Vonnegut was one of only seven American prisoners of war who survived this holocaust. He had been immured in Schlachthof-Fünf (Slaughterhouse-Five), which was deep enough beneath the city so that the heat did not penetrate to it. Discovered, he was given the job of helping to find bodies. He was rescued by Russian troops in May and exchanged for prisoners of other nationalities.
He was a born writer and soon successful. He wrote many fine and funny books, but the only story he really wanted to tell was about what had happened to Dresden on that night in February 1945. He was finally able to do this in his novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, published in 1969. The subtitle of the book, The Children’s Crusade, is an example of the kind of mordant humor to be found in this and many other Vonnegut titles. The subtitle reminds us of a terrible thing that happened in the twelfth century. Fifty thousand children, led by a boy named Stephen, tried to go to the Holy Land and conquer the Paynim with love, not arms. Instead, owing to mistakes and simple greed, most of them were sold into slavery as soon as they reached land. Vonnegut thought of soldiers as children being used by grownups. The book’s combination of simplicity and sense, irony and rue, said a critic, is very much in the Vonnegut vein. Its ironic phrase, “So it goes” in reference to death, became a slogan for anti-Vietnam-War protestors.
As time went on he grew more and more critical and pessimistic about what his country was doing in and to the world. The Vietnam War enraged him, and the misadventure in Iraq did so even more. “By saying that ‘Our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees,’” he wrote, “am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers? Their morale is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.”
He died as I was writing this, in April 2007. I won’t be the only one to miss him. There are thousands more. So it goes.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO
1922–
Blindness The Cave
José Saramago was born in Portugal in 1922, to a family of landless peasants. He had little education, but this didn’t stop him from becoming one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, or maybe of all time.
He is an iconoclast with many curious beliefs. A communist, an atheist, and a pessimist, he is also a lover of women. And he’s fond of dogs—there is a dog that plays a part in every one of the eight novels by Saramago I have read. I wonder if anyone else has noticed?
His prose style is decidedly strange. You have to get used to it. He never uses quotation marks to delineate conversational speech, and he hardly ever uses periods to end sentences, which run on in some cases for an entire page, with the clauses separated by commas. But once you have become used to this, you find it is a novel and intriguing way to describe the endlessly confusing actions and thoughts, as well as the words, of human beings, which is what Saramago is most interested in.
Blindness was published (in the United States) in 1995. A man and his wife are driving in a city and have stopped at a red light when the man suddenly becomes blind. His wife does not, and she is able to work her way out of the traffic jam caused by the sudden blindness of many other drivers. Neither of them is ever given a name. He is simply “The first person to become blind.” and she is “The wife of the first man to become blind.” The plague is not universal but it is nearly so, and the blind populace of the city make desperate efforts to rearrange their lives in order to live. Of course there are great difficulties, not least because a gang of criminals tries to take over the city, threatening everyone who does not obey them with death (they have found weapons and are willing to use them).
The wife of the first man to go blind turns out to be the salvation of the city and perhaps the entire race, because she alone can see and works her way into the gang and overcomes it. There is no explanation of why this has happened and why the plague ends. That is not the kind of thing Saramago does. Nevertheless, despite all its mysterious unanswered questions, this is one of the great novels of our time. In 1996, José Saramago received the Nobel Prize for Literature.
The Cave was published (in the United States) in 2002. It is a love story between a man and a woman who cannot speak to one another until almost the last page. Here, the dog, whose name is “Found” because it just turns up one day, is a charming and eloquent interlocutor. The man has a daughter who is married to a man who does not understand what is really going on, though he finally discovers an underground cave in which a group of persons are seated, staring at a wall. There is a light behind them; a machine is displaying pictures on the wall. The son-in-law is suddenly terrified and returns home to inform his family of this strange happening, which they understand because, whether they have read Plato’s Republic or not, it is clear to them. Which it will be to you when you read this beautiful book.
Other fine novels by Saramago are The Stone Raft, in which the Iberian Peninsula separates from Europe and starts to drift slowly westward; The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis; and The History of the Siege of Lisbon, in which a proofreader in a publishing house leaves out a “not” in a sentence and this changes the history of the world. There are many more. Prepare to be intrigued as well as delighted and amused.
JOSEPH HELLER
1923–1999 .
Catch 22
Joseph Heller was born on Coney Island, New York, in 1923. He flew sixty combat missions as a B-25 bombardier, returned safely, and won a Fulbright Scholarship to Oxford in 1949–50. After that he began to write the one book that everyone remembers. Called Catch 22, it was published in 196l.
In case you don’t remember, the absurd premise of the book is as follows. According to an extremely vague USAF regulation, anyone who is willing to fly combat missions (particularly in a B-25) must be considered insane. However, if you apply for release from the service on mental grounds, the act proves your sanity and you are reassigned to combat. That, in a nutshell, is Catch 22.
Yossarian is a captain in the air force who is trying to understand Catch 22. He is in love with Nurse Duckett and she is in love with him, but they don’t make it somehow. Milo Minderbinder is a mess officer who is willing to do anything if he can get paid for it, including hiring out his air force group to the Germans, who use it to kill many Americans. He is accused of treason but gets off by claiming that he was only being a capitalist. Ex-PFC Wintergreen is called that because he went AWOL. Later he becomes Ex-Sgt. Wintergreen and hopes someday to become a General so he can go AWOL and become ex-Gen. Wintergreen.