Books

Kurt Vonnegut

(Putnam, $24.95)

It's impossible to read Kurt Vonnegut's Armageddon in Retrospect without mixed emotions. On the one hand, there's the unexpected pleasure of encountering Mr. Vonnegut anew, a year after his death at age 84. On the other, the book can't help but remind us that he is no longer available in any living way.

This is clear from almost every piece here, for although Armageddon in Retrospect includes one "new" effort (the author's final speech, which his son Mark gave for him), it's largely a grab bag of unpublished fiction from the 1940s and 1950s, when Mr. Vonnegut was developing his voice. That's fine for what it is, but Armageddon in Retrospect seeks to frame itself as something more cohesive, less a collection of early writings than a series of meditations arranged around the themes of war and peace.

It's interesting mostly as a historical curiosity. One of its most vivid pieces, in fact, is a three-page typed letter, reproduced in facsimile, that Mr. Vonnegut sent his family from a prisoner-of-war repatriation camp in France in May 1945. Here, we see the writer in protean form, commenting on material he would later explore in his fiction: the absurdity of war, his experience surviving the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, and the futility of looking for meaning in a world gone mad.

Other pieces are amusing, clever even, but if they're memorable at all, it's in the glimpse they offer of Vonnegut in the process of becoming the author we would later know.

Los Angeles Times

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