bagombo snuff box

i recently finished reading kurt vonnegut's short story collection bagombo snuff box. it sucked. bad. i picked the book up at the salvation army - $1.50 for hardbacks, can't beat it. the stories are some of vonnegut's earliest publications, written for weekly magazines in the years before he started writing novels.

half of the stories in this book are really bad. they have the same boring plot: a stranger or someone that has been a way for a while comes to town. things seem great at first then it becomes clear that something isn't quite right. it's quite a mystery to the characters; i figured it out instantly almost every time. the characters carry on, wondering what is wrong but never really trying to figure it out. then the story ends with the non-surprise revelation that is often even less exciting that the one i had imagined. bleh.

about a quarter of the stories are about some highschool marching band leader that is obsessed with winning local band competitions. these stories aren't very good either, but hold more interest because the character of the band leader develops over the course of the stories. but in the end they get a bleh as well.

the rest of the stories are fairly original. the plots and characters themselves are still pretty lame, but they have interesting and imaginative settings. the best one, titled 2br02b, is set in a future in which all diseases have been cured and people no longer age. population growth is kept at an absolute zero by a law that requires anyone having children to find volunteers willing to die. such a great setup. too bad the story itself failed to explore it well. bleh for wasted potential.

at the end of the book there is a short note from vonnegut that is refreshingly honest. he admits that the stories aren't very good, don't make good use of the potential that is there and would not get published these days. i found this to be the best part of the book. he admits that at the time he wrote them these stories were just a way to make money, not part of some career goal of becoming a fulltime writer. so he wrote these crap stories to make money in his youth and now he's making more money repackaging and reselling the crap now, knowing that his name alone will sell it. awesome.

the few decent stories scattered among the crap kept me reading it. i was hoping for just one story that would be outstanding or great, near the end i was hoping just for good. but it never happened. having finished it i can say that i regret not giving up after the third obvious and boring story. at least i didn't pay the $25 cover price. i'd probably really hate it then.