INDY'S WEEKLY ALTERNATIVE NEWSPAPER HIGHLIGHTING ARTS, ENTERTAINMENT AND SOCIAL JUSTICE
Death in black and white
By Kurt Vonnegut
G.P. Putnam’s and Sons; $24.95
It’s been a year since Kurt Vonnegut’s mortal coil sprung, leaving the planet a little emptier than it was before. Fortunately, Kurt’s voice lives on through a body of work people will turn to as long as they continue reading English.
Now we have this warm, albeit somewhat slight, collection — a loving gesture, really — offered by Kurt’s son, Mark Vonnegut. Armageddon in Retrospect collects a dozen unpublished pieces on the subject of war, beginning with a typescript of the letter Kurt sent his parents after getting out of the German prison camp where he was held at the end of World War II. This is perhaps the most resonant piece on offer, a straightforward, understated account of a transit through hell that includes one blunt tale of death after another, closing with this rueful refrain: “But not me.”
The rest of what’s here are stories, mostly, about human fragility, pomposity and the straws we cling to when all else fails.
With the exceptions of his letter home and the text of the speech Vonnegut intended to give at Clowes Hall last April, the dates these pieces were written isn’t revealed, which is an oversight. They seem, for the most part, written before Vonnegut reached the full height of his powers. Their honorable humanism is, at times, reminiscent of classic black and white television — rather like vintage episodes of The Twilight Zone.
Interspersed throughout are reproductions of the Confetti prints Vonnegut produced during his later years (and that ran every week last year in NUVO). They are pithy, mordant one-liners that, like bells, have a way of ringing on after they’ve been struck.