Getting a Read: Mother Night
Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut
It’s my firm belief that when a person recommends a book to me, they’re handing me an inside look at their soul. In this series, “Getting a Read,” I try to uncover truth about books and their recommenders.
THE RECOMMENDER
Chris Reid, serenader of Disney music, DnD Dungeon Master extraordinaire, and childhood best friend of my brother. Safe to say, Chris and I go way back.
HOW TO READ IT
With an open mind and a reading buddy. It helped me very much to call my mom while writing this review and talk about it with her—she watched the movie recently and I was grateful for her conversation. This book makes you think, and I found that my thoughts were a bit difficult to tangle with solo.
REVIEW: Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut
I had absolutely no idea what to expect when I picked up this book. Chris told me Kurt Vonnegut was a bit weird, and he was NOT WRONG! This was all the warning I had before opening this slim text, made even slimmer by the fact that I checked it out from my local library on my phone.
This was my first Vonnegut and the first to make it to the Getting a Read list, though it was quickly followed by another, “Cat’s Cradle” given to me by a bookshop for a potential new spin-off of Getting a Read—stay tuned for more info. It’s safe to say, Vonnegut is a great writer. He’s one of the greats of the 20th century, in fact, and he’s well-loved by many, though this is not a well-known work of his. Most reviewers of Mother Night are talking these days about the play or the 1996 movie adaptation. All reviews of the book that I saw are careful to name Mother Night as one of his earlier works and note that he got much better over time.
Maybe Slaughterhouse Five is objectively better, but this book has plenty to offer its readers.
Mother Night was difficult in all kinds of ways from the moment I cracked it open. It’s humorous, sure, in a gallows-y sort of way lovers of Vonnegut are probably familiar with, and I’ve struggled for over a week trying to decide what exactly to say about it in this review. For one thing, this book is hard to talk about without spoiling—for another, it’s simply rough to think about. That’s an objectively true statement, but it’s true on top of the fact that I was reading “The Center Cannot Hold” by Elyn Saks concurrently, altogether making for a truly tough reading week for me. Saks was heavy, and this book was a bitter chaser.
Why? Quite simply, I had no idea before I turned to the first page that I was about to be plunged into a World War II novel. This book starts where it ends, written in the hand of a prisoner of the Israeli army and a decade and a half after the end of WW2. I thought for sure I was about to spend a story in the mind of a Nazi, but by the end, I didn’t quite know what to think about the central character’s place in history.
The narrator of this book is a spy, and I’ll leave you to find out all the other details on your own. Through the flashbacks, we learn of his life in Nazi Germany and his existence in the years after the war. We learn about his beloved wife, his passion for writing, and many, many conversations with Nazis, including Hitler himself.
Throughout the book, he tangles internally and externally with how to understand his place in history and sometimes does so simply by forgetting it. A first-person narrative, this book is rather strikingly similar to a diary, or it can feel like it at times. Except that it’s a fictional narrative, I didn’t find it so dissimilar to Anne Frank’s diary for its deeply emotional and personal reflections on feelings, memories, and experiences. This internally focused narrative gave the book plenty of power and left me truly unsure of how to construct an opinion of it when I closed the book.
I thought for over a week before I wrote a single word of this article. Finally, my understanding of this text opened up as I meditated on what I consider to be the single most striking phrase in this narrative: “the schizophrenia of the spy”
This phrase stuck out to me for three reasons. First, and most personally, because the Patreon book I just finished was a memoir of life with schizophrenia. It was hard not to call up images from that book alongside this one; to make the comparison between true schizophrenia and the kind of splitting of the mind that occurs when one must segment one’s life as a spy so profoundly and with such dire consequences on the line.
Which leads me to point two: Schizophrenia is no longer an appropriate metaphor for this kind of mind splitting. For a rather intensely academic, yet seriously pertinent read, check out Chopra and Doody’s analysis of the appearance of the term “schizophrenia” as a metaphor in the news. For a shorter, less academic version, let me summarize. Using any illness as a metaphor can lead to a general assumption that the disease is worse than it is. Therefore, labeling a thing that is not schizophrenia as “schizophrenic” can enhance the negative connotations of the term schizophrenia and lead to a stigmatization of people who suffer from the illness, which can have dire consequences. This is a familiar topic in our times, but in the 1960s it would likely have been unheard of to speak of such a concept.
So finally, point three: This book belongs in Vonnegut’s time, and that makes it a rather fascinating and unique reading experience. This anachronistic quality is, upon reflection, exactly why this book so disturbed me. This book was an introduction to a totally different time—the time of my grandparents’ young adulthood. The time of the cold war, bomb shelters, the rising importance of modern Israel, the baby boom, and the time of the world when it was just beginning to try to get along again.
Not so far away are we from the time after the war, when people were desperate to both move on from and never forget the horror they had so recently left behind.
This book was an effective time capsule and an important one. It tangled with questions like, what is the importance of language in the war against evil? Does a still, small voice outweigh the loud, repeated hammerings of propaganda? When is silence a more effective tool than speech, or is it ever? And perhaps most appropriately for our current moment, when leaders speak, what is their responsibility to the actions propagated in the aftermath of their words?
Read this book. Speak goodness and justice into the world. Encourage other people who speak these things into the world to keep doing so. Most importantly, think carefully about the implications of giving propaganda and incendiary speech a pass. Then and now, lives are on the line.
THE RECOMMENDER IN REVIEW
I imagine that Chris loves this book for its dark humor and intellectual wanderings. In this text I see Chris’s empathy and pragmatism working in high gear. He has a remarkable ability to accept the weirdness of life and just keep trucking along, with a deep understanding that life is no black and white proposition. I appreciate that my friend does not shy away from difficulties and ambiguities, and that he confronts even life’s darkest moments with a sense of humor.
WHERE TO FIND IT
This book is one of Vonnegut’s early works and not his most common. You can hunt for it at used bookstores like Half-Price Books, but you may also be able to easily download it like I did through your local library’s digital reader app. You can also check out “Mother Night” the movie my mom watched if you’d like a visual version.