Child of Light
at 9:35 pm (Self Writ, Literature, The King of Terrors)Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday. He survived — as a prisoner of the Germans — the terror-bombing of Dresden.
“The firebombing of Dresden explains absolutely nothing about why I write what I write and am what I am,” Vonnegut wrote in Fates Worse Than Death, his 1991 autobiography of sorts.
But he spent 23 years struggling to write about the ordeal, which he survived by huddling with other POW’s inside an underground meat locker labelled slaughterhouse-five.
I liked Mother Night the best of all his works. Even the film wasn’t bad.
Ave.
rivercrow
said,
April 13th, 2007 at 9:33 pm
I watched _Slaughterhouse 5_ at 3 am on a Saturday in Atlanta at DragonCon in the late 1980s.
Seeing the movie triggered a Vonnegut reading frenzy. Twenty years later, I still mostly remember the movie images.
He’s a figure who I was always surprised to hear was still living. But it will be easy for me to remember the day he died.