Cat's Cradle

eBook

English language

Published Dec. 4, 2010 by RosettaBooks.

ISBN:
978-0-7953-0272-5
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5 stars (2 reviews)

If any single novel of Kurt Vonnegut's can represent his unique voice and freewheeling imagination, it is probably the wildly funny and provocative Cat's Cradle, published in 1963. Though it might not be his most substantial or popular novel, Cat's Cradle is a perfect vehicle for his idiosyncratic style and his kaleidoscopic view of the modern world.The story unfolds from the point of view of a narrator, who, in preparing to write a book, wants to know what some famous Americans were up to the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. He learns that, on that very day, Dr. Felix Hoenikker—an absent-minded professor who was the erstwhile "father of the atomic bomb"—was uncharacteristically playing with string, making a cat's cradle and terrifying his young son by showing the boy his creation and speaking to him for the first time. Years later, the grown-up Hoenikker children are the key …

32 editions

Great ideas, but dated in parts

4 stars

I love Vonnegut's style in both the way he evokes huge images and events with sparse words and in his ideas, like this most banal and final of apocalypses with the world ending in ice-nine. The problem is that as we get further from the period it was written in, the assumptions it was written under, especially about the role of women and non-white (and non-American) people in the narrative and society, jar even more with the inventiveness going on around them.