One of my top five books of all time.

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	• Mother night (Bard books) Kurt Vonnegut Avon, 1972 - 192 pages average customer review:based on 99 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Ironic Evil

Many actors who create public personas blur the lines between their public and private faces. In other words, they become the character they created no matter how contrary to his creator the character may have originally been. Archie Leach became Cary Grant over time just as Marion Morrison became John Wayne after decades of movies. Our hero, Howard Campbell is no different. Instead of standing up to the rascists and antisemites, he meekly submits to their assumptions about him. Purhaps they're more correct than they know. True evil comes not from some insane meglomaniac trapped in his own delusions but from good people who do nothing. Who shut themselves off to survive. To make a buck. To stay out of trouble. A clear mind and clear heart do not a clear conscience make. The little dutiful cogs that make a big machine that chews the world to bits. Goodness comes not from not being bad but in being good on purpose. He was only doing his job but did he have to do it so well? Why couldn't he have been a barely adequate Nazi propagandist/ Allied spy? Just good enough not to be replaced but not good enough to inspire hatred in millions. If only he had cared.

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One of my top five books of all time.

Whenever I am between books, like if I have just finished one and am waiting for another one to come in the mail or just taking a week or two break from heavier reading, I will read this book. It's a quick read as are most of his books. I have read it a dozen times and I always enjoy it. I think that anyone who reads this book will enjoy it just as I did. I've read all of Vonnegut's books and enjoyed them all, but this one gets pulled off of my book shelf more than anything else. To borrow a quote from the book itself "We are what we pretent to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."

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Top-quailty writing

The usual Vonnegut: brilliant and iconoclastic. Very easy to read because of the short sentences and short chapters, but one needs to be alert to what is going on, who is who. The ending may leave you a bit up in the air. It would be worthwhile to see the excellent movie with Nick Nolte as Howard Campbell, Jr. The movie dialog is basically straight from the novel, but a few key scenes are left out. Look for Vonnegut in a scene.

Inside-Out or Outside-In

Mother Night is the story of an accidental American spy in Germany who, as part of his cover, wrote inflammatory Nazi propaganda and read it over the radio during World War II. The narrative takes the form of a memoir, written from prison while the author awaits trial as a war criminal. The moral, as conveniently provided by the author in the preface, is this: You are who you pretend to be, so be careful who you pretend to be. Basically, Mother Night is an exploration of what happened to one man who "served evil too openly and good too secretly."

I'm a huge Vonnegut fan, and I probably should have given it five stars since it's better than most of the books out there. I gave it four stars only because at a couple of points I felt like, for a page or two, the dialogue slipped out of the story and began to moralize more explicitly than I'm used to from Vonnegut. Otherwise, I thought the book was perfect: profound, disturbing, sad, and good enough to make me want to scrutinize the differences between my own inner and outer lives. Probably a must read for Vonnegut fans and a great introduction for anyone who likes to save the best for last.

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Mother Vonnegut

An interesting--almost crazy--ride through the later years of Howard Campbell, American-born, German playwright-turned-Nazi-broadcast propogandist, then-re-turned-American-spy.

Vonnegut once said, humbly, his writing was just 8 to 10-line jokes strung together. There is slapstick and farce here; great fun and entertainiment. What saves this from craziness is Vonnegut's ability to write so well about noble things such as love and kindness, friendship and decency. So one laughs and one thinks and one feels as he reads here. . .and in almost everything else Kurt Vonnegut wrote.

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