Bagombo Snuff Box

June 28, 1999
In an amiable and lengthy introduction read by the author, Vonnegut sounds downright aged, undeniably wise and a bit wistful, conjuring up the time of his early writing career when he wrote these previously uncollected short stories for magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post and Argosy. Sparks of his youthful, mischievous humor soon break through, as he describes his time working first as a PR man for General Electric, then as a journeyman magazine writer. "Thanasphere," a SF outing about an astronaut who hears the voices of dead spirits in space, mocks Cold War-era scientists who were "amazed at nothing." Likewise, "To Be or Not to Be," with its future-view of enforced population control, shows Utopian ideals gone awry. Read in sensitive tones by Marshall (an actor who has narrated parts for animated series on TV), the stories' sly moods seem to build on their own. Based on the 1999 Putnam hardcover.

April 15, 2000
Last year Vonnegut distressed his fans by saying that Timequake was his final book. The unexpected appearance of Bagombo Snuff Box this year is therefore a welcome surprise. However, it should be understood that this book contains no new fiction; it's a collection of stories that haven't seen the light of day since Vonnegut published them in early 1950s magazines. Their not being reprinted sooner says something about them--most simply aren't very good. When they start to develop interesting ideas, they tend to end abruptly and pointlessly. As a group, they're little more than curious relics revealing little of what makes Vonnegut's later work special. If anyone other than Vonnegut had written them, this book wouldn't draw flies. However, he did write them, and that means the book will draw library patrons aplenty. Alexander Marshall's reading is service able, but the real treat in this abridged audio edition is the author himself; he narrates his own lengthy, and often revealing, introduction and afterword. His reading alone is worth the price of admission, and it makes this an almost obligatory purchase for libraries catering to his readers.--R. Kent Rasmussen, Thousand Oaks, CA

Copyright 2000 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 2, 1999
Any new book by Vonnegut, especially since he has vowed to retire from literature, will be welcomed by his fans. But as the author himself says in his introduction, these 23 apprenticeship stories "were expected to be among the living about as long as individual lightning bugs," and they will be of most interest to completists and scholars. Vonnegut's best short stories from the '50s were collected in Welcome to the Monkey House. Those in this collection for the most part work humbly with formulas dear to mid-century middlebrow magazines like Colliers. Included are tales like "The No-Talent Kid" and "The Boy Who Hated Girls," both featuring a genial bandmaster named George Helmholtz, who has to deal with misfit high school boys while dreaming of owning a seven-foot-tall drum. In "Thanasphere," Vonnegut tries out a sci-fi theme--a man is sent into space in a rocket and discovers that space is full of the voices of the dead. In a short, ironic piece, "Der Arme Dolmetscher," a soldier who recites a line from Heine's "Die Lorelei" that he has learned by rote is assumed to "talk Kraut" by a bungling officer. Pressed into service as a translator, he acquires just enough of the language to help his detachment surrender in the Battle of the Bulge. The title story concerns a man who visits his ex-wife and feeds her a cock-and-bull story about being an adventurer. In "Runaways," two teenagers realize that love is not enough to get married on, gently deflating the myth of the then-incipient youth culture long before the Summer of Love. Vonnegut's afterword, "Coda to My Career as a Writer for Periodicals," comments in his trademark style about his midwestern origins and the vagaries of writing for magazines. BOMC featured alternate.