Slaughterhouse-Five

My first impressions of this book are a huge sigh of relief. After reading Mumbo Jumbo I have to say that this style of clear sentence structure will not be taken for granted. I can truly say that I enjoy reading this book. It's topic is one of very serious ramifications but at the same time Vonnegut mixes in humor which I appreciate. One thing I did notice is the repetition of things in the novel. When ever Vonnegut wrote "I am Yon Yonsin from Wisconsin" I was immediately sent back into the novel Fight Club in the way that the narrator often repeats "I am Jacks ____". Along with this comes the "So it goes" every time somebody dies.
Vonnegut's connection with history is very interesting. On the very cover page there is a veritable cornucopia of contradiction. He goes straight from talking about the validity of his novels to UFO's. The narrator seems to want to represent the war as truly as he can but does not want to make any claims of 100% accuracy. This puts Vonnegut in a comfortable position because nobody is going to be questioning every word he writes but at the same time the novel will have much more weight than a normal work of fiction; "he was there". I also want to note the strange way that Vonnegut keeps on saying the novel that we are reading is crappy and a flop. It is very strange to read about the very book you are reading as being an enormous failure when you know for a fact that it is not. These various things about the book have me very excited to read on, and I hope that it lives up to it's introduction.

Postmodernism strikes again...

After finishing Mumbo Jumbo I had a pretty big moment of clairvoyance. My first blog post was all about how confused I was by the book and all of it's small anachronisms, spelling "errors", and general non clear writing style. Now obviously, the book didn't remain an extremely confusing bunch of mumbo jumbo and I did get used to the writing style. The chapters about the egyptian story were especially an example of when I was fully grasping the things the books were saying. Anyways, the moment of clairvoyance that I had was that all of this was confusion and non traditionalism was quite intentional and an absolutely perfect example of postmodernism; I term I have strangely neglected to describe Mumbo Jumbo as up until now. But it all makes sense, from the first page Reed breaks all of the rules. Mumbo Jumbo is in every way a postmodernist novel. He doesn't use "proper" english, he doesn't spell out numbers instead using characters, and even when recreating a historical event he doesn't change the voice of the people who seem to talk in the same exact way that everyone else in the book talks. Another example of how non modernist this book is can be seen in the random pictures strewn about the novel. Some of which can be drawn to some relation to the text but most of which have no apparent relation whatsoever. This is heavily reinforced for me because in the first edition of the book, all of the pictures are completely different, which leads me to believe that the pictures don't hold too much meaning within them. Everything that Reed does seems to be postmodern because everything he does is not at all what would be expected of a novel. Mumbo Jumbo does not follow any of the rules that we have set for novels.

Mumbo Jumbo is a bunch of mumbo jumbo to me

I'm going to be honest here, the first part of Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed has been quite confusing to me. The reason for this may just be that my reading level is not as high as I once thought or just that we went straight from reading Ragtime to this book. Ragtime was about as clear cut a book can get. There weren't many points where I was confused as to what was actually happening in the narrative because it was written in a very clear, history book kind of voice. 
Mumbo Jumbo on the other hand starts out with the first chapter on the first page. Sounds reasonable enough but I really mean the first page; before all of the publication information which comes right after the first chapter. I don't know why this through me off but it did. Along with Reed's use of numbers. He often, but not always, replaces the word one with the character 1. Even when he isn't referring to the number one (which ideally would still be typed out). I always thought this writing style was something that was born with the age of computers and the instant gratification of texting (and texting abbreviations); but this book was published in 1972. 
I know these little alterations have no actual impact on the information being conveyed but it was these little things that made me do a double take and frankly annoyed me. Every book I have ever read was different than this so it is hard to suddenly switch. Hopefully I have an easier time with the rest of the book now that I am used to this style of writing.