"Everything Goes Like Clockwork" is a review of the novel Once a Greek... by Swiss author Friedrich Dürrenmatt printed in New York Times Book Review on June 13, 1965. The novel was first published in 1955 in its original German as Grieche sucht Griechin ("Greek Man Seeks Greek Woman"). In a letter to Knox Burger on June 4, 1965, Vonnegut mentioned receiving this assignment.[1]
Summary[]
Friedrich Dürrenmatt, 1989
Vonnegut reflects that Dürrenmatt's works are like "pretty and queer Swiss clocks" that can be admired for their machinery that moves small dolls in well-designed patterns. The novel takes place in a city so perfectly constructed as to be a "baroque, HO-gauge, middle-European Hell." Archilochos, the titular Greek, seeks love while working as a bookkeeper at a large, symbolically constructed factory with multiple floors. While beautifully described, they betray a writer who knows nothing of the workings of actual factories. Events occur simply because Dürrenmatt has written them that way, and Vonnegut describes the jokes as good, if Jungian: "private, Kraut, mythological." It is less satire and more dream, although lovely nonetheless.[2]
- ↑ "June 4, 1965," Letters, pg. 97.
- ↑ "Everything Goes Like Clockwork", New York Times Book Review, June 13, 1965, pg. 4.