Chamblee54

It was an unproductive visit to the Chamblee library. PG looked in the new books, the Georgia history, the A fiction, and the R fiction. He trolled the biographies, and back across the lounge of newspaper readers for another hopeful look through the fiction. Finally, he went to the V fiction. On the bottom row of a shelf, within the reach of small children, was Kurt Vonnegut. A book with the unlikely title Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction cried out “Take me home. Cat’s Cradle has a superiority complex that is highly annoying”. PG sighed, shifted the book into his left hand, and headed to the checkout machine.
BSB is a collection of short stories. Mr. Vonnegut (he did not have a middle name) came of age at a time when magazines were thriving, and published short stories. You could make a living doing it. BSB follows the tradition of selling anything you can find by an artist who has become marketable.
The stories are short, and fun to read. None of them tell a country song, even if country songs tell a story. A bartender could knock one out on his bus ride to work, and put the Saturday Evening Post back in his bag. The Norman Rockwell painting approved. Live goes on in Ilium, New York.
A high school bandleader named George Helmholtz makes a number of appearances. Joe Bane, a pawnbroker, turns down a chance to buy a watch Adolf Hitler gave the watch to a Nazi General, before it was stolen by an American POW. In the title story, Eddie Laird gives an old gf a priceless trinket, and she believes the lie. At no time is the phrase and so it goes used.
Some of the stories are not pleasant. 2 B R 0 2 B is about a future where old age and disease are conquered, and the people miss them. As link followers might guess, the tale is available for purchase as a stand alone book. PG tried to be fair, and listened to 8:43 of a audio version of the story, before shutting the tale down in dismay. Nor were amazon reviewers amused.
Should be sold in a collectionJanuary 22, 2011 W. L. LaCroix (Montana)
This is too short to sell separately.
You’re screwing people selling it stand-alone. I’m sure Kurt is rolling in his grave.
Waste of money July 19, 2010 Marty
I’m a big Vonegut fan, but I think this was designed to sucker us in to buying it.
I could swear I read this story in some other collection.
There was only one reviewer at amazon to give BSB one star.
Too good to be trueSeptember 25, 1999 jeffatbdi@aol.com (Southern California)
What a disappointment. KV must need money; it’s the only reason I can see for dragging out this last load of early fluff. It’s not hard to understand why these stories were uncollected up to now. They are all pre-enlightenment Vonnegut and, if you’re a fan of his unique view of the cosmos as expressed in his deep and witty novels, you’re in for a letdown. These stories are a chore to read—some don’t even have endings; they just stop, a bit like KV’s writing career. I heard him tell an interviewer that he’s run out of things to say.
No unfiltered Pell Mell cigarettes were harmed during the writing of this book report.