This is my second Kurt Vonnegut book I have read over the summer. Boy recommended Slaughterhouse Five earlier. This was a collection of shorter stories and honestly, more than half of them seemed like they were pulled from the events that made up Slaughterhouse Five. He spoke of Dresden for a second time with a sense that I really believe Kurt, the man, was there during World War II and he experienced what he wrote.
Two of the stories stick with me because they are so different, in time. The Unicorn Trap, is set in old England in the year 1067, the bad guy is a feared Robert the Horrible. He has just executed 18 people of the village and laid the responsibility of new tax collector on Elmer, an honest poor woodcutter, after the last one had failed. As Robert the Horrible is done explaining his command, his men and himself charge off after a deer and disappear, never to be seen again. The protagonist is conflicted about his new title. He does not want it, as he would rather be poor and invisible. His son, meanwhile, is trying to explain to his father about his unicorn trap and what he has been doing. To his father, this is his son being a boy, playing, but his boy has been busy growing and the trap has grown too. Elmer decides he will stand up to Robert and refuse the job, knowing he will die for it, he cannot see himself trying to take money from the other poor people. He waits for the next day to tell Robert the Horrible, but he never comes. His men are running on horseback back and forth, but they cannot find him. In the end, Elmer goes to see his son's trap and it is huge and it goes on underground, like a cave, with timbers at its entance that fell and killed Robert, somehow.
The other story is Armageddon In Retrospect, namesake of the book. It is set in Oklahoma and is based on the study of Demonology. It is quite grand, getting its start from a doctor from Dresden, Germany. He had a unifying theory for mental illness related to the devil. He wrote book after book, then died broke. Time passed, a rich oillman in Oklahoma wanted his library filled with 200 feet of books. This is how he came in possession of the doctor's works. He found german translators to convert the text into english and this caused him to spend the rest of his life and millions trying to prove the german's theories. He had a lavish Institute built with an army of researchers and scientists studying in demonolgy. The story gets quite grand, leads all the way to the UN before coming back to itself. The end is also a little far fetched, and possibly just describes another doctor losing his mind and playing the very character he tried to find.
The other stories all seemed to be from the eyes of someone in a war zone. Interesting, but not unique enough to stand out. There was a story about a kid who lived with an old man. As mch as the old man wanted the kid to experience just one day of normal, he takes him out of the city, into the countryside, next to a stream. The kid still manages to find an old shell of a tank, which fascinates the boy.
There was a story of the prisoners of war constantly talking about food. They are supposed to be clearing the streets of Dresden as their work, and three of them are under the eye of an older german Klenheins, who tolerated their bickering over food and minimum work, as long as he was left alone. In the end, Klenheins has been wanting to be transferred out of that job assignment and after a superior officer comes and demotes him for carrying notebooks with pictures of food the prisoners had been drawing, we find Klenhein realizes he is as much a prisoner as the americans. In the end, there is nothing better to do than to join them in talking about food to get through the dread of the day.
Most stories, as I said, had the war as a backdrop. After a while, they all kind of seem like one long story. I enjoyed the book, and read it in about a week. It is about 232 pages long, but has several cartoon drawings which take a page or two apiece.
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