Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [0]
KURT VONNEGUT IS …
“UNIQUE … one of the writers who map our landscapes for us, who give names to the places we know best.”
—DORIS LESSING
The New York Times Book Review
“OUR FINEST BLACK HUMORIST.
…. We laugh in self-defense.”
—The Atlantic Monthly
“AN UNIMITATIVE AND INIMITABLE SOCIAL SATIRIST.”
—Harper’s Magazine
“A CAUSE FOR CELEBRATION.”
—Chicago Sun-Times
“A LAUGHING PROPHET OF DOOM.”
—The New York Times
“A PROFOUNDLY HUMANE COMEDY …
Jailbird definitely mounts up on angelic wings—in its speed, in its sparkle, and in its high-flying intent.”
—Chicago Tribune Book World
“JOYOUSLY INVENTIVE … gleams with the loony magic Vonnegut alone can achieve.”
—Cosmopolitan
“VONNEGUT IS OUR GREAT APOCALYPTIC WRITER, the closest thing we’ve had to a prophet since … Lenny Bruce.”
—Chicago Sun-Times
“VONNEGUT AT HIS IMPRESSIVE BEST….
His imaginative leaps alone … are worth the price of admission…. His far-reaching metaphysical and cultural concerns … are ultimately serious and worth our contemplation.”
—The Washington Post
“HE HAS NEVER BEEN MORE SATIRICALLY ON-TARGET…. NOTHING IS SPARED.”
—People
“VINTAGE VONNEGUT!”
—Time
“IS IT ENTERTAINING? EVERY PAGE OF IT….
Easily his best work of fiction since Slaughterhouse-Five.”
—New York Daily News
“THE WRITING … IS IMMEASURABLY STRONGER, FUNNIER, AND MORE CONFIDENT…. Life, in Vonnegut’s eyes, is as chaotic as ever … but Jailbird emanates serene control.”
—The Atlantic Monthly
“AT HIS BEST … Vonnegut in very good form, tart, wry, often very funny.”
—New York Post
“WONDROUS…. A MAGICAL WRITER who can turn laughter into tears, absurdity into reality…. Jailbird is a novel of power, humor, and beauty set to the tempo of laughter, a dazzling and virtuoso achievement by one of our finest literary natural resources.”
—WILLIAM DIEHL,
author of Sharky’s Machine
BOOKS BY KURT VONNEGUT
Bluebeard
Breakfast of Champions
Cat’s Cradle
Deadeye Dick
Galápagos
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
Jailbird
Mother Night
Palm Sunday
Player Piano
The Sirens of Titan
Slapstick
Slaughterhouse-Five
Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons
Welcome to the Monkey House
For Benjamin D. Hitz,
Close friend of my youth,
Best man at my wedding.
Ben, you used to tell me about
Wonderful books you had just read,
And then I would imagine that I
Had read them, too.
You read nothing but the best, Ben,
While I studied chemistry.
Long time no see.
PROLOGUE
YES—KILGORE TROUT is back again. He could not make it on the outside. That is no disgrace. A lot of good people can’t make it on the outside.
• • •
I received a letter this morning (November 16, 1978) from a young stranger named John Figler, of Crown Point, Indiana. Crown Point is notorious for a jailbreak there by the bank robber John Dillinger, during the depths of the Great Depression. Dillinger escaped by threatening his jailor with a pistol made of soap and shoe polish. His jailor was a woman. God rest his soul, and her soul, too. Dillinger was the Robin Hood of my early youth. He is buried near my parents—and near my sister Alice, who admired him even more than I did—in Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis. Also in there, on the top of Crown Hill, the highest point in the city, is James Whitcomb Riley, “The Hoosier Poet.” When my mother was little, she knew Riley well.
Dillinger was summarily executed by agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He was shot down in a public place, although he was not trying to escape or resist arrest. So there is nothing recent in my lack of respect for the F.B.I.
John Figler is a law-abiding high-school student. He says in his letter that he has read almost everything of mine and is now prepared to state the single idea that lies at the core of my life’s work so far. The words are his: “Love may fail, but courtesy will prevail.”
This seems true to me—and complete. So I am now in the abashed condition, five days after my fifty-sixth birthday, of