Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

            A book I love so much that I got a tattoo for it. A book that definitely sounds like your crazy uncle wrote parts of it, but that aged better than most episodes of The Simpsons. A book that dares to ask: what if the cold war got really cold?

            Cat's Cradle follows a narrator whose name is announced on the first page and then never used again. For the sake of this review, I will call him Jonah, because that is what the reader is told to do: "Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John."

            The book begins with Jonah setting out to write a book about the father of the atomic bomb. No, not Oppenheimer. This is Vonnegut we're reading, so the father of the atomic bomb is one Dr. Felix Hoenikker.

            While interviewing people close to Dr. Hoenikker, Jonah realizes that he is not investigating the intricacies of a scientist’s life, but rather the lethal legacy left by that scientist: a substance that could freeze the world in an instant: Ice-9.

            Jonah eventually ends up on an island in the Caribbean where everyone, even those in charge, follows an outlawed religion based completely on lies. He meets Felix Hoenikker's three children, makes a name for himself on the island, and even falls in love, all while trying to get to the bottom of what exactly is at stake if Ice-9 really exists.

            Cat's Cradle is a masterpiece of satire, highlighting just how absurd most of our worldly existence is. Throughout the book, the youngest Hoenikker child, Newt, repeats an observation about the cat's cradle: "Where's the cat? Where's the cradle?" It's just some string with a good marketing team, and human existence isn't so different. We look for meaning where there isn't any, in the hopes that it will distract us from the knowledge that we could destroy the world.  

my silly little tattoo :)

            Faced with the possibility of nuclear war, the fictional Dr. Hoenikker played a game with a string, showing his son an invisible cat in an invisible cradle. Faced with climate change, an intense political landscape, and my own existential fears, I got a tattoo. A cat's cradle–no cat, no cradle–is now permanently etched onto my arm. It is a reminder that in the grand scheme of things, nothing really matters.

This concludes my annual existentialist rant. Stay tuned for some more uplifting content soon.