Voice, narration and perspective: 6/9. The protagonist’s gloomy melancholy over his participation in the genocide overwhelmed me.

Plot, suspense and climax: 7/9. it would have been better if Potapov’s identity had not been exposed at the beginning.

In 1961, Howard W. Campbell Jr.—a notorious Nazi propagandist and anchorman—recalled his life and wrote this autobiography in the Israeli prison:

Campbell, born in 1912, was originally an excellent German dramatist. In 1938, he was recruited by an American called Colonel Frank Wirtanen to be their spy within the Nazi government.

After World War II, Campbell was captured by American Lieutenant O’Hare, but Wirtanen helped Campbell escape his trial and live in New York for about 13 years peacefully and anonymously.

In 1958, Campbell crafted a set of chess on a whim and invited Klopfer, his neighbour and a talented painter, to play with him. They became good friends quickly thereafter. The protagonist trusted him so deeply that he even revealed his true identity to Klopfer.

Before long, his identity and location were publicized in the newspaper. Jones, a hardcore American Nazi, visited him and also brought Campbell’s missing wife, Helga, along with his cohort. She claimed that this reunion had been sponsored by those who admired Campbell.

Robert, one of Jones’s companions, offered to carry Helga’s suitcases out of admiration—an imprudent action that cost his senile life. Jones wanted Campbell to fill the vacancy of their newly found league caused by Robert’s death.

Helga presented him with his early works before his involvement with the Nazis. Soon, Helga confessed that she was actually Resi, Helga’s little sister, who had once boldly expressed her love to Campbell in her teens.

A male attacked Campbell for his hatred for Nazi, which indicated Campbell little attic was no longer safe. Luckily, Jones arranged for them to fly to Mexico and the loyal Potapov purposed to accompany Campbell out of friendship and loneliness.

After Robert’s funeral, Campbell was informed clandestinely by Wirtanen that Potapov was virtually a Russia agent. It was he who leaked Campbell’s information to the public and orchestrated their reunion. Their ulterior motive was to abduct Campbell after his arrival in Mexico and force him to accept Russian unjust sentence. Hilariously, it was Wirtanen that reported a dishonest Russian soldier who had found Campbell’s early works, impersonate their creator, and made them known to every household in Russia—even including pornography that should have been forbidden. Though Campbell felt indignant with Russians for destroying all his cherished memories, he felt delighted that his works had survived and even had been widespread recognized.

Defying Wirtanen’s suggestion to leave immediately, Campbell still returned to the gathering and exposed Potapov and Resi’s conspiracy, before the police burst into this assembly and arrested them. Resi, however, committed suicide out of Campbell’s rejection of her love.

Afterwards, Campbell was so possessed with his bad conscience that he surrendered himself to the Israeli government to receive his condign condemnation, even though he just got away with O’Hare—a desperate, drunken, and old man who wanted Campbell for some so-called glory to dispel his dissatisfaction with his pitiful life.

“I’m not your destiny, or the Devil, either!” I said. “Look at you! Came to kill evil with your bare hands, and now away you go with no more glory than a man sideswiped by a Greyhound bus! And that’s all the glory you deserve!” I said. “That’s all that any man at war with pure evil deserves.

“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 its 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.”

But Wirtanen finally felt obliged to prove Campbell’s contribution as an American agent despite the administrative requirement of confidentiality. Therefore, Campbell couldn’t help but end his own life.

Character, dialogue and interaction: 9/9.

Although this book didn’t exhibit the same amount of charismatic dark humour as Kurt Vonnegut’s other works, his characters vividly and succinctly showed various distorting, agonized, and discomfited spirits affected by World War II. It seemed a miracle to me how he managed to weave approximately 20 distinct and impressive characters into a novel no more than 50,000 words.

Personally, I appreciate that, at the beginning, the protagonist’s elaborate dialogues with four insignificant guardians, because they introduced primarily the absurdity and cruelty of the formidable war, in which the protagonist had apparently played an active role in:

The protagonist’s first guardian was too young to care about politics. His ignorance frightened the protagonist and also made me realise that all these crazy things would probably be forgotten within a few generations and would therefore undoubtedly reappear in the future.

The second guardian acknowledged that he had once volunteered to help the Nazis party annihilate other prisoners in the concentration camp under the sway of their ubiquitous propaganda, despite knowing that he himself would too be executed afterwards.

The third guardian admitted that he faked his identity, hid his Jewish lineage, and served the Nazis fanatically to obtain a perfect camouflage and save his own life.

The fourth guardian claimed that he became so numb owing to the World War II that even hanging a Nazi commander would give him no other feeling than the thought of simply finishing his job.

World, wonder, and detail: 8/9. Vonnegut tends to digress from the main plot to discuss about minor characters or unnecessary details, sometimes to an annoying extent.

Nevertheless, exactly in light of this technique known as non-linear collage, his worlds are always kaleidoscopic and magnificent.

Theme, conflict, and influence: 9/9.

Campbell indeed spent his remaining life in the purgatory where the only punishment was his own guilty conscience.

The protagonist was absolutely the most tragic character and the successful embodiment of the theme: At first, Wirtanen observed from Campbell’s work that he had admired pure hearts, heroes, good, and romance—all of which Campbell had ultimately abandoned along with his artistic career and apolitical attitude, which might account for his denouement.

“The arts, the arts, the arts—” he said to me one night. “I don’t know why it took me so long to realize how important they are. As a young man, I actually held them in supreme contempt. Now, whenever I think about them, I want to fall on my knees and weep.”

Perhaps the real Campbell had already died with his enclosed works that he regarded as his alternative self:

Here lies Howard Campbell’s essence,

Freed from his body’s noisome nuisance.

His body, empty, prowls the earth,

Earning what a body’s worth.

If his body and his essence remain apart,

Burn his body, but spare this, his heart.

Hence, Kurt Vonnegut warned us in the introduction:

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

Also, espionage was extremely difficult:

“Generally speaking, espionage offers each spy an opportunity to go crazy in a way he finds irresistible.”

Kurt Vonnegut was perspicacious:

I doubt if there has ever been a society that has been without strong and young people eager to experiment with homicide, provided no very awful penalties are attached to it.

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

The willful filing off of gear teeth, the willful doing without certain obvious pieces of information—

That was how a household as contradictory as one composed of Jones, Father Keeley, Vice-Bundesfuehrer Krapptauer, and the Black Fuehrer could exist in relative harmony—

That was how my father-in-law could contain in one mind an indifference toward slave women and love for a blue vase—

That was how Rudolf Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz, could alternate over the loudspeakers of Auschwitz great music and calls for corpse-carriers—

That was how Nazi Germany could sense no important differences between civilization and hydrophobia—

That is the closest I can come to explaining the legions, the nations of lunatics I’ve seen in my time. And for me to attempt such a mechanical explanation is perhaps a reflection of the father whose son I was. Am. When I pause to think about it, which is rarely, I am, after all, the son of an engineer.

Since there is no one else to praise me, I will praise myself—will say that I have never tampered with a single tooth in my thought machine, such as it is. There are teeth missing, God knows—some I was born without, teeth that will never grow. And other teeth have been stripped by the clutchless shifts of history—

But never have I willfully destroyed a tooth on a gear of my thinking machine. Never have I said to myself, “This fact I can do without.”

Howard W. Campbell, Jr., praises himself! There’s life in the old boy yet!

And, where there’s life—

There is life.

“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 its side. It’s that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive.