A Great Slip!

Kurt Vonnegut slipped away in to memory. He was 84 and one of the most intellectual writers i have  ever came across! He was just too good with this prophetic views smeared with a heavy dose sarcasm which often made fun of our very existence in the most possible darkest ways. He was/is often misjudged as a comic writer who throws in a tinge of science fiction and quirky prose. But that doesn't really do a great justice to him as a writer. Be it Slaughterhouse-Five, Jail Bird or God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, he is able to portray life and its futility, and its obsession with the trivial and dangerous things - money, war and all sorts of that stuff, which should actually shame the man kind.

America, its culture, the American dream and concepts of that sort takes center stage in his works and that is quite obvious being an American writer but  he had a prophetic view, where he could draw a picture about people who inherited wealth and had nothing to do with it, Where some chased a dream and reached hell and so on.

I enjoyed reading him and i am going to collect some more of his books. He made an indelible mark on my psyche. Although most of the searches on net gave accounts about him as a plain humorist but this very piece gives an account of what he really was.

With kurt's death, the number of literary icons who saw the grim face of catastrophic wars and who constantly beleted out cathartic proses against wars are fast dwindling. We are being pushed in to an intellectual void; where we lack authentic voices of protest. It is indeed a scary thought.

It took him 25 years to pen down Slaughterhouse-Five. When asked about this he told :

"You can't remember pure nonsense," Vonnegut said. "It was pure nonsense, the pointless destruction of that city, and, well, I just couldn't get it right. ... I kept writing crap, as they say."

You can gather a bit more than what you need from here