Product Description

A companion novel to "Slaughterhouse 5", covering similar themes and drawing on the author's experiences as a prisoner of war in Dresden. A black satire, it tells of an American spy in Germany who becomes confused by his own methods as he sends his coded messages by using pro-Nazi radio broadcasts.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #14289 in Books
• Published on: 1992-05-21
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Customer Reviews

A novel about serving evil too openly and good too secretly
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.

Brilliantly dark postmodern satire
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.

My first Vonnegut experience, now I am eager for more
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.