"Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse Five" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vonnegut Kurt)

everybody had to work so hard, and because there wasn't much shelter or food or clothing. But
things were much better now. He had a pleasant little apartment, and his daughter was getting an
excellent education. His mother was incinerated in the Dresden fire-storm. So it goes.
He sent O'Hare a postcard at Christmastime, and here is what it said:
'I wish you and your family also as to your friend Merry Christmas and a happy New Year and I
hope that we'll meet again in a world of peace and freedom in the taxi cab if the accident will.'
I like that very much: 'If the accident will.'
I would hate to tell you what this lousy little book cost me in money and anxiety and time.
When I got home from the Second World War twenty-three years ago, I thought it would be easy for
me to write about the destruction of Dresden, since all I would have to do would be to report what
I had seen. And I thought, too, that it would be a masterpiece or at least make me a lot of money,
since the subject was so big.
But not many words about Dresden came from my mind then-not enough of them to make a book,
anyway. And not many words come now, either, when I have become an old fart with his memories and
his Pall Malls, with his sons full grown. I think of how useless the Dresden -part of my memory
has been, and yet how tempting Dresden has been to write about, and I am reminded of the famous
limerick:

There was a young man from Stamboul,
Who soliloquized thus to his tool,
'You took all my wealth
And you ruined my health,
And now you won't pee, you old fool’

And I'm reminded, too, of the song that goes

My name is Yon Yonson,
I work in Wisconsin,


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I work in a lumbermill there.
The people I meet when I walk down the street,
They say, 'What's your name?
And I say,
‘My name is Yon Yonson,
I work in Wisconsin...

And so on to infinity.
Over the years, people I've met have often asked me what I'm working on, and I've usually
replied that the main thing was a book about Dresden.
I said that to Harrison Starr, the movie-maker, one time, and he raised his eyebrows and
inquired, 'Is it an anti-war book?'
'Yes,' I said. 'I guess.'
'You know what I say to people when I hear they're writing anti-war books?'
'No. What do you say, Harrison Starr?'
'I say, "Why don't you write an anti-glacier book instead?"'
What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as