verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора
Материала на еще один сборник рассказов Курта Воннегута собрали издатели и неравнодушные – и это уже третья книга писателя, вышедшая посмертно. Правда, они появляются довольно тихо (по крайней мере, две последние; эссеистика из «Armageddon in Retrospect», появившейся в 2008 году, уже по своей тематике требовала большой громкости обсуждений): писатель рассказов не жег, издавать их не запрещал, похоронить вместе с собой не просил... Да и рассказы – это далеко не такой случай, как случайно найденный неоконченный роман.
Впрочем, среди четырнадцати текстов «Look at the Birdie» почти не было невнятных – будем надеяться, что и в случае с «While Mortals Sleep», где шестнадцать рассказов, результат получился не хуже (ну и, конечно, иллюстрации самого Вонегута – всегда праздник). А пока – небольшой отзыв на книгу из
«Washington Post».
Book review: "While Mortals Sleep" by Kurt Vonnegut
By William Sheehan
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
The late Kurt Vonnegut was one of the great humanist voices of the 20th century. A former prisoner of war and a witness to the firebombing of Dresden in 1945, he was also a profoundly pessimistic man with a bleak worldview fueled by what he described as "disgust with civilization." Paradoxically, though, the general tenor of his fiction was neither bleak nor bitter. It was humane, consistently funny and filled with rueful, hard-earned wisdom.
As readers of "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" will remember, he famously advocated kindness in all human dealings and was fond of quoting a remark made by his like-minded son, Mark, author of "The Eden Express": "We are here to help each other through this thing, whatever it is."
Since his death in 2007, Vonnegut has, to our great good fortune, remained a persistent literary presence. To date, three volumes of previously unpublished early writings have appeared, and they have all been uniquely valuable. The first, "Armageddon in Retrospect" (2008), is largely notable for the title story, which gave hints of the idiosyncratic style that would eventually emerge, and for "Wailing Shall Be in All Streets," an earnest, angry nonfiction account of the bombing of Dresden. Next came "Look at the Birdie" (2009), 14 vivid, often comic slices of life in postwar America.
Now we have "While Mortals Sleep," which contains 16 stories, numerous sui-generis illustrations by the author himself and an introduction by Dave Eggers that is a model of its kind: smart, sympathetic and scrupulous in its assessment both of the stories at hand and of Vonnegut's overall place in American culture.
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