TL:DR;
Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan is just outside the fringes of what I normally like to read, and I found myself walking away from the book with a slightly muddled sense of satisfaction. The book left me with plenty of things to think about: human nature and certain philosophies being chief among them. Vonnegut does an excellent job building and shaping his characters. Malachi Constant, Beatrice Rumfoord and Winston Niles Rumfoord all felt very real to me and evoked a wide range of emotions over the course of the book.
The story is interesting and compelling as well; however, I did find the beginning of the book to be very bland and a bit off putting (I did later come to see the necessity of the beginning, but that did not make it anymore interesting to read while I was reading it.) Ultimately, I enjoyed the book and I would encourage people to read it, but I would only actively recommend this book to specific readers. If you want to explore human nature, follow one man on his quest for the meaning of life, or experience a small taste of just how indifferent and large the galaxy really is, I would highly recommend this book. If you’re looking for space battles, high action, or physical conflicts, I’d suggest you look elsewhere.
The Bad:
1. I felt the beginning of the book was weak. Vonnegut's writing struck me as somewhat circular and sometimes a bit wordy (this problem cleared up later. I’m not sure if I just got used to the style, or it slowly evaporated). I also had very little interest in the characters and found the story itself slow. The reasoning for this is revealed later in the book, but that doesn’t excuse having a blunt hook at the start of the story.
The Good:
1. Once you get past the slow hump in the beginning, the characters become quite interesting and develop real personalities of their own. There are times at which you’ll loathe Constant, pity him, empathize with him, and be happy for him. Vonnegut’s depiction of the sad isolation and creeping depression that Constant deals with really reverberated with me. The same goes for many of the other characters, despite their initial two dimensional presentations they all prove themselves to be multi-faceted gems by the end of the book.
2. The story. Again, once you crest the hill that is the beginning of the book, the story really picks up. After the main characters leave Earth and make for Mars (as prophesied by William Niles Rumfoord) things become really interesting, and Vonnegut’s story telling really begins to shine. Vonnegut's thematic elements shine brightly throughout the entire story as well, which gave me a deeper appreciation for the situations that Vonnegut penned.
The Meh:
1. You’re going to need a little background information to understand this gripe. My editor girlfriend loves, loves, loves semicolons. She loves semicolons an almost inordinate amount. She gets excited when she gets to edit one into something. So I used to love to tease her with this Vonnegut quote.
“Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.”
Upon reading some of his work, that quote makes Vonnegut seem like a hypocrite to me. I do not recall coming across any semicolons; however, I came across quite a few words that I had to stop and look up.
Synopsis:
Winston Niles Rumfoord and his dog, Kazak, are chronosynclastically infundibulated, and every fifty nine days he materializes for a period of hours at his home on the planet Earth. The materializations have always been a private event, until one day Malachi Constant is invited to witness and partake in one of Rumfoord’s materializations. Since he is infundibulated, Rumfoord knows many things, specifically he knows that Constant will travel to Mars, then Mercury, back to Earth again, and then finally on to one of Saturn’s Moons, Titan. Of course Constant doesn’t believe him and leaves the materialization shortly after it ends. It doesn’t take long to discover the first of Rumfoord’s predictions to be true. With each new planet, we explore a new side of Malachi Constant and discover just how little the universe really cares.
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| Slaughterhouse-Five | Cat’s Cradle | Breakfast of Champions | Mother Night | God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater | Welcome to the Monkey House | |
| “[A] desperate, painfully honest attempt to confront the monstrous crimes of the twentieth century” (Time). | “A free-wheeling vehicle . . . an unforgettable ride!”—The New York Times | “Marvelous . . . [Vonnegut] wheels out all the complaints about America and makes them seem fresh, funny, outrageous, hateful and lovable.”—The New York Times | “Vonnegut is George Orwell, Dr. Caligari and Flash Gordon compounded into one writer . . . a zany but moral mad scientist.”—Time | “[Vonnegut] at his wildest best.”—The New York Times Book Review | A collection of Kurt Vonnegut’s shorter works. “There are twenty-five stories here, and each hits a nerve ending.”—The Charlotte Observer |
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A Beautiful Siren Song, But No Depth: Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens Of Titan
Reviewed in the United States on July 12, 2022
This one should have been a home run. I love Kurt Vonnegut’s writing, and one of his novels, Cat’s Cradle, has made a huge impact on my own writing. I eagerly purchased this book because of several glowing reviews from friends on FaceBook. “It’s pure science fiction!” they told me. “You will love it!” So when I finally had the book in my hands and started to flip through the pages, I was expecting greatness. What I found instead was a story that never connected. It was like having a luxury room at a beach-side hotel, with an over-sized picture window that is covered by a curtain. You know there’s something special waiting on the other side, but you can’t see it with the drapes in the way. That’s how this novel went from me. I kept waiting for that big connection, that rush of insight into Vonnegut’s characters and the world he was building, and it never came. There was an incredible amount of build-up, manufactured quotes that opened each chapter, a story about a business tycoon and a soldier on Mars, and it all led nowhere. All smarm, no substance. In the end the main character remembers nothing, and that was as close as we came to a meeting of the minds. After over 300 pages there wasn’t a single thing that stood out to me that had happened in the story. The words just swept over me, beautiful at times, but never meaningful enough to draw me in.
Reviewed in the United States on July 12, 2022
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Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 12, 2022
So when I finally had the book in my hands and started to flip through the pages, I was expecting greatness. What I found instead was a story that never connected. It was like having a luxury room at a beach-side hotel, with an over-sized picture window that is covered by a curtain. You know there’s something special waiting on the other side, but you can’t see it with the drapes in the way.
That’s how this novel went from me. I kept waiting for that big connection, that rush of insight into Vonnegut’s characters and the world he was building, and it never came. There was an incredible amount of build-up, manufactured quotes that opened each chapter, a story about a business tycoon and a soldier on Mars, and it all led nowhere. All smarm, no substance.
In the end the main character remembers nothing, and that was as close as we came to a meeting of the minds. After over 300 pages there wasn’t a single thing that stood out to me that had happened in the story. The words just swept over me, beautiful at times, but never meaningful enough to draw me in.
A Beautiful Siren Song, But No Depth: Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens Of Titan
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 12, 2022
This one should have been a home run. I love Kurt Vonnegut’s writing, and one of his novels, Cat’s Cradle, has made a huge impact on my own writing. I eagerly purchased this book because of several glowing reviews from friends on FaceBook. “It’s pure science fiction!” they told me. “You will love it!”Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 12, 2022
So when I finally had the book in my hands and started to flip through the pages, I was expecting greatness. What I found instead was a story that never connected. It was like having a luxury room at a beach-side hotel, with an over-sized picture window that is covered by a curtain. You know there’s something special waiting on the other side, but you can’t see it with the drapes in the way.
That’s how this novel went from me. I kept waiting for that big connection, that rush of insight into Vonnegut’s characters and the world he was building, and it never came. There was an incredible amount of build-up, manufactured quotes that opened each chapter, a story about a business tycoon and a soldier on Mars, and it all led nowhere. All smarm, no substance.
In the end the main character remembers nothing, and that was as close as we came to a meeting of the minds. After over 300 pages there wasn’t a single thing that stood out to me that had happened in the story. The words just swept over me, beautiful at times, but never meaningful enough to draw me in.
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