God Bless You Mr. Rosewater Review
Oct. 4th, 2024 06:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
queen_unicorn_rejectGod Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is an American novel written by Kurt Vonnegut. Jr, published in 1965. It's the seventh book I've read this year, and the 4th Vonnegut book in that list, I believe.
Statistics time: I read this book for 234 minutes and 23 seconds, over the course of a week, from the 7th of September to the 13th of September. It's a short book, as all Vonnegut stories tend to be.
Vonnegut's stories and the themes in them tend to be deeply political, primarily inspired by his experiences in World War II. In this book, he directly tackles perhaps the most political topic of all; capitalism. In this book, Vonnegut touches on the absurd reality of the existence of billionaires in the first place, and raises the question: can there be a truly good billionaire?
Elliot Rosewater, in that case, is not a person who can truly exist in our reality. He is much like Winston Niles Rumfoord, a caricature sorely designed and crafted to push this narrative along and embody its narrative. He is a man so stricken with his desire to help people and his guilt of having murdered innocents in war (not to mention having an absurd amount of money) that doing what any sane, conscious thing to do for a man in his position is constantly seen as clinically insane behavior by his family.
Vonnegut books all typically have an ironic truth to them, and I think that is the idea Vonnegut is trying to get at in this novel. There can be no ethical billionaire, in the same way there can be no ethical cop; even when they attempt to be ethical and conscious, they will be violently excised by this system.
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is, even for a Vonnegut book, a complete and utter mess of a novel. This book is even more fractured than the chronologically fractured Slaughterhouse-5, which is saying something. It often feels like the book is jumping into a completely unrelated story at times, or focusing on tangential details which don't ultimately matter. In terms of the overall craftsmanship of the narrative, I would rank this one in the lower tiers of Vonnegut books.
Still, it's undeniable that God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is one of Vonnegut's most heartfelt books. Perhaps it's because in this book, Vonnegut is allowed to truly become a good person - a genuinely good man, in the form of Elliot Rosewater. In so many of Vonnegut's books, his main characters are flawed, traumatized; and, most importantly, slaves to their own destiny, trapped in a darkly comedic tragedy, forced into bittersweet endings. While also flawed and traumatized, Elliot Rosewater, against all odds, earns the best possible ending he would have earned at the end of this story. I see this as Vonnegut's gift to Elliot, for being one of the few characters of his that tried to do good in a sick and twisted world.
Statistics time: I read this book for 234 minutes and 23 seconds, over the course of a week, from the 7th of September to the 13th of September. It's a short book, as all Vonnegut stories tend to be.
Vonnegut's stories and the themes in them tend to be deeply political, primarily inspired by his experiences in World War II. In this book, he directly tackles perhaps the most political topic of all; capitalism. In this book, Vonnegut touches on the absurd reality of the existence of billionaires in the first place, and raises the question: can there be a truly good billionaire?
Elliot Rosewater, in that case, is not a person who can truly exist in our reality. He is much like Winston Niles Rumfoord, a caricature sorely designed and crafted to push this narrative along and embody its narrative. He is a man so stricken with his desire to help people and his guilt of having murdered innocents in war (not to mention having an absurd amount of money) that doing what any sane, conscious thing to do for a man in his position is constantly seen as clinically insane behavior by his family.
Vonnegut books all typically have an ironic truth to them, and I think that is the idea Vonnegut is trying to get at in this novel. There can be no ethical billionaire, in the same way there can be no ethical cop; even when they attempt to be ethical and conscious, they will be violently excised by this system.
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is, even for a Vonnegut book, a complete and utter mess of a novel. This book is even more fractured than the chronologically fractured Slaughterhouse-5, which is saying something. It often feels like the book is jumping into a completely unrelated story at times, or focusing on tangential details which don't ultimately matter. In terms of the overall craftsmanship of the narrative, I would rank this one in the lower tiers of Vonnegut books.
Still, it's undeniable that God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is one of Vonnegut's most heartfelt books. Perhaps it's because in this book, Vonnegut is allowed to truly become a good person - a genuinely good man, in the form of Elliot Rosewater. In so many of Vonnegut's books, his main characters are flawed, traumatized; and, most importantly, slaves to their own destiny, trapped in a darkly comedic tragedy, forced into bittersweet endings. While also flawed and traumatized, Elliot Rosewater, against all odds, earns the best possible ending he would have earned at the end of this story. I see this as Vonnegut's gift to Elliot, for being one of the few characters of his that tried to do good in a sick and twisted world.
