Let's start here: I was under the impression I'd read this book before. I had not. So that was a fun discovery. Slaughterhouse-Five, read for the first time, is fierce. I often don't go for the darkly comic, but it's just bleak enough and purposeful enough in Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s work to carry it for me. The anti-war thread, the way that trauma from the war unsticks the main character from time, and the way the sci-fi element works within these is vivid, good work. Such impactful one-liners, and of course the use of "So it goes" has had plenty of analysis elsewhere, but nevertheless is genius.
I'm going to take the unusual step of quoting a review on the back of the book, from Life magazine, as I found myself thinking of it often while reading: "a funny book at which you are not permitted to laugh, a sad book without tears." A brilliant work about the hard task of looking back on tragedy that is impossible to lock down with words; a favorite line of mine was when the narrator says his war book was "written by a salt pillar"—written by someone who, though they know they shouldn't, though they know some kind of sin runs through them if they do, cannot help but to look back.
Content warnings for violence, animal cruelty, racial slurs, torture.
