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Mother Night
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From the Purgatory, With Love: Howard W. Campbell Jr.'s Auto-Biography
Review date: 2009-12-17 Rating: 10 out of 10
When, right in the very beginning, you can read who's the book dedicated to, the introduction and the editor's note (both by Vonnegut) you get the feeling you've in your hands a very smart and humorous piece of modern literature. It was compulsive and addictive reading.
It's the compilation of often short confessions of Howard W. Campbell Jr., an enigmatic and ambiguous person, with an unusual life.
Each confession has a title, which will make all the sense when reading the chapter, like a challenge, if you wish. The end of each chapter is powerful and amusing. Some of these take place in Germany, during the WWII. As you can imagine (or if you've read "Slaughterhouse-Five", by the same author), the emotional charge of events in enormous, almost breath-taking. It's also a continuum of ethical, moral and political struggles that fulfills his entire life.
I've read Slaughterhouse-Five before Mother Night, and was intrigued by Howard W. Campbell Jr. character, making me very curious about reading Mother Night, which was actually written before Slaughterhouse-Five.
I've really enjoyed reading this book, I believe it's Kurt Vonnegut at his best. From now and then I read some chapters to keep reminding me the surprisingly wonderful experience of reading Mother Night (4.8/5).
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Reviews
My first Vonnegut experience, now I am eager for more
Review date: 2007-08-24 Rating: 10 out of 10
For quite a while I had been planning on reading some of Vonnegut's books, but I kept forgetting and grabbing other things from my TBR list. But when a month back I saw the author interviewed in two of my favorite shows regarding his new book "A man without a country", I was once more enticed to follow-up on the idea of reading his works.
It seemed to me that "Mother Night" was a good place to start as any, even though most people's starting point would probably be "Slaughterhouse Five", which I will hopefully get around to reading soon. In "Mother Night", Vonnegut presents us with an extremely interesting setting, which contains a whole array of "gray situations", since Howard W. Campbell, Jr. tells his story as an American spy working in the German publicity machine during World War II. What makes the case even more interesting is that the narrator is not really clear regarding the events that developed during that period. Logically, one would expect Howard to say he hated what he had to do in order to support the US, but in fact we are faced with a scenario that allows for a lot more ambiguity than that. And even though, I have only read this novel by this author so far, I believe that this is one of his most salient characteristics.
Besides the interesting storyline, I was pleasantly impressed by the author's writing style, using short chapters that are somewhat linked in their main topics, but that are not completely linear. This reminds me of the work of one of my favorite Latin American authors, Eduardo Galeano, who uses a similar approach to writing. If you are interested in reading about the history Latin America and like Vonnegut's style, I highly recommend Galeano's non-fiction book "The Open Veins of Latin America".
Coming back to Vonnegut, I recommend "Mother Night" to all those that enjoy stories in which ethics and the concept of what is wrong and what is right play a central role. As to me, I am already looking forward to my next Vonnegut read.
A novel about serving evil too openly and good too secretly
Review date: 2003-08-21 Rating: 10 out of 10
To the best of my knowledge, there really is no other writer quite like Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Mother Night appears to be a rather straightforward, albeit quirky, novel at first glance, but as one delves down into the heart of Vonnegut's prose one finds grounds for contemplation of some of life's most serious issues. This novel is the first-hand account of Howard Campbell, Jr., a most remarkable character. Campbell is an American-born citizen who moved to Germany as a child and became the English-speaking radio mouthpiece for Nazi Germany during World War II. In the fifteen years since the end of the war, he has been living an almost invisible life in a New York City attic apartment. He misses his German wife Helga who died in the war, sometimes thinks about his pre-war life as a successful writer of plays and poems, and perhaps just waits for history to find him once again. As we begin the novel, he has been found and is writing this account from a jail cell in Israel, awaiting trial for his crimes against humanity. While he is reviled by almost everyone on earth as an American Nazi traitor, the truth is that he was actually an agent working for the American government during the war; this is a truth he cannot prove, though. Thus, in this 1961 novel, the hero is ostensibly a Nazi war criminal.
The primary moral of Mother Night, Vonnegut tells us in his introduction, is that "we are what we pretend to be" and should thus be pretty darned careful about what we are pretending to be (a secondary moral being the less enlightening statement "when you're dead, you're dead"). In the eyes of the entire world, Campbell is exactly what he pretended to be during the war, a traitorous Nazi purveyor of propaganda who mocked and demoralized allied troops as well as regular citizens. Internally, Campbell hardly knows what he is anymore; he claims no country, no political values, wanting only to live in a "nation of two" with his beloved wife Helga once again. A series of significant events forces Campbell out of the cocoon of his past fifteen years, and his thoughts and actions along the way provide big juicy morsels of food for thought: taking personal responsibility for one's actions, the harsh truths of war and peace, the sometimes vast differences between truth and fact, individual redemption before self and society, finding direction and a purpose in a world gone mad, etc. Vonnegut's scythe-like dark humor cuts deeper than mere satire, aiming directly at some of the darker sections of the human heart, areas which most individuals too often ignore or refuse to acknowledge. The gallows humor can be quite funny on the surface, but it is in actuality a scalpel which Vonnegut wields to open up the heart and soul of the reader for self-examination. Mother's Night, the title of which is taken from Goethe's Faust, is a relatively short but very powerful novel.
Saddening tale of scapetgoating
Review date: 2001-09-27 Rating: 10 out of 10
This book is a wonderfully moving story of double-crossing and betrayl. The story is excellent for being thought provoking. The character is a man who is sought for war crimes against america, and yet this is a man caught in a web of deciept spun by american and german intelligence agencies. It is one of the best World War II stories I have read.
If you like this try Martin Amis: time's arrow.
Brilliantly dark postmodern satire
Review date: 2001-03-10 Rating: 10 out of 10
Vonnegut's metafictional memoir of Howard W Campbell Jr - American Nazi, American spy, American villain and American hero in one brilliantly blurs the line between right and wrong, history and fiction and fiction and reality through dark, biting, postmodern satire. Ranks easily alongside his 'Slaughterhouse 5' (I actually enjoyed it slightly more) as a treatise against war.
Product Details/Specifications
Authors:
Kurt Vonnegut
Recording label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
EAN: 9780099819301
Binding: Paperback
Dewey decimal number: 813
ISBN: 0099819309
Number of pages: 192
Publication date: 1992-05-21
Language: English (Original Language)
Language: English (Unknown)