Title:: [[Mother Night]] Authors:: [[Kurt Vonnegut]] Tags:: #vonnegut #darkhumor #WW2 #antisemitism #satire #fiction Read:: [[2022-02-03]] ## Editions - Edition:: Dial Press Trade Paperback Edition, 2009 - Copyright:: 1961 - Pages:: 268 Vonnegut’s third novel and the first that feels more firmly rooted in satire than science fiction.  I liked it a lot.  A theme throughout is the question of how people can come to believe awful, immoral things. In this case, it’s people who believed Nazi propaganda, but even today, I am sure you can think of something insane and awful otherwise normal people believe.  Here’s Vonnegut’s explanation by way of describing the mind of a fervently religious and patriotic, racist anti-Semite named Jones: “I have never seen a more sublime demonstration of the totalitarian mind, a mind which might be likened unto a system of gears whose teeth have been filed off at random. Such a snaggle-toothed thought machine, driven by a standard or even substandard libido, whirls with a jerky, noisy, gaudy pointlessness of a cuckoo clock in Hell.  The boss G-man concluded wrongly that there were no teeth on the gears in the mind of Jones… Jones wasn’t completely crazy. The dismaying thing about the classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, though mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined… The missing teeth, of course, are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten-year-olds, in most cases.” And that’s why I think you should read Vonnegut in 2022.