First thoughts on Cat's Cradle

I am almost halfway through this book even though I haven't had much time to read thus far this week. It's fairly short and an easy read. I fear Vonnegut is seeding the story with clues and references I should be picking up but aren't. This is, alas, fairly typical of my experience of literature.


I looked up Fata Morgana just like the narrator of the book did and it is a real thing. It refers to "an unusual and very complex form of mirage" and is caused by the phenomenon of atmospheric ducting where warm air is above a layer of cooler air closer to the ground. Usually, the situation is reversed hence the relative rarity of the phenomenon. It is indeed derived etymologically from Morgan LeFay. There were legends that there were sirens around Sicily who lured sailors to their deaths. Vonnegut made such a point of mentioning and defining this in reference to Frank's first impression of San Lorenzo, there must be some literary purpose at work.

I understand why I made it 41 years without having a clue as to what this book is about other than something something ice-nine. I can't even really describe it. I do like it, I just feel like I'm too literal and missing symbols and repetitions of themes everyone else is getting-I see myself reading the SparkNotes when I'm done just to get as equal amount out of the book.  Definite foreshadowing. All the water references are significant I assume (Bokonon and his love of boats, the narrator saying he should be called Jonah in the first lines, Bokonon as "a fish pitched up by an angry sea", the continuing reminders that the three Hoenikker children have ice-nine in their thermos jugs as they were travelling over water-but only Frank is a "son of a bitch" for having it, all the musing about Bokononism and fate and how the Hoenikker children are in the narrator's karass.)

I like the chapter titles. They are like the little spoiler still-frames on NCIS after commercial breaks. Here is a smattering of lines I liked:

Of these fourteen hundred [conscripted laborers on San Lorenzo], about half are said to have been executed in public for substandard zeal.

 When McCabe and Johnson arrived [on San Lorenzo] in 1922 and announced that they were placing themselves in charge, Castle Sugar withdrew flaccidly, as though from a queasy dream.

 Dr. Breed [are we supposed to dislike him because I really like him thus far] on hearing a secretary refer to a science exhibit as "magic": "I am sorry to hear a member of the Laboratory family use that brackish, medieval word."

 "I guess Americans are hated a lot of places"
[Ambassador Hinton on his wife's letter to the NYT that got him called before the HUAC and fired]: People are hated a lot of places. Claire pointed out in her letter that Americans, in being hated, were simply paying the normal penalty for being people and that they were foolish to think they should somehow be exempted from that penalty. 

"Never index your own book."  [Claire Hinton, former professional indexer. This makes me feel like I did when I read the description of the protagonist's job in Bright Lights, Big City as a fact-checker for a New Yorker-ish magazine: WANT this job.]


"Pay no attention to Caesar. Caesar doesn't have the slightest idea what's really going on." [Bokonon's version of the "render to Caesar" quote]