[Reader-list] Kurt Vonnegut

[S Fatima]

Novelist Kurt Vonnegut dies at age 84 
By CRISTIAN SALAZAR, Associated Press Writer 

NEW YORK - Kurt Vonnegut, the satirical novelist who
captured the absurdity of war and questioned the
advances of science in darkly humorous works such as
"Slaughterhouse-Five" and "Cat's Cradle," died
Wednesday. He was 84. 
 
Vonnegut, who often marveled that he had lived so long
despite his lifelong smoking habit, had suffered brain
injuries after a fall at his Manhattan home weeks ago,
said his wife, photographer Jill Krementz.

The author of at least 19 novels, many of them
best-sellers, as well as dozens of short stories,
essays and plays, Vonnegut relished the role of a
social critic. He lectured regularly, exhorting
audiences to think for themselves and delighting in
barbed commentary against the institutions he felt
were dehumanizing people.

"I will say anything to be funny, often in the most
horrible situations," Vonnegut, whose watery,
heavy-lidded eyes and unruly hair made him seem to be
in existential pain, once told a gathering of
psychiatrists.

A self-described religious skeptic and freethinking
humanist, Vonnegut used protagonists such as Billy
Pilgrim and Eliot Rosewater as transparent vehicles
for his points of view. He also filled his novels with
satirical commentary and even drawings that were only
loosely connected to the plot. In
"Slaughterhouse-Five," he drew a headstone with the
epitaph: "Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt."

But much in his life was traumatic, and left him in
pain.

Despite his commercial success, Vonnegut battled
depression throughout his life, and in 1984, he
attempted suicide with pills and alcohol, joking later
about how he botched the job.

"I think he was a man who combined a wicked sense of
humor and sort of steady moral compass, who was always
sort of looking at the big picture of the things that
were most important," said Joel Bleifuss, editor of In
These Times, a liberal magazine based in Chicago that
featured Vonnegut articles.

He always said he was a humanist and a socialist.
That's how he described himself."

His mother had succeeded in killing herself just
before he left for Germany during World War II, where
he was quickly taken prisoner during the Battle of the
Bulge. He was being held in Dresden when Allied bombs
created a firestorm that killed an estimated tens of
thousands of people in the city.

"The firebombing of Dresden explains absolutely
nothing about why I write what I write and am what I
am," Vonnegut wrote in "Fates Worse Than Death," his
1991 autobiography of sorts.

But he spent 23 years struggling to write about the
ordeal, which he survived by huddling with other POW's
inside an underground meat locker labeled
slaughterhouse-five.

The novel, in which Pvt. Pilgrim is transported from
Dresden by time-traveling aliens from the planet
Tralfamadore, was published at the height of the
Vietnam War, and solidified his reputation as an
iconoclast.

"He was sort of like nobody else," said Gore Vidal,
who noted that he, Vonnegut and Norman Mailer were
among the last writers around who served in World War
II.

"He was imaginative; our generation of writers didn't
go in for imagination very much. Literary realism was
the general style. Those of us who came out of the war
in the 1940s made it sort of the official American
prose, and it was often a bit on the dull side. Kurt
was never dull."

Vonnegut was born on Nov. 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, a
"fourth-generation German-American religious skeptic
Freethinker," and studied chemistry at Cornell
University before joining the Army.

When he returned, he reported for Chicago's City News
Bureau, then did public relations for General
Electric, a job he loathed. He wrote his first novel,
"Player Piano," in 1951, followed by "The Sirens of
Titan," "Canary in a Cat House" and "Mother Night,"
making ends meet by selling Saabs on Cape Cod.

Critics ignored him at first, then denigrated his
deliberately bizarre stories and disjointed plots as
haphazardly written science fiction. But his novels
became cult classics, especially "Cat's Cradle" in
1963, in which scientists create "ice-nine," a crystal
that turns water solid and destroys the earth. 

Many of his novels were best-sellers. Some also were
banned and burned for suspected obscenity. Vonnegut
took on censorship as an active member of the PEN
writers' aid group and the American Civil Liberties
Union. The American Humanist Association, which
promotes individual freedom, rational thought and
scientific skepticism, made him its honorary
president. 

His characters tended to be miserable anti-heros with
little control over their fate. Vonnegut said the
villains in his books were never individuals, but
culture, society and history, which he said were
making a mess of the planet. 

"We probably could have saved ourselves, but we were
too damned lazy to try very hard ... and too damn
cheap," he once suggested carving into a wall on the
Grand Canyon, as a message for flying-saucer
creatures. 

He retired from novel writing in his later years, but
continued to publish short articles. He had a
best-seller in 2005 with "A Man Without a Country," a
collection of his nonfiction, including jabs at the
Bush administration ("upper-crust C-students who know
no history or geography") and the uncertain future of
the planet. 

He called the book's success "a nice glass of
champagne at the end of a life." 

In recent years, Vonnegut worked as a senior editor
and columnist at In These Times. Bleifuss said he had
been trying recently to get Vonnegut to write
something more for the magazine, but was unsuccessful.


"He would just say he's too old and that he had
nothing more to say. He realized, I think, he was at
the end of his life," Bleifuss said. 

Vonnegut, who had homes in Manhattan and the Hamptons
in New York, adopted his sister's three young children
after she died. He also had three children of his own
with his first wife, Ann Cox, and later adopted a
daughter, Lily, with his second wife, the noted
photographer Jill Krementz. 

Vonnegut once said that of all the ways to die, he'd
prefer to go out in an airplane crash on the peak of
Mount Kilimanjaro. He often joked about the
difficulties of old age. 

"When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the
end of his life; old age is more like a semicolon,"
Vonnegut told The Associated Press in 2005. 

"My father, like Hemingway, was a gun nut and was very
unhappy late in life. But he was proud of not
committing suicide. And I'll do the same, so as not to
set a bad example for my children." 
___ 

Associated Press writers Michael Warren, Hillel Italie
and Chelsea Carter contributed to this report.







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