Cat's Cradle

by Kurt Vonnegut
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Publish Date: August 31, 2010
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Overview

If any single novel of Kurt Vonnegut's can represent his unique voice and freewheeling imagination, it is probably the wildly funny and provocative Cat's Cradle, published in 1963. Though it might not be his most substantial or popular novel, Cat's Cradle is a perfect vehicle for his idiosyncratic style and his kaleidoscopic view of the modern world.

The story unfolds from the point of view of a narrator, who, in preparing to write a book, wants to know what some famous Americans were up to the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. He learns that, on that very day, Dr. Felix Hoenikker - an absent-minded professor who was the erstwhile "father of the atomic bomb" - was uncharacteristically playing with string, making a cat's cradle and terrifying his young son by showing the boy his creation and speaking to him for the first time. Years later, the grown-up Hoenikker children are the key to what follows, possessing as they do the only example of their father's last discovery, a potentially destructive kind of super-ice called "ice-nine."

Cat's Cradle is a wild, hurtling apocalyptic tale that satirizes, among many other things, the blithe indifference and goofiness of the people who populate the nuclear science community. The story travels from the home turf of Vonnegut's imagination - Ilium, N.Y. - to a Caribbean banana republic where an illicit religion called Bokononism is practiced, as a sense of doom (in the form of ice-nine) overtakes mankind. The New York Times perhaps said it best in describing Cat's Cradle as "a freewheeling vehicle ... an unforgettable ride." |||This book is sold in the US by Sony Electronics Inc. |||This book is sold in Canada by Sony Electronics Inc.

Author Information

Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) is perhaps the most beloved American writer of the 20th century. His audience has built steadily since his first pieces in the 1950's. Vonnegut's 1968 novel, SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE has become a canonic war novel - with Joseph Heller's CATCH-22 the truest and darkest of all to have come from World War II. Vonnegut began as a science fiction writer and his early novels PLAYER PIANO and THE SIRENS OF TITAN were so categorized even as they appealed to a young audience far beyond science fiction readers. In the 1960's he became the writer most identified with the Baby Boomer generation. Like the novels of Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut's large body of work is now understood as unified. There is a consistency to his satirical insight, humor and anger which makes his work synergistic. The more of Kurt Vonnegut's work you read, the more the work resonates and the more you wish to read. Vonnegut's reputation - like Twain's - will grow steadily through the decades to come as his work grows in relevance, truthfulness and searing insight.

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