Fotografía de autor

John Somer

Autor de The Vonnegut Statement

9+ Obras 203 Miembros 1 Reseña

Obras de John Somer

Obras relacionadas

Oyez Review : Vol. 8, No. 1 — Contribuidor — 1 copia

Etiquetado

Conocimiento común

Género
male

Miembros

Reseñas

http://andalittlewine.blogspot.com/2012/03/book-11-of-52-vonnegut-statement.html

Old books make fantastic windows. The Vonnegut Statement, published in 1973, collects some of the first essays written about Kurt Vonnegut's works after the publication of Slaughterhouse Five. They seem to alternate between accessible and esoteric, but I found myself nodding along with the broad strokes of the criticism.

I often struggle to put a finger on what draws me to the authors whose body of work speaks to me. I have plenty of books I like by a range of authors, but the authors I like is a very exclusive list: Vonnegut is one, Hemingway and Steinbeck are two others, Philip Roth and Philip Larkin probably round out the top 5.

Over and over, the critics in The Vonnegut Statement return to the idea that as life has become more absurd, art is forced to take new forms. Part of the reason that Vonnegut's characters and scenes often feel like stick figure drawings when compared to the lush realism of Steinbeck or the terse depths of Hemingway is because the world makes so much less sense than it did twenty years before. Vonnegut survived the firebombing of Dresden, and while both Steinbeck and Hemingway came home with war stories and wrote stories about the war and people affected by war, only Vonnegut's characters were fully broken by war because war broke Vonnegut's ideals in a way it didn't affect the other authors.

Somewhere in the back of my head, I've known that.

Is this a book I'd recommend? Meh. You'd have to do a lot of reading, love Vonnegut and enjoy lit crit to make the journey worth it. But it was worth it for me.
… (más)
 
Denunciada
jscape2000 | Apr 16, 2012 |

También Puede Gustarte

Autores relacionados

Aidan Mathews Contributor
Rita Kelly Contributor
Eilis Ni Dhuibhne Contributor
Ronan Sheehan Contributor
Eamonn Sweeney Contributor
Cherry Smyth Contributor
Michael O'Loughlin Contributor
Mary Dorcey Contributor
Evelyn Conlon Contributor
Maeve Binchy Contributor
Anne Devlin Contributor
John Banville Contributor
Anne Enright Contributor
Neil Jordan Contributor
Clare Boylan Contributor
Colum McCann Contributor
Bernard MacLaverty Contributor
Patrick McCabe Contributor
Joseph O'Connor Contributor
Elizabeth Bowen Contributor
Emma Donoghue Contributor
Desmond Hogan Contributor

Estadísticas

Obras
9
También por
1
Miembros
203
Popularidad
#108,639
Valoración
½ 3.6
Reseñas
1
ISBNs
11

Tablas y Gráficos