Forgotten Book: CAT’S CRADLE by Kurt Vonnegut

CAT’S CRADLE by Kurt Vonnegut, 1963

This is the 58th in my series of Forgotten Books.

The other day when preparing my Forgotten Film column on ATTACK OF THE 50 FT. WOMAN I wrote about some of the process used to select the titles I discuss. This week’s book is hardly “forgotten” since it has just been reissued in a prestigious format. But, for me, it was sort of forgotten.

As a teenager growing up in the Viet Nam era, you had to read a lot of literature to have any status. That meant things like THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE, CATCH-22, and the works of Kurt Vonnegut. The first real Vonnegut I read was SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE. I had seen a review of it and knew that it (and Vonnegut) was right in my wheelhouse. I immediately read everything else (which was not really a whole lot since S5 was only his sixth novel.
It was hard to describe Vonnegut then and it still is. Absurdist satire with a biting wit might come close. Imagine Mark Twain ramped up on speed.

The other day I was cruising one of the big box book stores with a gift card burning a hole. I cruised through the remainders and best sellers, looking for good cheap titles. And, eventually I was in the Fiction and Literature section minding my business looking at Mark Twain titles when I spotted the relatively new Library of America title VONNEGUT: NOVELS AND STORIES 1963 – 1973.

I am a sucker for LOA titles, particularly the fiction titles and I picked this one up. I opened it up and looked at the beginning of CAT’S CRADLE. The brief, breezy chapters drug me in and before I knew what had happened I was 40 pages into the book. I bought it, paying full price (though I did use the gift card) and brought it home.

It was all there – the sardonic wit, comments on religion, Mankind, science, science fiction, the birth of the Atom Bomb, and the end of the world! It was funny; it was tragic. It was only 188 pages but it made a huge impression on me as a kid. The early Vonnegut is what you need. This volume and the three novels that preceded it – PLAYER PIANO, THE SIRENS OF TITAN, and MOTHER NIGHT as well as the short stories collected in CANARY IN A CAT HOUSE or WELCOME TO THE MONKEY HOUSE. Fiction after SLAUGHTERHOUSE 5 tended to not be as wild with a few exceptions. For some reason I recall being very fond of SLAPSTICK while I was unable to finish BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS. Go figure.

One of the best things about CAT’S CRADLE is the excerpts from THE BOOKS OF BOKONON. Bokonon is a religious figure with a Zen like quality based in realism. It is absolutely essential to the story being told and brings some laugh out loud moments. I recall reading the chapter THE FOURTEEN BOOK . The Fourteenth Book of THE BOOKS OF BOKONON is entitles “What Can a Thoughtful Man Hope For Mankind on Earth, Given the Experiences of the Past Million Years?”. The book is reproduced within the novel in its entirety. What it said was “Nothing.”

One other Bokonist thought struck me as I reread this novel for the first time in many years. “Maturity,” Bokonon tells us, “is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.”

So this week this book is considered ‘forgotten” because I had forgotten how much I had enjoyed it before and rereading it was a pleasure I shall cherish for a long time.

To paraphrase an old commercial “Friends, when was the last time you had a great big steaming volume of Kurt Vonnegut? Well, that’s too long!”

Series organizer Patti Abbott hosts more Friday Forgotten Book reviews at her own blog, and posts a complete list of participating blogs.