NP but Rushdie on Vonnegut

[Thomas Eckhardt]

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/what-kurt-vonneguts-slaughterhouse-five-tells-us-now


Amongst many other interesting observations -- the Vonnegutian origin of a 
key event in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", for example -- Rushdie 
in passing addresses a question which is relevant to Pynchon and has also 
been tackled by Coetzee in "Elizabeth Costello":

"One of the great questions that faces all writers who have to deal with 
atrocity is, is it possible to do it? Are there things so powerful, so 
dreadful, that they are beyond the power of literature to describe? Every 
writer who faced the challenge of writing about the Second World War—and the 
Vietnam War, in fact—has had to think about that question. All of them 
decided they needed to come at the atrocity at an angle, so to speak, not to 
face it head on, because to do that would be unbearable."