A friend of mine at work gave me Mother Night. I'm still not quite sure why he gave it to me other than I guess he imagined I would quite simply appreciate it. He was right, I've never read anything by Vonnegut until now, and I think he's a genius. Each page I read, each paragraph, each sentence-- each word-- I ask what was in his head as he wrote. Where did this story come from? Who is Howard W. Campbell? Surely he is a real WWII criminal... but nothing but Mother Night pops up in a Google search. Surely the man is as schizophrenic as his fellow espionage mates... but his Blue Fairy Godmother sheds light on things outside of one man's personal knowledge.

I have 25 pages left to go, so hopefully the answers will arise. Until then, I'll say that I love what this book does to the mind; the way it engages it in a historical, a psychological, a philosophical/ethical sense all at once. Pick it up sometime- it'll take a fast reader a day to get through.

As a teaser, here are some quotes that I've found ravishing:

"From the Empire State Building, I walked downtown. I walked all the way to my old home in Greenwich Village, to Resi's and my and Kraft's old home.

"I encountered many fellow lightning bugs. Sometimes I gave the cherry red signal first, sometimes they. And I left the seashell roar and the aurora borealis of the city's heart farther and farther behind me." (pg. 152)

"Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile." (pg. 103)

"I have never seen a more sublime deomonstration of the totalitarian mind, a mind which might be likened unto a system of gears where teeth have been filed off at random. Such snaggle-toothed thought machine, driven by a standard or even by a substandard libido, whirls with the jerky, noisy, gaudy pointlessness of a cuckoo clock in Hell.

"The missing teeth, of course, are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten-year-olds, in most cases." (pg. 145)

"There are plenty of good reasons for fighting,' I said, 'but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on his side. It's that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive. It's that part of an imbecile,' I said, 'that punishes and vilifies and makes war gladly.' " (page 164)

"His mother understood my illness immediately, that it was my world rather than myself that was diseased." (page 168)

And finally, one amazing bit of prose that strikes a chord deep within me for all the reasons Vonnegut intended plus others he may not have even imagined:

"As for children's working off aggressions, I'm against it. They are going to need all the aggressions they can contain for ultimate release in the adult world. Name one great man in history who did not go boiling and bubbling through chidhood with a lashed-down safety valve..." (page 174)

Of course, all of these feel weightless and unsubstantial without the surrounding context of the story. Nonetheless, I'll print them here in the hopes that ounces of literary genius will spark an interest in reading the book.

The thing I find most fascinating out of it all is that he rarely, if ever, uses a phrase other than "I said" or "he said" and so on to create conversation. And yet, there is no problem in understanding the emotion of the moment...