Here's another posthumous collection, but this time without anything which has already seen print. It's short fiction, and I get the impression most of it must surely date from before Player Piano, or was at least written around the same time. Many of the stories are drawn from life to greater or lesser degrees, particularly Vonnegut's experience of the Second World War. As you may be aware, Vonnegut's experience of the Second World War was significantly coloured by his time in Dresden as the city was bombed into oblivion, which he returned to again and again and to greatest effect in Slaughterhouse Five; and much of this reads like preliminary explorations of the subject, circling around and chipping away to see whether it was even possible to write about something which made no sense. I guess he realised it wasn't, at least not in conventional terms, hence the non-linear blend of reality and surrealism that was Slaughterhouse Five. Nevertheless, he had a good go at it, and these shorter, more focused vignettes are rewarding if occasionally shocking, because even if the short form wasn't really his thing, he mastered it nonetheless. The Commandant's Desk and the almost novella which gives the collection its title both pack a punch, utilising a degree of satire but nothing at the strength with which we're familiar. The former narrows its martial focus to the tribulations of a Czech carpenter obliged to rework the desk he's been ordered to make for his invading Commandant, first from a swastika motif to the hammer and sickle, then to the American eagle. It's powerful, funny, and very depressing all at the same time and I'm astonished it didn't see print until the lad left us for the typewriter in the sky; but the collection is solid from start to finish.
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