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By Shweta Shah, 9/14/2013 7:55:36 AM
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"THE COMPLICATED FUTILITY OF IGNORANCE.
OK. I ADMIT IT. IT REALLY WAS A WHOREHOUSE.
I’D LAUGH LIKE HELL.
EXCREMENT HIT THE CEILING."
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According to Oxford dictionary,
hocus-pocus
noun
•meaningless talk or activity, typically designed to trick someone or conceal the truth of a situation
•US deception; trickery.
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It’s the story of Eugene Gene Debs, a Vietnam War veteran who becomes a Professor and later, is accused of masterminding a prison break. He writes this book while awaiting his trial, on pieces of papers and the narrative is like snippets stitched together.
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Just like this. Smug.
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Kurt Wanna-gut gives you guts churning episodes in his book Hocus Pocus. A Black escaped convict is shot while ice skating. A Japanese Warden recollects the bombing of Hiroshima. The story ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Tralfamadore’ is a biting piece of satire in the book which attacks the state of planet.
History -facts and opinions and episodes- and anecdotes are interwoven together in the book, giving us a patched and tattered flag of humanity in the mid-20th Century. Vonnegut adds a smattering of quotations from Shakespeare in an almost irreverent manner. He plays around with numbers too.
And lists. Debs makes two lists: people he killed and women he has made love to. I’d like to make a list of similes used by Vonnegut which gives us a glimpse into his imaginative mind. So helicopters are human pterodactyls, World War II is Finale Rack, Homecoming from the Vitenam war is like coming out of a stuck-up lift and “the noise of artillery shells is our tune”, in words of Jack Patton. Every time I read one such comparison; I closed the book, closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Easy.
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Americans were after body counts in the Vietnam war. Japanese in the futuristic (no more) 2001(the book was written in 1990) are after dollar. I ask you, what’s common between war and economy? They make people …bleed.
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The feel of this anti-war book is morbid: there are wars, suicides, madness but the narrative never lets you out of the grip. The book is anti-TV, anti-government, anti-Capitalist cronies, anti-religion, anti-racism.
Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the Universe.
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Still taking that one-way-trip to Mars, are you?
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Reviews posted for
Hocus Pocus
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