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.
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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. Indianapolis, his hometown, declared 2007 as "The Year of Vonnegut" — an announcement he said left him "thunderstruck."
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.
His mother killed 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.
"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 work, 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 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."
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Associated Press writers Michael Warren, Hillel Italie and Chelsea Carter contributed to this report.
ova me vest danas bas rastuzila. ima nesto jezivo u tome kada umre komicar, pogotovu koji, kao Vonegat, bukvalno zonglira teskim temama dok ti ne istera sav strah od njih iz kostiju. laka mu zemlja.
Goran, kome je Vonegat omiljeni pisac, svojevremeno je odrzao sjajnu tribinu u LK, a na osnovu nje je napisao i tekst koji je objavljen u Znaku Sagite. Mozda bi trebalo uzivo napraviti komemorativnu reprizu, s obzirom da se covek zanimao i za SF.
:(
Tako mu je to.
Šteta.
Quote from: "angel011"Šteta.
ne bih rekao.
čovek je, po sopstvenom priznanju, kazao svoju zadnju reč par godina pre smrti, ovo sad je bilo samo odlaganje i mučenje.
voleo bih da JA odem tako, nakon što kažem sve što imam... ali retki su srećnici kojima je dato da stave tačku.
obično se završava sa...
I to je bolje od onih koji celog zivota nisu nista rekli, nit' su umeli ili smeli da kazu.
Ali se slazem da je lepse zavrsiti posao i biti miran.
kakva šteta.
jako ga cenim kao pisca, iako ne volim sve njegove knjige.
klanica je remekdelo!!!
reših da odam počast preminulom vonegatu gledanjem TV filma HARRISON BERGERON, po čuvenoj v. priči.
avaj, malo je počasti a više pošasti u ovom delcu.
sjajna satira iz priče rastegnuta je i kompromitovana stavljanjem u zaplet koji samom svojom strukturom protivreči sadržini, tj. priča o lepoti RAZLIČITOSTI ispripovedana je kroz dosadno prepoznatljivu, klišetiziranu povest o pobuni 'probuđenog' pojedinca protiv totalitarnog sistema; sve je vrlo programski, i by the numbers, rutina, u kojoj je hobit šon ostin tek mlako 'ubedljiv' kao genijalac, a jedino se k. plamer ističe kao upečatljiva gl. pojava (on, zapravo, ima i jedinu komplexnu ulogu, uslovno rečeno, Velikog Inkvizitora).
film prolongira idiotsku predrasudu da pamet=poznavanje činjenica, odnosno da su pobednici tv slagalice nekakvi geniji. kao, pametan čovek je onaj ko zna tablicu množenja i par istorijskih datuma, i koji je glavni grad tadžekistana.
takođe se kao ultimativni kulturnoumetnički artefakti promovišu isključivo američka muzika (džez!!!), film (IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE kao predstavnik 'vrha', a zapravo još jedan idejno degutantan, mada, kao, 'well-meaning' film) itd. kao da ostatak čovečanstva nema šta da ponudi...
i, najgore, film (kao da) promoviše predrasudu da je budalama dovoljno nešto lepo reći/pokazati, i oni će se zato opametiti.
iako kraj to pomalo relativizuje, završna scena ostavlja nužnu dozu optimizma da će novi naraštaji slušajući džez da, slowly but surely, zbace jaram tiranskog ropstva.
itd.
ukratko, film o duhu - bez duha; film o umetnosti – bez umetničkih vrednosti; film o različitosti – koji je bljutavo klišetiziran; film o pobuni – koji tu istu pobunu implicitno podriva, zaslađuje, kastrira, odlaže (baš kao i kaprino zlodelo...)
moja ocena: ** (2)
vonegat je zaslužio bolje.
uzeću ovih dana da pogledam SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE. to bi trebalo da je valjanije. mada, mene je i sam roman, svojevremeno, ostavio prilično neuzbuđenim. možda zato što svaki antiratni roman, čitan odmah posle selinovog PUTOVANJA NAKRAJ NOĆI, deluje kao užegla limunada...