The 6th book I read this year was ‘Mother Night’ by Kurt Vonnegut. I was quite taken by it. Not something that happens often late in life.  Not for me.

It is often noted that the influence of a book, movie, or even music on your life is strongly correlated with the time and circumstance when you consume it. I read Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut earlier this year. It was a period when the vagaries of life had me in their grip. The absurdity and uncertainty of our very being was presenting itself every day. I had all the power over my life and still didn’t feel like it. I had many options but no real choice. I was numb. And when I encountered Mother Night, I felt it spoke to me in a language that I understood in that moment. I am not sure I would understand in other moments. But what I understood spoke to me very clearly and helped me escape a comfortable mental prison. It was nihilism after all.

Mother Night’s protagonist, Howard Campbell, finds himself in a weird mental place. Is he a Nazi propagandist or is he an American spy? Does he know anymore? Is he numb? He is numb. While not entirely clear as to why, but my guess is that absurdity would do it. It would discount the meaning of reason. In fact, reason, once again fell short. It reminded me of the Dostoevsky quote from his remarkable “Notes from the Underground” …

“Reason is an excellent thing, there's no disputing that, but reason is nothing but reason and satisfies only the rational side of man's nature, while will is a manifestation of the whole life, that is, of the whole human life including reason and all the impulses. And although our life, in this manifestation of it, is often worthless, yet it is life and not simply extracting square roots. Here I, for instance, quite naturally want to live, in order to satisfy all my capacities for life, and not simply my capacity for reasoning, that is, not simply one twentieth of my capacity for life. What does reason know? Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning.”

Kurt Vonnegut’s admonition in Mother Night comes early – “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be” – and pretend we must. Our true selves are often too much to bear but most of us aren’t good at all at knowing what to pretend to be. It cannot be easy. It is unfortunate how little control we really have in how we get slotted into specific pigeonholes. How difficult it can be to see clearly. This constant struggle with the abundance of options and lack of choices builds a grotesque scaffolding that holds our lives that feel barely ours and barely even lives.

It is a book that can tell a different story to different readers or even to the same reader over different times. Mother Night sows the seed but allows us to bear the fruit we want.

Other recent posts on books.