Today, on NPR's Day to Day, in honor of Vonnegut, they played him reading the following passage from Slaughterhouse Five:

Billy Pilgrim padded downstairs on his blue and ivory feet. He went into the kitchen, where the moonlight called his attention to a half bottle of champagne on the kitchen table, all that was left from the reception in the tent. Somebody had stoppered it again. "Drink me," it seemed to say.

So Billy uncorked it with his thumbs. It didn't make a pop. The champagne was dead. So it goes.

Billy looked at the clock on the gas stove. He had an hour to kill before the saucer came. He went into the living room, swinging the bottle like a dinner bell, turned on the television. He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this :

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.

The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn't in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.

And people wonder why I want to study philosophy of history. The film read forwards is jingoistic claptrap (probably) but read backwards, it's moving and solemn and beautiful. This simple transposition changes so much beyond just the order and causality of the events.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time centers around an autistic boy who investigating a curious incident, involving a dog. In the night-time.

It's entirely in first person from the boy's perspective and contains no metaphors (he hates metaphors. He feels like they are lies), though it does contain a smattering of similes, because similes are not lies, as long as they are accurate. This, and a host of other related quirks make the read ... interesting, from a comparative perspective. Because when was the last time you read a book where all the chapters were numbered with prime numbers? And when was the last time you read a book where the point-of-view character included for you maps drawn to scale of more than a few locations?

On the whole, the book, I think, is meant to be a look inside autism as well as a mystery novel. I'll say this right now: the mystery did not work for me. I did not care whether or not he found out who killed the dog but it is interesting that the character forced the book into the form of a mystery novel--the only type of fiction he can stand. That, however, doesn't absolve the mystery aspects of the book from being kind of boring.

And then there's the problem of motivation. Given that he's autistic, and self-aware, we very rarely see him act in ways that surprise himself (except for one section in the middle, where he goes into shock, but even that's understandable) or us. Or, perhaps, all the things that seem initially inexplicable (though usually the author prepares us for them in advance) are quickly explained away by the autism, which robs the main character of any interestingness he had outside his disorder.

One thing that really worked for me, however, were some of the descriptions of what autistics are going through, in particular how he talks about the fact that most people get through life every day because they don't see everything they look at but for an autistic (or, at least, this particular autistic, which is always the trouble in writing a book on a spectrum disorder) they can't help but see everything. The kid gives an example of standing in a field. Most people would say that they see the field, the farmhouse, the horizon and some cows. The main character could tell you precisely how many cows and how their spots were shaped, even much later (though his supposedly perfect recall does seem to be at odds with his occasional, noted paraphrasing throughout the book, though I may be fishing too deeply there). And that this overwhelming surplus comes part-and-parcel with many related problems.

It hit other autism-related high-points. Love of routine (he make train-like timetables for himself), dislike of being touched, dislike of looking people in the face, inability to decode the emotions of others, et cetera, and while it all worked coherently and reasonably together, it didn't deliver like I had hoped. And maybe that's the big problem, for me: after hearing people talk about this book and it selling one bajillion copies last summer (or two summers ago, was it?) I expected more out of it. In the end, it's medium to medium-good at best. Not a recommend unless you're interested in the specific field.

And also, for some reason, it really bothered me that the book was British. Couldn't tell you why. Wasn't expecting it and it really through me off.

Those of you that have experience and/or training with/about autism and have read the book, tell us where the book went wrong, or what it got right that you were surprised it got right.