LJC: Could I begin by going backwards and asking you about your last novel, which is the first I read, Slaughterhouse-Five? I thought this rather different from your earlier novels with the partial exception of Mother Night. Did you feel you were doing something different when you wrote it?

KV: I hope each book is different from the other. The book I’m working on now grew out of Slaughterhouse-Five. There haven’t been such a lot of novels; I haven’t written too many and each one seems to grow out of the one before and I find myself using characters from previous novels.