
The Art of Fiction: Kurt Vonnegut - kapitza
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3605/the-art-of-fiction-no-64-kurt-vonnegut
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hellofunk
> Four different interviews with me were submitted to The Paris Review. These
> were patched together to form a single interview, which was shown to me.
> This scheme worked only fairly well, so I called in yet another interviewer
> to make it all of a piece. I was that person. With utmost tenderness, I
> interviewed myself.

~~~
frutiger
Don't ruin it for those who read the comments first!

~~~
hellofunk
I think by definition the comments sections is implicitly a spoiler section.
Those who read it first get what they came for :)

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luxpir
I'll just add that this is well worth the read. I'd go so far as to say it's
an inspirational piece. More upvotes. More hacker hacks.

~~~
pmoriarty
I don't know. I found it really superficial and trite, with absolutely no
insight whatsoever.

I really don't get why Vonnegut is so popular. He seems pretty talentless to
me.

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alextheparrot
His gift was to tell a story in a way that both entertained and informed. His
paragraphs invoked both interest and caused me to think about the world in a
different way. I'll attach a snippet from Slaughterhouse Five, where Vonnegut
describes a bombing raid, except chooses to do so in reverse.

“It was a movie about American bombers in World War II and the gallant men who
flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes,
full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield
in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards,
sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They
did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew
up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The
bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which
shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers , and lifted
the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored
neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which
were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen
and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans though and some of
the bombers were in bad repair. Over France though, German fighters came up
again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from
the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories
were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the
dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this
work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was
their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they
would never hurt anybody ever again.”

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andyidsinga
really good read, here's a snippet of vonnegut's sharp wit re Dresden bombing:

\--- VONNEGUT

I said that only one person on the entire planet benefited from the raid,
which must have cost tens of millions of dollars. The raid didn’t shorten the
war by half a second, didn’t weaken a German defense or attack anywhere,
didn’t free a single person from a death camp. Only one person benefited—not
two or five or ten. Just one.

INTERVIEWER

And who was that?

VONNEGUT

Me. I got three dollars for each person killed. Imagine that.

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alextheparrot
What an incredible writer, with this piece just reinforcing it. Vonnegut has
expressed more feelings, described the world more clearly, and opened my mind
more widely than any other author. I remember reading Slaughterhouse Five (the
first time) during high school, then again nearly every year since. His
descriptions of and thoughts on Dresden in the book and this interview really
show his outlook on the war.

