This was from David (inscription: "Finally, I get you a book") and, of all the people who are at all likely to be giving me books, he is/was, in retrospect (that is, having read Cat's Cradle), by far the most likely to've given me this one, I reckon.
Reminded me of nothing so much as a less dense Pynchon (who, incidentally, has a new book in the works - much excitement...must get round to finally reading Mason & Dixon some time soon) - that same sense of screwball alarums wrapped up in textual puzzles and enigmas and inextricability,[*] of a cynical vision touched by an unsettling and sometimes shocking but nonetheless humane (or at least human) humour, of an author (text) engaged in mapping out and showing us How The World Is, of a voice and narrative that is at once smart (in the sense of both 'clever/intelligent' and 'wise-cracking'), acerbic and clear-sighted, all seeming more to unspool (or 'ramify', or something) than simply to develop or go forward.
Also, it's funny and acute and maybe a little bit wise, and it's about the end of the world.
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[*] Consider the framing device - the "tentative tangling of tendrils" in which the narrator offers his Bokononist warning about lies. (Never mind the opening epigraph, renewing the old problem of the Cretan - "Nothing in this book is true".) Accept for a moment that the narrator 'really' is a Bokononist; in this case, there's no reason to think that anything else he recounts in the book is true. But, he tells us, something useful can be founded on lies, and that's surely how we must take Cat's Cradle. Is Vonnegut a Bokononist? It's probably as good a term as any.
