Slapstick@@ or Lonesome No More - Softcover

Vonnegut, Kurt:

Softcover

ISBN 10: 009984270X ISBN 13: 9780099842705

Publisher: London: Vintage 2008., 1994

Synopsis

Wilbur Swain and his twin sister, Eliza, are so immensely hideous, helpless and vile in their infancy that their wealthy parents are forced to send them to live on a nearby asteroid. But behind their facade of idiocy, the monstrous pair possess a joint intelligence that could outstrip the most advanced computers...

About this title

Review:

Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain, centenarian, the last President of the United States, King of Manhattan, and one-half (along with his sister, Eliza) of the most powerful intelligence since Einstein, is penning his autobiography. He occupies the first floor of a ruined Empire State Building and lives like a royal scavenger with his illiterate granddaughter and her beau. Buffeted by fluctuating gravity, the U.S. has been scourged by not one, but two lethal diseases: the Green Death and the Albanian Flu. Consequently, the country has fallen into civil war. (Super-intelligent, miniaturized Chinese watch the West self-destruct from the sidelines.) Swain stayed at the White House until there were no citizens left to govern, then moved to deserted New York City, where he writes a thoughtful missive before death.

In Slapstick, Vonnegut muses on war, man's hubris, and the awful, crippling loneliness humans are freighted with--but, miraculously, the book still manages to delight and amuse. Absurd, knowing, never depressing, Slapstick kindles hope--for the possibility of wisdom, perhaps; for human resiliency, surely.

It's best to end with a quote from the prologue wherein the author discourses on The Meaning of It All, or at least This Book: "Love is where you find it. I think it is foolish to go off looking for it, and I think it can often be poisonous.
I wish that people who are conventionally supposed to love each other would say to each other, when they fight, 'Please--a little less love, and a little more common decency.'"
Amen.

From the Publisher:

Slapstick presents an apocalyptic vision seen through the eyes of the current King of Manhattan (and last President of the United States), a wickedly irreverent look at the all-too-possible results of today's follies. But even the end of life-as-we-know-it is transformed by Vonnegut's pen into hilarious farce--a final slapstick that may be the Almighty's joke on us all.

"Vonnegut's ongoing puppet show. . .the fabulous is reborn."--John Updike, The New Yorker.

"Imaginative and hilarious... a brilliant vision of wrecked, wacked-out future!" --Hartford Courant

About this edition

• Publisher: London: Vintage 2008.
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 009984270X
• ISBN 13: 9780099842705
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 170