Armageddon in Retrospect
by Kurt Vonnegut
(Putnam) $24.95
It’s hard to hate a new book by Kurt Vonnegut, and this posthumous
release is actually a far worthier final book than 2005’s A Man
Without a Country. The Armageddon in the title is the 1945
decimation of Dresden by American bombers, an event that Vonnegut lived
through as a young man in the army. Dresden figured prominently in more
than half of his novels and all of his nonfiction collections; Vonnegut
himself seemed aware of the horrible fact that his career is built on
the 250,000 lives lost in that one day.
A Man Without a Country was simply a string of
anticonservative screeds, and the book sold quite well with the
indignant liberal crowd, landing Vonnegut on best-seller lists again.
As a cohesive work, it was a failure. Armageddon in Retrospect,
though, is as clear and cogent an antiwar book as the pacifist Vonnegut
ever wrote.
There are science-fiction stories about time machines from early in
Vonnegut’s career and essays written weeks before his death, but all of
them are about war, and all of them could easily have sprung, fully
formed, from Vonnegut’s mind as he emerged from the bunker he
accidentally found himself in on the day of Dresden’s burning. A large
part of the man passed away on that day, and more than anything,
Armageddon in Retrospect is an elegy for the part of Vonnegut
that died more than a half-century before the rest of him.