{"id":5610,"date":"2022-05-28T08:32:24","date_gmt":"2022-05-28T08:32:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/?p=5610"},"modified":"2024-02-08T09:41:23","modified_gmt":"2024-02-08T09:41:23","slug":"book-review-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/?p=5610","title":{"rendered":"BOOK REViEW: Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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NB – This is another archival entry. I think I read and reviewed this originally around Jan\/Feb, 2021.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.\u2019 Vonnegut in his intro to this book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I stumbled upon, or was reminded of, a few terrific Vonnegut quotes fairly recently, reminding me that I’d loved reading some of his stuff, years ago. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So I ordered a couple of his works I hadn’t already encountered, namely Slap Stick<\/em>, and this, Mother Night<\/em>. (I have to remark on how great the cover designs of these Vintage editions are, really very striking!) His trademark wit is present and correct as ever. But I’d forgotten how very bleak quite a lot of his prose fiction can be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t really want to synopsise the content here (the wiki entry on the book<\/a> is great for that). In a nutshell it\u2019s about apathy and belief, or how engaged one really is with what goes on around one. If we take Vonnegut\u2019s own quote from the intro (reproduced above) at face value, it\u2019s rather Hamlet-like in it\u2019s utter weariness at our shabby play-acting. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

These dark and comfortless ideas are embedded in a very clever but horribly bleak context, in which the narrator protagonist, Howard Campbell Jr, is both a former Nazi propagandist and a double-agent for US secret services, recounting his bizarre life story from an Israeli jail cell.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s a short easy read; I read the whole thing in one day. But it’s a bit hard going psychologically, on account of it being so relentlessly dark. Vonnegut, like so many, saw things in WWII that, unsurprisingly, coloured his entire life thereafter. But the pitch black darkness of the vision of humanity offered here is, unlike the more uplifting quotes I recently encountered by him elsewhere, energy-sapping.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As always, Vonnegut’s very clever, highly articulate, effortlessly imaginative and even darkly funny. But this is so<\/em> grindingly dark, it’s certainly not a favourite from Vonnegut’s canon, a least for me. Unlike some of his writings, from Sirens of Titan<\/em> to Breakfast of Champs<\/em>, I can’t see myself ever re-reading this one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

UPDATE: Rather ironically, given my stated desire not to re-read this, whilst posting this old review I discovered that Mother Night<\/em> is the subject of a local reading group event, coming up soon. So, I may well re-visit it, after all!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NB – This is another archival entry. I think I read and reviewed this originally around Jan\/Feb, 2021. \u2018We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.\u2019 Vonnegut in his intro to this book. I stumbled upon, or was reminded of, a few terrific Vonnegut quotes … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “BOOK REViEW: Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paGwUa-1su","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5610"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5610"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5610\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11528,"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5610\/revisions\/11528"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5610"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}