I'm not neutral on this novel. How could I be? I listened to the audiobook (read by Ethan Hawke, which I cannot recommend enough) watching the sun rise over the reconstructed old town of Dresden while in my ears, Billy was riding through its ruins in a horse-drawn carriage. And according to the Trafalmadorians, my city and the heap of ashes of 1945 are both just as real as the other. That'll get you.

What a fascinating book. It has several things going for it - things that, in my opinion, would have all made for a very decent novel all on their own, but that I would have never thought to combine. The concept of time is so intriguing. The alien abduction story is surprisingly original. The absurd life of Billy Pilgrim after the war is a wild, wild ride. I really enjoyed Vonnegut's writing style and his humour, it reminded me lots of a few German authors, mostly Kästner, who incidentally was a Dresden native who wrote the most heartbreaking things about its destruction himself. The war story is so interesting and so heartbreaking and feels very real.
And then somehow, throwing that all in a blender resulted not in a horrible confusing mess but instead something that feels tangible and real in a way that Billy's experiences in Europe on its own could never have been. Beneath the very absurd and very whacky surface, there is such a sharp and realistic image of trauma and horror and heartbreak. I don't feel like Vonnegut intentionally put it there. It's more like he couldn't put what he wanted to express into words so he wrote around it, and you start to be able to tell the shape of the hollow in the middle.