SO IT GOES

LAUGHTER OVER TEARS, VONNEGUT WAS ACQUAINTED WITH LIFE'S PAIN AND LOSS

Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time

Cast: Kurt Vonnegut,

Robert B. Weide Director: Robert B. Weide,

Don Argott Duration: 2 h 7 m Available: At the Hot Docs

Ted Rogers Cinema

Filmmaker Robert Weide spent almost 40 years making a documentary about the life (and, as of 2007, the death). of writer Kurt Vonnegut. In the process, he gained a friend. In the early years of the project, he feared the friendship might hurt the film. By the end, the reverse troubled him. But both seemed to have survived, intact, at last. Here are five things we learned from Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time:

❚ Like a lot of writers, he started early

In Shortridge High School in Indianapolis, a young Vonnegut worked on the student newspaper, where he says he learned to “be clear and don't bluff, say as much as possible as quickly as possible.” It's a technique that continued in his novels: “I give away the big secrets on the first page and tell people exactly what's going to happen.”

❚ The Second World War affected him deeply

Vonnegut fought overseas, was captured by the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge and spent time in a PoW camp in Dresden. When Allied firebombing levelled that city, he was made to excavate bodies from the rubble. Many of these experiences shaped his most famous novel, Slaughterhouse-Five.

❚ He didn't have much success outside of being a novelist

Vonnegut once owned a Saab dealership that went bankrupt within a year. He quit his job as a publicist for General Electric after being troubled by the notion of machines taking people's jobs, a theme he used in his first novel, Player Piano. He left a job at Sports Illustrated after submitting a story about a runaway horse condensed to a single short sentence, including an expletive.

❚ His family grew quickly

In 1958, Vonnegut's sister died of cancer, two days after her husband died in a train crash. Vonnegut and his wife Jane took in their four sons, plus two dogs and a rabbit. The couple already had three children of their own.

❚ He was ... complicated

Vonnegut's daughter Nanette says he laughs at the most inappropriate times, and we see a bit of that in the film. He says he prefers laughter to crying because there's less cleanup afterward. “Also, it's faster to shut it down.” And he could be philosophical in fewer words than many of us use to give directions to a café. His most famous quotation, repeated 100 times in Slaughterhouse-Five until it becomes a kind of mantra, a bulwark against the pain and loss that life inflicts upon us: “So it goes.” ★★★