RIP: Kurt Vonnegut Nov. 11, 1922 - April 11, 2007
I don't know what to say, except that he was an amazing and creative author, and he will be missed by his fans.
"He was sort of like nobody else," said Gore Vidal, who noted that he, Vonnegut and Norman Mailer were among the last writers around who served in World War II.
"He was imaginative; our generation of writers didn't go in for imagination very much. Literary realism was the general style. Those of us who came out of the war in the 1940s made it sort of the official American prose, and it was often a bit on the dull side. Kurt was never dull."
May he rest in peace.
Edited to add: I found this picture from when I was downloading pictures for my Iowa City post, so I thought I'd add it here.
Labels: books
posted by Jennifer @ 5:45 AM
3 comments
3 Comments:
This is a blog post from a former Greek professor in College. Thought you might find it interesting...
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"John Wilson, the editor of Books and Culture, was on IWU's campus today as part of our "Celebration of Scholarship" extravaganza. He had been on the road and hadn't heard yet that Kurt Vonnegut, who was actually from Indianapolis, had died.
There were two things about Wilson's comments that I found striking.
The first was Wilson's sense that despite the virulent anti-theism of Vonnegut and others like Salmon Rushdie, they could not have given birth to such art apart from the common grace that we all enjoy as humans made in the image of God. He seemed to think that their creations reflected the image of God in them, even though the content they created was sometimes vile.
The second was even more striking. He prayed for Vonnegut, sorta. He made some prefatory remarks about how much we are uncertain of, and mentioned that there was one stream of Christianity that believed a person's eternal destiny might be changed even after death. He did not think the evidence for this was ultimately very good.
But then he prayed. He did not exactly pray for Vonnegut, as I remember. But he thanked God for His great mercy, in fact, had to stop in the middle of the prayer to regain his composure.
It was a profound prayer to me, even though I remember hardly a word from it."
btw, in the above post, I meant "seminary", not "college."
I barely got through Spanish in college... Greek would have been a disaster.
Paul--thank you for your very thoughtful comments. It would take me quite a while to thoroughly sort out and elucidate all my thoughts in response, so I'm just going to give you what I have now, sort of stream of consciousness:
I've only ever read Slaughterhouse Five by Vonnegut, and that was 5 years ago, so I don't really remember it but I remember being impacted in a visceral way by it. I'd like to read it again.
Rushdie I've read a couple short stories from, but all I remember is his evocative imagery.
Philip Pullman is another author that frequently gets called virulently anti-theistic, and I've read and remember several of his books. But with him I've always wanted to send him a letter and say "I'm sorry--I just don't buy it. You're not a very convincing atheist. There's simply too much theology in your books to be accidental." Partly because I think it's true and partly because it would be so funny--I bet no one has ever sent him a letter like that before.
Pullman, and perhaps Vonnegut and Rushdie (haven't read enough of them to be sure) I think are the sort of atheists Madeleine L'Engle talks about when she says that some atheists are atheists not because they don't believe in God, but because they believe so deeply in the idea of a loving God, but do not see that reflected in the world.
When I heard Vonnegut died while I was getting ready for work, I started crying. And I couldn't really stop. I don't know why--I barely remember the one book I've read from him.
I also prayed for him quite literally. Not something I usually do for the dead. I grew up believing such prayers were futile. But I've read to much Charles Williams in the intervening years, and that has widened my sense of what is possible. He has made God seem much bigger and more amazing to me, which I think has been crucial for my continued faith.
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