Matadero Cinco

Kurt Vonnegut wanted to write a novel about the war. But he had two problems. The first, which made him return to what he had suffered: he survived the bombing of Dresden, the bloodiest of World War II, and was made a prisoner of war. The second, that he was terrified that they would take the story to the cinema (as a good friend of hers had warned him that it would happen) and that it was played by a great star, a very macho actor, and the children would also want to go to war and wars are not they will never end. But he wrote that novel, and he promised himself that it would be different from all the others. That he would speak of "the children's crusade". And that in her there would be fear and laughter and time travel and tenderness and amazement and surprise and fragility. And that novel became the great antiwar novel of all time. In the emblem of the sixties counterculture. In one of the greatest classics of American fiction. In this book that the reader now holds, in which Vonnegut's scared and laughing heart beats inside a bombed bunker and also the childish (and pretty) promise that there will be no more wars.