughterhouse Five episodes of the the protagonist's, Billy Pilgrim's, life are given. He was in the World War II, witnessing the bombing of Dresden (which currently is a scaringly popular topic in German media, by the way). He is also an optometrist, married to a rich fat daughter of an optometrist. And he is being abducted by a breed of alien that can travel along time, giving him another perspective of time – and making other humans think he's mad. Those different lines are interwoven and juxtaposed throughout the book.
The author Kilgore Trout also appears in the book.
Trout, incidentally had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer.
So it goes.
After you've read the book, you may want to see the film.
Bookmark: 07-08-2001 Coventry to Birmingham International airport by train.
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