solid book. rlly slay. kurt vonnegut my anti capitalist beloved. it is very true: most humans have no “purpose,” from the very rich to the middle class to the very poor. and that makes us all want to kill ourselves. yet we keep living regardless. 

world war two did a number on humans and on kurt vonnegut. i dont believe in war of course, but i think the lack of another great war is the reason so many modern americans have gone braindead. they have not seen or refuse to learn about the atrocities of humans against humans. and instead live blindly in the crumbling american democracy and capitalist system.

in the same vein as “do we need a pandemic to dwindle our population?”, do we need another extremely violent and traumatic generational event to create change in our country and our world? perhaps

some things i didnt enjoy as much were the women characters and how they were mostly all hysterical. all of them did the “wrong” thing and the subtext or sometimes just the text argued, besides for arguably sylvia, that they were stupid or entitled. so that kind of sucks. even sylvia who wasnt stupid still did the “wrong” thing by not going back to eliot. played on a lot of women stereotypes 👎👎👎. 

another thing i didnt love was that all the poor people of rosewater were “stupid,” with almost no exceptions? maybe that was the exaggeration parody of it all, and the point is that even if people are incredibly useless and dumb, you need to love them anyway. but i would have enjoyed at least one or two examples of non-rosewater rosewater residents that werent dumb. cuz like, just bc ppl r poor doesnt mean theyre stupid, obviously, and i think the perpetuation of that idea, even ironically, can be damaging.