Kurt Vonnegut. Great Writers. by John Tomedi
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"[...] an essentially pessimistic outlook is advanced in almost all of Vonnegut's novels. [...] One of the few bright spots on the dim palette of Vonnegut's fiction is the place of decency, humanity, and kindness in a modus vivendi."

Since I am slowly working through Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s literary opus I thought it might be interesting to read the great author's biography. The first of the two that I found in my university library is a "critical biography" Kurt Vonnegut (2004), written by John Tomedi and published in the Great Writers series. This is a serious book, a monograph with a clear research bent. The author focuses on the analysis of the writer's work rather than on his life story.

Kurt Vonnegut is one of my most favorite authors even though I really like only few of his books and do not care much for several others. So far I have reviewed here on Goodreads 10 out of the author's 30 works (14 novels and 16 other books, including both fiction and non-fiction) and the average rating is not impressive. But then I think a writer who has created a masterpiece like Slaughterhouse-Five deserves all his works to be read even if most of them are failures of some kind.

I share several of Mr. Vonnegut's concerns that the author of the biography identifies as main themes in Vonnegut's work: dark pessimism about the nature and future of the human race, total randomness of life, skepticism as to the power and role of science in society. Moreover, in almost all of his works Vonnegut attempts to determine "what's wrong with America", and I agree with many of his diagnoses: the culture of greed and commercialism, the glorification of violence, and the cult of guns. Mr. Tomedi's book also made me realize that my identification with Vonnegut's ideas is not only based on the commonality of negatives. As shown by the fragment I used for the epigraph Vonnegut offers human decency and kindness as the rays of hope, "bright spots on the dim palette" of his fiction. There is nothing that I value more in people than the notion of decency and that's one of the main reasons why I cherish works by authors such as Coetzee, Macdonald, or Vonnegut.

I also share the author's outrage at the fact that Slaughterhouse-Five was "banned from several school district's libraries and reading lists, and even burned in a few communities." Grim is the future of a country where great books are burned while commercials on TV poison people's minds 24 hours a day. Speaking about TV, Mr. Tomedi offers the following great observation:

"[...] people try to imitate the unrealistic world of stories in reality. One result is the expectation that reality will behave like a story. Television is a prime culprit."

An interesting tidbit I learned from Mr. Tomedi's book is that Vonnegut's rejected Master's thesis, Fluctuations Between Good and Evil in Simple Tales, attempted to provide a graphical description of structure of stories from wide-ranging cultures, which reminds me of the famous (for an Eastern European like myself) study by Vladimir Propp, Morphology of a Folktale.

To sum up, the biography is a worthy read, and I recommend it, although it suffers from frequent repetitions of themes and it reads more like a collection of essays about individual books by Kurt Vonnegut rather than as a synthesis of analyses.

Three stars.

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