Just learned of the passing yesterday of American novelist Kurt Vonnegut, at age 84 . Like many of my ilk (US-educated Trinidadian of a certain age?), I had my Vonnegut phase. It’s been ages since I’ve read him, but I loved (perhaps still love) his off-the-wall imagination, the dark nuttiness of the world his characters lived in. A friend and I even had a long-running joke where I’d send postcards to her from various parts of the world signed “Larry, Curly, Moe and Kilgore Trout.”

Some years ago, Vonnegut, who was noted for his clear, simple, prose, was one of the spokesmen for a plain English campaign; the ads used to run in places like the New Yorker. I’ll never forget the cartoon that was part of the Vonnegut ad. Two figures, one a speaker of the “jargonese” the campaign was meant to combat, the other a user of plain English. The jargonese-user was saying something like, “The biota exhibted an 100% mortality response,” which the plain English user translated as, “All the fish died.” As someone who fell — very briefly — under the sway of Post-structuralism and witnessed with great dismay the havoc it wrought upon academic writing; and as someone who has has worked on publications for organisations which believe that language is best used as a big stick, an obscurer of meaning, this summed up much of what I feel about writing. It may not even have been Vonnegut’s own idea, but it sounds like something he might have conjured up.

Vonnegut didn’t have an easy life, but he worked hard, continued writing articles when he had no novels left in him, and it doesn’t sound like he complained much. He sounds like someone who truly deserves to rest in peace.

Technorati Tags: literature, books, kurt vonnegut, reading, writing