Kurt Vonnegut-Autobiographical collage. Gift book bound in leather

"Palm Sunday" is a truly unique work. This is a striking, whimsical and artful mosaic of episodes, funny and sad, which Vonnegut himself called an "autobiographical collage". Childhood, youth, war, captivity, the joy of marriage and fatherhood, a catastrophe, a new take — off-memories that the writer shuffles like a deck of cards, easily and almost casually. And against the background of all these sketches from his life, the "cursed question" that tormented Vonnegut all his life clearly emerges — what saves a person from loneliness and gives meaning to life?..

"Fates are worse than death"

In the photo taken by Jill Kremenz (my wife), you see me with the outstanding German writer Heinrich Bell (who, like me, as well as Norman Mailer, James Jones and Gore Vidal, was once an infantry private). We are looking out of the windows of a tourist bus in Stockholm, where we were invited in 1973 to the congress of the international writers ' organization PEN Club. I told Bell about a German veteran of the Second World War (and now a carpenter, whom I met at Cape Cod): he shot himself in the thigh to avoid getting to the Eastern Front, only the wound was healed even before he was taken to the hospital.