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31 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Marvellous, funny, intelligent, perceptive, 23 Sep 2001
Along with Edmund Cooper's "The Overman Culture", one of the science fiction books I remember reading most avidly as a child, books which stay with you throughout your life. "Cat's Cradle", for me, is Vonnegut's best. It doesn't have the nightmare resonance of "Slaughterhouse Five", the cosmic jokes of "Sirens of Titan" or the deep, abiding humanism which suffuses "Breakfast Of Champions", surely Vonnegut's most moving work (positively heartbreaking), but "Cradle" is a magnificent achievement, a book you will return to time and again and always find something new and interesting (and funny!).Vonnegut topples his targets like bowling pins. The self-consciously epic sweep of the narrative is signalled by its cheeky references to Moby Dick -- "Call me Jonah" is the first line, and there are a massive 127 chapters crammed into its tiny 179 pages -- but what could be more epic than the end of the world anyway? Vonnegut not only thinks up a new and unusual method of destroying the planet, he invents a cynical new religion, a cast of extraordinary characters, and a very human and very flawed narrator. There's love, sex, death, high farce and the meeting of souls. "Cat's Cradle"'s abiding popularity can be demonstrated by the number of words and phrases which are now part of everyday language - "busy busy busy", ice nine, boko-maru, foma, karass and so on. Genius is an overused word, but this is clearly the work of genius. It may just seem to you like a book full of cruel jokes in which ultimately everybody dies, but that's the world we live in. The central conceit of the invented religion Bokononism is that its followers know it's all rubbish. Worshipping Bokononism is like reading a good novel. "Don't try," Vonnegut tells us about life on page 115. "Just pretend you understand." These are words to live by. You won't regret buying this book.
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by Kurt Vonnegut
by Kurt Vonnegut
by Kurt Vonnegut
by Kurt Vonnegut
