God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian (Kurt Vonnegut)
It’s truly amazing that this man is still around — born in 1922, rumored to smoke unfiltered Pall Mall cigerettes (”a classy way to commit suicide,” he says). But thank the Lord that he is still here — or, because Vonnegut is a humanist, whoever the humanists would thank.
This ultra-slender book took me exactly an hour to read. No, I’m not kidding. It’s exactly 78 pages, very loosely spaced and cut into segments of 2-4 pages each. What is great is that the narrator is actually Vonnegut himself. He originally wrote most of these short spurts of pseudo journalism for a recurring NPR program wherein he was their offical reporter on the afterlife. He achieved his “scoops” by being 3/4ths killed by Dr. Kevorkian (hence the title), interviewing both famous and mundane personages outside of the holy gates, and then returning to the world of the living to transcribe their thoughts.
As with most of Vonnegut’s work, these thoughts are witty, informed, random and insightful, yet never deep. The word deep connotes a self-importance that Vonnegut lacks. For instance, the words of Adolf Hitler:
I was gratified to learn that he now feels remorse for any actions of his, however indirect, which might have had anything to do the violent deaths suffered by thirty-five million people during World War II. He and his mistress Eva Braun, of course, were among those causualties, along with four million other Germans, six million Jews, eighteen million citizens of the Soviet Union and so on.
“I paid my dues along with everyone else,” he said.
It is his hope that a modest monument, possibly a stone cross, since he was a Christian, will be errected somewhere in his memory, possibly on the grounds of the United Nations headquarters in New York. It should be incised, he said, with his name and dates 1889-1945. Underneath should be a two-word sentence in Germsn: “Entschuldigen Sie.”
Roughly translated into English, this comes out, “I Beg Your Pardon,” or “Excuse Me.”
And as well as this demented dictator, Vonnegut tackles Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, Clarence Darrow and more. My favorite? Why Kilgore Trout, of course, Vonnegut’s famous character from Slaughterhouse Five, Breakfast of Champions and more. If you’ve read Vonnegut, you know Kilgore Trout. Simply because the book is so light weight, I don’t think I can grant it a full fledged five on the rating scale. However, because it was a hilarious hour, a memorable experience and a reminder of a great author I haven’t read in a while, I give it a:
4.5 out of 5 stars: A hardcover book club selection
Fiction, Short Stories |