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Sunday, 29 January 2006 15:37

There’s a solace in Vonnegut’s work, something also readily perceptible in most of his novels, an encouraging window the author opens onto the hypocrisy of war and the terror of tyranny, especially when it masquerades as democracy.

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“To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it.” This sentiment of Kurt Vonnegut is one of a number of missives he assails the political and cultural landscape with in A Man Without Country, and one he has never failed to live up to. Book after book, Vonnegut’s soul has grown, and now in his eighth decade of life is as feisty as ever, taking on homeland security alerts, Bush and his cronies, and just about anything else flying in the face of his common sense.

There’s a solace in Vonnegut’s work, something also readily perceptible in most of his novels, an encouraging window the author opens onto the hypocrisy of war and the terror of tyranny, especially when it masquerades as democracy. His anti-war stance is hardly a revelation, and so when recalling the bombing of Dresden, a subject he was finally “grown up enough to write about” in 1968 when he wrote Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut says: “It was pure nonsense, pointless destruction. The whole city was burned down, and it was a British atrocity, not ours.” It’s enough to get any right-wing sycophant’s blood curdling.

Portions of A Man Without a Country also give a glimpse of Vonnegut, the writer and the man, a humanist through and through. “If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: The only proof he needed for the existence of God was music,” he writes in one of the book’s brief passages.

A Man Without a Country is a pithy volume of whimsical attitude, a testament of waning years, and incisive cuts that are smaller, but still sting. As for his age, Vonnegut simply writes: “I turned eighty-two on November 11, 2004. What’s it like to be this old? I can’t parallel park worth a damn anymore, so please don’t watch while I try to do it.”