by Kurt Vonnegut

“I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.”

What a wonderful, obscenely funny, and quirky overlooked sci-fi classic this novel was. As slow as I was to get through it, there was hardly a moment I didn’t want to read it; I just never found the time. This will be my last review for the 2023 reading list as I never caught up with doing the others, and this has been the most memorable one in recent months for me. Sorry John Green, my thoughts on The Fault in Our Stars will have to wait another day. And just as you make an exception for the Mongols, you must accept this exception for Mr. Vonnegut, as I am sure you would oblige.

The Sirens of Titan could have been written yesteryear. The comedy woven into the novel is obvious and yet hidden. If you read it a certain way, it seems like a serious allegory about human selfishness, free will, and the search for the “meaning of life.” On the other hand, read it in another way, it becomes an exaggeration of these themes, but with a dry, direct delivery. That is what is called sarcasm. However you do read it, it’s both funny and deep. Trivial and existential.

I have never laughed so hard at a book before. I found the decimation of the Martian army to be one of the funniest sequences of total destruction ever. At 3 am, in the Detroit Airport, I had to hide my face behind the book for about 4 solid minutes, taking short breaks between laughing fits to read a little more. That only further sent me into early morning public hysteria. I do wonder what the people sitting across from me were wondering what I was laughing at. To include one of my favorite lines from the book:

The official estimate of the number of thermo-nuclear anti-aircraft rockets fired at the Martian armada is 2,542,670. The actual number of rockets fired is of little interest when one can express the power of that barrage in another way, in a way that happens to be both poetry and truth. The barrage turned the skies of Earth from heavenly blue to a hellish burnt orange. The skies remained burnt orange for a year and a half.

I bet the Texas Longhorns were happy with the color of the sky, but maybe for only a day or so. The writing of this section reads like an Onion article, taking itself seriously only when the reader doesn’t know it’s the Onion. When Vonnegut combines poetry and truth, you get the word choices of barrage and hellish.

But his book, however sarcastic it is, is also very touching. It pins a question to a bulletin board about free will and excess of power. Malachi Constant, our protagonist, went from lucky and successful billionaire to Martian slave and Mercurian castaway to the Messiah for the Church of the God of the Utterly Indifferent. When humans, stripped away from their knowledge of their past, can still come to the conclusion that:

“A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”

I give The Sirens of Titan five out of five stars.