Slapstick.

Kurt Vonnegut.

Kurt Vonnegut is my favourite author. If you have never read Vonnegut you are in the wonderful position of having a large number of unique and fantastic stories just waiting for you to experience them for the first time. If I could go back and re-experience reading Slaughterhouse Five for the first time I most definitely would. 

Very quickly into my relationship with Vonnegut I decided I would make it a goal to read everything he has ever written. Fortunately for me, he has written quite a few books and it is therefore taking a while to make my way through the list. 

I have read these ones so far:

- Slaughterhouse Five
- Galapagos
- Cat's Cradle
- Mother Night
- Look at the Birdie
- Welcome to the Monkey House
- Deadeye Dick
- Timequake
- God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian
- Sucker's Portfolio
- While Mortals Sleep
- Slapstick
- A Man Without a Country
- The Sirens of Titan
- Breakfast of Champions
- Hocus Pocus
- We Are What We Pretend To Be 

So that means I have these ones left to read:

- Player Piano
- God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
- Jailbird
- Bluebeard
- Canary in a Cathouse
- Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons
- Palm Sunday
- Fates Worse Than Death
- Bagombo Snuff Box
- Armageddon in Retrospect

Then if I am really dedicated I can move on to tracking down some of his more obscure essays and reading his plays and articles. There is a book that is just a massive collection of his drawings and I need it in a big way. 

Anyways, Slapstick.

I ordered this book online and then discovered when I moved that I already owned it and had already read it. The title prompted no remembrance of the story itself. Which is weird because I usually remember Vonnegut. But it was quite a few years ago. Anyways, I read it again and within the first chapter I remembered having read it before. 

Here is the blurb on the back of the book:

"Slapstick presents an apocalyptic vision as seen through the eyes of the current King of Manhattan (and last President of the United States), a wickedly irreverent look at the all-too-possible results of today's follies. But even the end of life-as-we-know-it is transformed by Kurt Vonnegut's pen into hilarious farce - a final slapstick that may be the Almighty's joke on us all."

Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain lives in the Empire State Building with his granddaughter. Manhattan is referred to as 'The Island of Death' and is almost entirely empty. People don't visit out of fear of 'The Green Death,' which killed the majority of the original inhabitants. Dr. Swain was the last President of the United States and while he was in power he assigned everyone in America a new middle name and created new extended families based on those middle names. It was his attempt to end loneliness by creating new families that spanned the entire country. 

See the thing about Vonnegut is that every time you read one of his books you get an entirely new and entirely unique story. The imagination that man had was incredible. And you also get his very distinct dry and dark sense of humour intertwined into each of his stories. Sometimes his stories have fantastical science fiction qualities and time travel, sometimes they are fictional stories that intertwine with actual history, and sometimes they are very clear commentaries on the state of the world. They are always good and Slapstick was no exception.