Cat's Cradle: A Novel
Cat's Cradle: A Novel book cover

Cat's Cradle: A Novel

Paperback – September 8, 1998

by
Price
$14.99
Format
Paperback
Pages
304
Publisher
Dell Publishing
Publication Date
ISBN-13
978-0385333481
Dimensions
5.25 x 0.69 x 8 inches
Weight
8 ounces

Description

“A free-wheeling vehicle . . . an unforgettable ride!” — Thexa0New York Times “[Vonnegut is] an unimitative and inimitable social satirist.” — Harper’s Magazine “Our finest black-humorist . . . We laugh in self-defense.” — Atlantic Monthly One of Vonnegut's major works, this is an apocalyptic tale of the planet's ultimate fate, featuring a cast of unlikely heroes. Kurt Vonnegut ’s humor, satiric voice, and incomparable imagination first captured America’s attention in The Sirens of Titan in 1959 and established him as “a true artist” ( The New York Times ) with Cat’s Cradle in 1963. He was, as Graham Greene declared, “one of the best living American writers.” Mr. Vonnegut passed away in April 2007. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter One The Day the World Ended Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.Jonah--John--if I had been a Sam, I would have been Jonah still--not because I have been unlucky for others, but because somebody or something has compelled me to be certain places at certain times, without fail. Conveyances and motives, both conventional and bizarre, have been provided. And, according to plan, at each appointed second, at each appointed place this Jonah was there.Listen:When I was a younger man--two wives ago, 250,000 cigarettes ago, 3,000 quarts of booze ago . . .When I was a much younger man, I began to collect material for a book to be called The Day the World Ended.The book was to be factual.The book was to be an account of what important Americans had done on the day when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan.It was to be a Christian book. I was a Christian then.I am a Bokononist now.I would have been a Bokononist then, if there had been anyone to teach me the bittersweet lies of Bokonon. But Bokononism was unknown beyond the gravel beaches and coral knives that ring this little island in the Caribbean Sea, the Republic of San Lorenzo.We Bokononists believe that humanity is organized into teams, teams that do God's Will without ever discovering what they are doing. Such a team is called a karass by Bokonon, and the instrument, the kan-kan, that bought me into my own particular karass was the book I never finished, the book to be called The Day the World Ended. Chapter Two Nice, Nice, Very Nice"If you find your life tangled up with somebody else's life for no very logical reasons," writes Bokonon, "that person may be a member of your karass."At another point in The Books of Bokonon he tells us, "Man created the checkerboard; God created the karass." By that he means that a karass ignores national, institutional, occupational, familial, and class boundaries.It is as free-form as an amoeba.In his "Fifty-third Calypso," Bokonon invites us to sing along with him:Oh, a sleeping drunkardUp in Central Park,And a lion-hunterIn the jungle dark,And a Chinese dentist,And a British queen--All fit togetherIn the same machine.Nice, nice, very nice;Nice, nice, very nice;Nice, nice very nice--So many different peopleIn the same device. Chapter Three FollyNowhere does Bokonon warn against a person's trying to discover the limits of his karass and the nature of the work God Almighty has had it do. Bokonon simply observes that such investigations are bound to be incomplete.In the autobiographical section of The Books of Bokonon he writes a parable on the folly of pretending to discover, to understand:I once knew an Episcopalian lady in Newport, Rhode Island, who asked me to design and build a doghouse for her Great Dane. The lady claimed to understand God and His Ways of Working perfectly. She could not understand why anyone should be puzzled about what had been or about what was going to be.And yet, when I showed her a blueprint of the doghouse I proposed to build, she said to me, "I'm sorry, but I never could read one of those things.""Give it to your husband or your ministers to pass on to God," I said, "and, when God finds a minute, I'm sure he'll explain this doghouse of mine in a way that even you can understand."She fired me. I shall never forget her. She believed that God liked people in sailboats much better than He liked people in motorboats. She could not bear to look at a worm. When she saw a worm, she screamed.She was a fool, and so am I, and so is anyone who thinks he sees what God is Doing, [writes Bokonon]. Chapter Four A Tentative TanglingOf TendrilsBe that as it may, I intend in this book to include as many members of my karass as possible, and I mean to examine all strong hints as to what on Earth we, collectively, have been up to.I do not intend that this book be a tract on behalf of Bokononism. I should like to offer a Bokononist warning about it, however. The first sentence in The Books of Bokonon is this:"All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies."My Bokononist warning in this:Anyone unable to understand how a useful religion can be founded on lies will not understand this book either.So be it.. . . About my karass, then.It surely includes the three children of Dr. Felix Hoenikker, one of the so-called "Fathers" of the first atomic bomb. Dr. Hoenikker himself was no doubt a member of my karass, though he was dead before my sinookas, the tendrils of my life, began to tangle with those of his children.The first of his heirs to be touched by my sinookas was Newton Hoenikker, the youngest of his three children, the younger of his two sons. I learned from the publication of my fraternity, The Delta Upsilon Quarterly, that Newton Hoenikker, son of the Noel Prize physicist, Felix Hoenikker, had been pledged by my chapter, the Cornell Chapter.So I wrote this letter to Newt:"Dear Mr. Hoenikker:"Or should I say, Dear Brother Hoenikker?"I am a Cornell DU now making my living as a free-lance writer. I am gathering material for a book relating to the first atomic bomb. Its contents will be limited to events that took place on August 6, 1945, the day the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima."Since your late father is generally recognized as having been one of the chief creators of the bomb, I would very much appreciate any anecdotes you might care to give me of life in your father's house on the day the bomb was dropped."I am sorry to say that I don't know as much about your illustrious family as I should, and so don't know whether you have brothers and sisters. If you do have brothers and sisters, I should like very much to have their addresses so that I can send similar requests to them."I realize that you were very young when the bomb was dropped, which is all to the good, My book is going to emphasize the human rather than the technical side of the bomb, so recollections of the day through the eyes of a 'baby, if you'll pardon the expression, would fit in perfectly."You don't have to worry about style and form. Leave all that to me. Just give me the bare bones of your story."I will, of course, submit the final version to you for your approval prior to publication."Fraternally yours--" Chapter Five Letter froma pre medTo which Newt replied:"I am sorry to be so long about answering your letter. That sounds like a very interesting book you are doing. I was so young when the bomb was dropped that I don't think I'm going to be much help. You should really ask my brother and sister, who are both older than I am. My sister is Mrs. Harrison C. Conners, 4918 North Meridian Street, Indianapolis, Indiana. That is my home address, too, now. I think she will be glad to help you. Nobody knows where my brother Frank is. He disappeared right after Father's funeral two years ago, and nobody has heard from him since. For all we know, he may be dead now."I was only six years old when they dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, so anything I remember about that day other people have helped me to remember."I remember I was playing on the living-room carpet outside my father's study door in Ilium, New York. The door was open, and I could see my father. He was wearing pajamas and a bathrobe. He was smoking a cigar. He was playing with a loop of string. Father was staying home from the laboratory in his pajamas all day that day. He stayed home whenever he wanted to."Father, as you probably know, spent practically his whole professional life working for the Research Laboratory of the General Forge and Foundry Company in Ilium. When the Manhattan Project came along, the bomb project, Father wouldn't leave Ilium to work on it. He said he wouldn't work on it at all unless they let him work where he wanted to work. A lot of the time that meant at home. The only place he liked to go, outside of Ilium, was our cottage on Cape Cod. Cape Cod was where he died. He died on a Christmas Eve. You probably know that, too."Anyway, I was playing on the carpet outside his study on the day of the bomb. My sister Angela tells me I used to play with little toy trucks for hours, making motor sounds, going 'burton, burton, burton' all the time. So I guess I was going 'burton, burton, burton' on the day of the bomb; and Father was in his study, playing with a loop of string."It so happens I know where the string he was playing with came from. Maybe you can use it somewhere in your book. Father took the string from around the manuscript of a novel that a man in prison had sent him. The novel was about the end of the world in the year 2000, and the name of the book was 2000 A.D. It told about how mad scientists made a terrific bomb that wiped out the whole world. There was a big sex orgy when everybody knew that the world was going to end, and then Jesus Christ Himself appeared ten seconds before the bomb went off. The name of the author was Marvin Sharpe Holderness, and he told Father in a covering letter the he was in prison for killing his own brother. He sent the manuscript to Father because he couldn't figure out what kind of explosives to put in the bomb. He thought maybe Father could make suggestions."I don't mean to tell you I read the book when I was six. We had it around the house for years. My brother Frank made it his personal property, on account of the dirty parts. Frank kept it hidden in what he called his 'wall safe' in his bedroom. Actually, it wasn't a safe but just an old stove flue with a tin lid. Frank and I must have read the orgy part a thousand times when we were kids. We had it for years, and then my sister Angela found it. She read it and said it was nothing but a piece of dirty rotten filth. She burned it up, and the string with it. She was a mother to Frank and me, because our real mother died when I was born."My father never read the book, I'm pretty sure. I don't think he ever read a novel or even a short story in his whole life, or at least not since he was a little boy. He didn't read his mail or magazines or newspapers, either. I suppose he read a lot of technical journals, but to tell you the truth, I can't remember my father reading anything."As I say, all he wanted from that manuscript was the string. That was the way he was. Nobody could predict what he was going to be interested in next. On the day of the bomb it was string."Have you ever read the speech he made when he accepted the Nobel Prize? This is the whole speech: 'Ladies and Gentlemen. I stand before you now because I never stopped dawdling like an eight-year-old on a spring morning on his way to school. Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and sometimes learn. I am a very happy man. Thank you.'"Anyway, Father looked at that loop of string for a while, and then his fingers started playing with it. His fingers made the string figure called a 'cat's cradle.' I don't know where Father learned how to do that. From his father, maybe. His father was a tailor, you know, so there must have been thread and string around all the time when Father was a boy."Making that cat's cradle was the closest I ever saw my father come to playing what anybody else would call a game. He had no use at all for tricks and games and rules that other people made up. In a scrapbook my sister Angela used to keep up, there was a clipping from Time magazine where somebody asked Father what games he played for relaxation, and he said, 'Why should I bother with made-up games when there are so many real ones going on?'"He must have surprised himself when he made a cat's cradle out of the string, and maybe it reminded him of his own childhood. He all of a sudden came out of his study and did something he'd never done before. He tried to play with me. Not only had he never played with me before; he had hardly ever even spoken to me."But he went down on his knees on the carpet next to me, and he showed me his teeth, and he waved that tangle of string in my face. 'See? See? See?' he asked. 'Cat's cradle. See the cat's cradle? See where the nice pussycat sleeps? Meow. Meow.'"His pores looked as big as craters on the moon. His ears and nostrils were stuffed with hair. Cigar smoke made him smell like the mouth of Hell. So close up, my father was the ugliest thing I had ever seen. I dream about it all the time."And then he sang. 'Rockabye catsy, in the tree top'; he sang, 'when the wind blows, the cray-dull will rock. If the bough breaks, the cray-dull will fall. Down will come cray-dull, catsy and all.'"I burst into tears. I jumped up and I ran out of the house as fast as I could go."I have to sign off here. It's after two in the morning. My roommate just woke up and complained about the noise from the typewriter." Read more

Features & Highlights

  • “A free-wheeling vehicle . . . an unforgettable ride!”—
  • The New York Times
  • Cat’s Cradle
  • is Kurt Vonnegut’s satirical commentary on modern man and his madness. An apocalyptic tale of this planet’s ultimate fate, it features a midget as the protagonist, a complete, original theology created by a calypso singer, and a vision of the future that is at once blackly fatalistic and hilariously funny. A book that left an indelible mark on an entire generation of readers,
  • Cat’s Cradle
  • is one of the twentieth century’s most important works—and Vonnegut at his very best.
  • “[Vonnegut is] an unimitative and inimitable social satirist.”—
  • Harper’s Magazine
  • “Our finest black-humorist . . . We laugh in self-defense.”—
  • Atlantic Monthly

Customer Reviews

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Most Helpful Reviews

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Amazing

I don't like sci-fi, but I loved this. This is the first Vonnegut I've read (I took a chance after reading so much praise for it) and it definitely won't be the last. It's one of those rare and wonderful books in the same vein as Animal Farm: simple prose, easy to read, yet with ironic tinges and thought-provoking depths; a novel that can be read and enjoyed at many different levels.
Cat's Cradle is narrated through Jonah, an author who aims to write a book on the single day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. On investigating the atomic bomb's main founding father (and his three children) he is told about a *non-existant* substance with the capacity to provide all water on earth with a different molecular structure, turning it into Ice 9 (ie, a substance that could bring about the end of the world) A different assignment takes Jonah to the small island of San Lorenzo where he encounters Felix Hoenikker's three children and a society where the religion of choice (a religion that everyone knows is based on lies, yet still has utter faith in) is punishable by death, for the simple fact that it adds excitement to the dull lives of the inhabitants. I won't go any further...
The thing that delighted me most about this book was the way in which it was written. A lot of great and influential books are ones that (on the whole) you enjoy, but take a while to get into, and at times you feel like giving up on: you know the book in question is good literature, but the style and plot make finishing it seem a chore.
Similarly, a lot of fast-paced books hold little impact, don't challenge the mind and are forgotten the instant you read them.
Kurt Vonnegut has managed to write a powerful and memorable novel in a short, snappy style: this book has everything that makes a compelling, challenging read. Vonnegut lets you get a feel for the characters without going into lengthy descriptions, he manages to make sharp, subtle criticisms of religion, human nature and society without rambling or whining, his plot is exciting yet not unrealistic, he creates a hellish world that plays on everyone's fear of obliteration in precious few words. I thought the ending was too abrupt, but it fitted well with the rest of the story (and it would have been even more disappointing if he'd created a satisfying, everything-tied-up-nicely ending)
I found this impossible to put down, and highly recommend it to any fan of literature.
105 people found this helpful
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Classic Satire

Okay -- three stars. That's what I think OTHER readers will think of this book. I think it is worth four stars. But this review is supposed to try and be helpful to you, dear reader, so I do not wish to inflate how good YOU might think this book is.

But let's face it: It's Vonnegut. Satirical. Whimsical. Deadly earnest in a half-joking kind of way. Not particularly optimistic about the future of us People, and not, apparently, particularly fond of us either. Three stars of Vonnegut is worth maybe four stars of Wolfe, maybe five stars of Koontz. Just three stars of Twain, though.

So about this book: it's a quick read. There are like 127 chapters in the story, but they all fit (in my edition) into just 287 pages. 287 very spacious and roomy pages. The chapters tend to be about a page-and-a-half long, some just a couple of paragraphs. Vonnegut bounces right along, telling the story of John, as John seeks to write a biography of one of the father's of the atom bomb. (A fictional father.)

The work no doubt contains some of Vonnegut's more creative ideas: ice-9; Bokononism; Mona Aamons Monzano, the most beautiful girl ever; a completely incomprehensible dialect of what might have once been the English language; and, of course, the end of the World. The story starts out innocently enough, but one thing just leads to the next and the next and before you know it, you will find yourself enmeshed in a world of utter ridiculousness, but you had better take it seriously or you may end up on "the hook." Pronounced "hy-u-o-ook-kuh."

So, not too deep, but deep enough. Not too, too funny, but totally, irreverently so. Not too long, but not too short. You will most likely enjoy this book.
81 people found this helpful
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A Funny, Philosophical, Superb Romp-to-the-end.

Vonnegut writes the book with the question that "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" plays with on a different level, all the while throwing in philosophies, wit, and things to ponder on and about during the COLD WAR.
The narrator (first-person incompetent) is somewhat vacant, and being so, maneuvers the story the best way possible.
The narrator is writing a book on the atomic bomb and he travels about meeting strange people who know the creators of the bomb. The characters he meets are funny and strange (You would have to be an oddball to be toying with doomsday.). In his journey he finds the sons and daughter of the inventor of the A-bomb. He finds that these three are an eccentric and foolish trio. The daughter and sons hold with them ice-nine, a weapon that makes the a-bomb seem infantile. Ice-nine was an attempt by their father to make battlefields (mud) solidify, making battle easier on soldiers. It winds up making any moisture it touches solid and blue, but its one flaw is, once put into the atmosphere it regenerates without stopping, freezing everything in its path(including human beings).
Vonnegut throws in the element of Bokononism, a quirky, weird religion spawned by an eccentric, self-made prophet named Bokonon. This angle plays in the mind of the reader as it debases the relevancy of all religions, thus, for example, making Catholicism or Islam just as strange as Bokononism. Bokononists chant about man being born of the "mud."
Symbolically the three children holding ice-nine, a single flake of which will end mankind as we know it, stand for three world superpowers. It shows that anyone, no matter how high in power, can be foolish, and should have no access to such an element of destruction. The ice-nine is just a symbol of the end of mankind through the folly of science, for the ice-nine turns things bluish white, like ice--putting man in another ice-age, destroying all "mud". The island of San Lorenzo is like Cuba--through its history no one really cared about anyone else ceasing it, but since there is an odd belief there(Bokononism/Communism),people poke around there now. It shows how such a small place, like Cuba, in the Cold War, could be ground-zero for the end of humanity, and warns against intervention there.
Being that the Cold War is over, this is an era piece that some may think is stagnate. Yet the tools to end civilization are still out there, so this book is relevant as long as science and government have and look for a greater means of destruction.
Though this book is funny and eccentric on surface, it is ultimately found to be a political warning. This humorous look at what could be the end, parallels Orwell's "Nineteen-Eighty-Four" in the field of political writing for the sake of warning (Orwell warns about the threat of Totalitarianism, Vonnegut warns about man's acute closeness to his own demise). This book is not as hard-nosed as "Nineteen-Eighty-Four." It is funny, but this is done to show the folly and incompetence that mankind's demise is handled with: Vonnegut's use of juxtaposition is without flaw.
Bokonon adds a religious facet to this novel. He ultimately shows folly and incompetence in the creation of something other than doomsday devices--religion. After the reader drops the hypocrisy of thinking their religion is "the one," Vonnegut brings up the question: Were people like Jesus or Mohammed just fools out spreading nonsense for the sake of an ego-trip?
This book touches on so many intense questions. It puts forth a vehicle for such deep introspection, yet it is hilarious. I only wish I were to have read this in the mind set of the world in the early sixties, when this book was first published. Vonnegut was way ahead of his time with this one. His writing, when dissected, makes me think he is one of the great thinkers of the twentieth-century into the twenty-first...
65 people found this helpful
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Please, teleport me back to 1963

Hey science fiction, please teleport me back to 1963, so I can read in one year, Dune, The Man in the High Castle and Cat’s Cradle. Frankly speaking, I don’t want to sound like the squeaky-rocking-chair-old-man-whining cliché where “those were the days my friend”, but… those were the days indeed.

They say Cat’s Cradle is a satirical commentary. I say it is pure prophecy, far more accurate than the technobubble prophecies of our days.

Yes, it is Cat’s Cradle which accurately foreshadowed the Jonestown mass suicide by 15 years.

Yes, it is Cat’s Cradle which put (then respected by a large portion of the human intelligenzia) Mao, Stalin etc in their correct place in human history: targets to be eliminated from humanity’s annals.

And I am afraid, that it will be Cat’s Cradle, predicting, rather accurately, the end of the world by a mysterious “Ice-Nine” substance, now being in its “Ice-Two” or “Ice-Three” version. Hope, this will take some time.

Kurt Vonnegut’s writing feels so natural, as you and me breathing. Yes, this great man was surely exhaling words, sentences, phrases, paragraphs, chapters and whole books, even in his sleep.

I cannot even begin to describe how good and cathartic reading Cat’s Cradle feels. Put in your abandoned island books lists, in your read before dying list, in any list you like. But you should read it.

As for me, I hold to what I said in the beginning. Please, take me back to 1963.
40 people found this helpful
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Nihilistic rubbish, not worthy of the name "Science-Fiction."

This review will likely spoil parts of the plot. I'll try and keep those to a minimum, but you've been warned.

My English teacher once called this book a "science-fiction" novel, and that was the first red flag I should have noticed. Science-fiction, in a literature class? What English teacher would allow such a thing? I thought they despised books that focused on ideas instead of character!

I soon learned that I had misread them entirely. It's not the focus on ideas that turns English majors off--it's optimism, and a sense that science and technology empower humanity and allow a brighter future. That's why "Cat's Cradle" is a book that they endorse. It goes beyond mere pessimism and dives into the abyss of nihilism.

From Kurt Vonnegut, we learn that science and technology will be the death of us all, that the military-industrial complex is a force that will develop any weapon for its own sake without regard for the consequences, and that the purpose of religion is to provide comforting lies.

These ideas are delivered through two plot devices--a substance called Ice-9, which converts water into solid form at room temperature, and an ideology called Bokononism. The former eventually--spoiler--kills almost all the world's population, and is supposed to be a parody of the atomic bomb. The latter is a religion whose adherants tell each other comforting lies. Leaving aside that doublethink is necessary for a lie to be comforting if the recipient of the lie is aware of its lack of truth, Bokononism fails as a parody of Christianity--Vonnegut's target--because the whole point of Christianity is that the adherants believe their ideology to be the truth! If an ideology is accepted to be a lie, why would anyone follow it? It is also an inherantly ugly ideology in that it provides no reason for one to exist. Even Marxism has some sort of bright ideal at the end of it to motivate its followers--Bokononism has nothing going for it.

As for Ice-9, its inherant flaw as a satirical concept is that it is a parody of a phenomenon that doesn't exist. The military-industrial complex would not develop an obviously self-destructive device--the fact that there are no Cobalt Bombs should be evidence enough of that. Before anyone counters this point with the Atomic and Hydrogen bombs, an atomic war is not inherantly a civilization-ending event. They're just big explosives in a small package--humanity no more can wipe itself and the earth's biosphere out with them than it can alter the earth's orbital path. Ice-9 is a wholly different concept, a device that can freeze all liquid water on earth, and, if one thinks on timescales of trillions of years, perhaps the entire galaxy. Its use in battle would inherantly destroy the one who wields it. There is no reason that any power would develop it.

Another flaw in this book is its lack of memorable characters. A character can be judged on his or her strength by how well one can remember them. Some authors write truly memorable characters--Allen Steele's William Tucker in "A King of Infinite Space," Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's Allen Carpentier in "Inferno," Henryk Sienkiewicz's entire cast of main characters in his Trilogy, to name but a few. In "Cat's Cradle," the only characters I can remember are that one midget (because I thought maybe the word "midget" was the source of that legendary Vonnegut humor) and the woman from Indiana who wants people to whom she is not related to call her "mom" (I remember her only because I tried to figure out what her mental disorder was for a while).

Bottom Line: The book's messages are that Science is Bad and Religion is Lies. If you believe that either of these statements are false, you'd be better off with just about any other writer (Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Jules Verne, if you're into Science Fiction. Otherwise, I can recommend Henryk Sienkiewicz). If you are an English major, this might be the book for you. It's depressing, cynical, and all the other things that make for those excessively-long papers that English professors love.
24 people found this helpful
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Litter box is more like it.

You either like Vonnegut or not. This is my second novel of his that I've read, and again, he comes across as misanthropic, plotless, and pseudo-philosophical. His characters are wooden and unlikeable. His chapters are usually one page long. His prose and dialogue are generally quite bad. He is not a comedian. If this is the published novel, one wonders what the first draft or brainstorm was like.

What drug was Vonnegut doing, when the Cold War made him think up "ice-nine?"

If Vonnegut wrote to get some message across, why didn't he write an essay or a short story? If he wrote a novel so that he could flesh out characters or tell some compelling story, then this is a utter failure.

If you want funny, read P.G. Wodehouse. If you want an anti-nuclear message, there are at least a dozen better short stories or novels by other authors. Some of them are near-masterpieces like Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains", Clarke's "The Curse", and Miller's "A Canticle for Liebowitz." If atheism is what floats your boat, read some atheistic philosopher because Vonnegut can't even go toe to toe with Elijah and the bears.
22 people found this helpful
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Unreal, boring, tedious

I picked up this book on audiobook because my library had it, and I heard it's a famous book, so I wanted to give it a shot. Audiobook by Caedmon, unabridged, 6 CDs (7 hrs), which also includes recordings of interviews with the author on the last disk. In addition, I borrowed the print version, just to compare notes, from Dial Press.

The title of the book "Cat's Cradle" is very indicative of what the story is like. It starts at a point where the protagonist (Jonah) is trying to write a book about the end of the world, which is actually about Felix Hoenniker, a brilliant but odd scientist who invented the atomic bomb. The protagonist says right away "I am a bokononist", which we later find out is something he becomes at the END of the book. So, it's unclear the order of the writing, which I think was done in purpose, like an infinity loop.

In the beginning Jonah is seeking interviews with people related to Hoeniker, and as he meets people they give him further suggestions of people to talk to and so on, and so on, so he's building a "web" of people (kind of how the strings look when playing the game). Then he goes to an Island, San Lorenzo, to meet Hoennikers children (who are middle aged adults now). On the island, he learns about a new religion, Bokononism, and he also learns about how lazy the people are, how they don't question anything, don't strive for anything, and don't like to fight. Throughout the book Vonnegut introduces words like "karass" and "bokonomatu" which are parts of the religion.

I found Cat's Cradle to be pretty boring. The interviews were boring. The island was dull. There was so much ridiculousness (ie making LOVE through feet), that it made the story obviously unbelievable and hard to relate to. There is just a lot of stuff that I found myself rolling my eyes at. I knew it couldn't be true, and I just felt it was all pointless, and couldn't wait for it to be over. It's just a completely looney story.

Can you say that the title of the book is correct? Is it a Cat's Cradle? Well, yes. You could draw lots of lines connecting people to other people, and to events. It's all messy and crazy just like the game. But is this book worth reading? No. I read Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5, and that was MUCH better! Worlds apart.

I did not like this book. I don't think it deserves critical acclaim. Further, it should be categorized as sci-fi or fantasy, bc none of the stuff would ever happen in real life.

My favorite part were the interviews with Vonnegut at the end of the book! haha
17 people found this helpful
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Disappointing and Mostly Lifeless

Slaughterhouse Five is one of my five favorite books ever. I keep trying to find something else from Vonnegut that exudes the same energy and necessity of that book. Cat's Cradle didn't do it for me. At the end of the day, the novel felt naked and didactic, like an excuse to shout a world-view. It felt self-indulgent to me.

There are a few areas in which a novel can excel in order to spark interest: plot, character, setting, and language/style. The Greatest Novel of All Time probably excels at all of those -- but I don't think that novel's been written yet. If a writer can nail two or three, it's probably worth reading. Heck, if you completely kill on one of those four, the novel will probably do well. For me, Cat's Cradle doesn't excel at any of the above.

The plot is thin -- and given that it's intended as comedy, that's to be expected. Still, there's no point at which the main character faces a Problem, battles with Complications, and then either succeeds or fails. Instead, the book's tension is based on withholding a mystery from the reader -- what's the deal with the ice and why does the author keep hinting at how important it is? It's not a very gripping source of tension and, from the standpoint of plot alone, there's no reason not to turn to the last ten pages of the book and see how it turns out. I don't feel like I would've missed out on key plot points by doing so.

Characters in this novel are thin and two-dimensional (if that). Again, this is meant to be a comedy, or a parable maybe, so stock characters may be called for. But by not having any actual depth or texture in the characters, character does not provide a reason to care about the novel. The characters come off as so subservient to the Message and are so devoid of reality, that their idiosyncrasies feel arbitrary and manipulative rather than interesting.

I'm guessing Cat's Cradle defenders would argue this point with me, but I found that the novel's setting was practically non-existent. At least, I didn't come away from the book feeling like I Was There. The eventual San Lorenzo is sparsely described and, as with the characters, seems entirely subservient to the Message. I don't feel like I get the sense of another actual place -- it felt like it was all happening on a sound stage. To a certain extent, the same could probably be said for Slaughterhouse Five -- except that with Slaughterhouse Five, well, first off there was, in fact, more attention to setting details, but also SH5 builds a landscape out of the minds of its author and protagonist. In Cat's Cradle, we get so little from the narrator in terms of his way of thinking, this doesn't happen. Maybe it should have.

Finally the writing and style of the novel -- well, it's the trademark Kurt Vonnegut style, except that he did it better elsewhere. There are no coy self-references like occurred in SH5, no cunning self-deprecation, no fierceness of joy in the absurdity of language and the novel format. It's just sort of jaunty and tossed-off and having read SH5 previously, the writing in CC felt like a weak and unremarkable shadow of what Vonnegut eventually accomplished.

As a result, I come away from Cat's Cradle feeling like I'd just read a thinly masked agenda story. And unless you already cling (heh) *religiously* to its message, there's not much fun to be had. In terms of communicative efficiency, it would've been more profound for Vonnegut to have simply written the sentence "People believe in and do stupid things, which is especially problematic when they have access to nuclear arsenals." I didn't find anything in the novel that conveyed any other idea of any significance. And frankly, that message itself seems pretty dull in the modern world, especially without a fresher lens through which to view it.

All that said, while I didn't enjoy the book overall, I appreciated its brevity (that's not meant entirely back-handedly -- short novels rarely overstay their welcomes). Also, it's a very easy read, and there's a lot to be said for a writing style that allows for that. Unfortunately, I didn't find enough else in this one to make me care.

(PS, I've read some of the negative reviews of the book that knock it for being cynical and pessimistic. Er -- it's *Kurt Vonnegut*, it's *supposed* to be cynical and pessimistic. Cynicism in a novel can be done very well and its presence doesn't degrade the work any more than optimism necessarily would.)
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Like zooming out

What a trip of a novel, I won't go as far as saying it will change your life but you may indeed think about various human institutions in ways you never have before upon its completion. Reading it was an experience, like living in a completely different culture or taking an acid trip. Its power is not so much in its storyline and plot but in the individual details. It's like seeing the world reflected in a funhouse mirror, except this bizarre rendering now shows you all the things about religion, science, groupthink etc. you never noticed before. What I love perhaps most is the fact that two people can read this book and walk away with completely different ideas of what this book is trying to do. You could interpret it as being pro-religion or anti-religion, pro-science or anti-science, because the truth is that it is none of these things. It just shows the flaws in our collective conceptions of religion or science, it does not demonize either in and of itself. Truly a remarkable read.
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If this is your first novel ever you might like it.

I bought this book because it was recommended as a great read that influenced the referrer's thinking. I can't see how that is even possible unless he's been sheltered his whole life and never had a deep thought about the world in his life. Maybe he has never read a good sci-fi book. Maybe it's his first novel and it really made him think differently. I don't know but the book isn't good.

Now let's get to the novel itself. As a stand alone story it's really bad and not interesting. The whole time I was reading it I was waiting for it to get good and it never really did. He's one of these authors that I feel people think they should like because they've been told to but he isn't that good, at least not in this book. I won't be buying any others either though.
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