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Bluebeard
Broad humor and bitter irony collide in this fictional autobiography of Rabo Karabekian, who, at age seventy-one, wants to be left alone on his Long Island estate with the secret he has locked inside his potato barn. But then a voluptuous young widow badgers Rabo into telling his life story—and Vonnegut in turn tells us the plain, heart-hammering truth about man’s careless fancy to create or destroy what he loves.
318 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1987
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About the author
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
710 books36.8k followersKurt Vonnegut, Junior was an American novelist, satirist, and most recently, graphic artist. He was recognized as New York State Author for 2001-2003.
He was born in Indianapolis, later the setting for many of his novels. He attended Cornell University from 1941 to 1943, where he wrote a column for the student newspaper, the Cornell Daily Sun. Vonnegut trained as a chemist and worked as a journalist before joining the U.S. Army and serving in World War II.
After the war, he attended University of Chicago as a graduate student in anthropology and also worked as a police reporter at the City News Bureau of Chicago. He left Chicago to work in Schenectady, New York in public relations for General Electric. He attributed his unadorned writing style to his reporting work.
His experiences as an advance scout in the Battle of the Bulge, and in particular his witnessing of the bombing of Dresden, Germany whilst a prisoner of war, would inform much of his work. This event would also form the core of his most famous work, Slaughterhouse-Five, the book which would make him a millionaire. This acerbic 200-page book is what most people mean when they describe a work as "Vonnegutian" in scope.
Vonnegut was a self-proclaimed humanist and socialist (influenced by the style of Indiana's own Eugene V. Debs) and a lifelong supporter of the American Civil Liberties Union.
The novelist is known for works blending satire, black comedy and science fiction, such as Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Cat's Cradle (1963), and Breakfast of Champions (1973)
He was born in Indianapolis, later the setting for many of his novels. He attended Cornell University from 1941 to 1943, where he wrote a column for the student newspaper, the Cornell Daily Sun. Vonnegut trained as a chemist and worked as a journalist before joining the U.S. Army and serving in World War II.
After the war, he attended University of Chicago as a graduate student in anthropology and also worked as a police reporter at the City News Bureau of Chicago. He left Chicago to work in Schenectady, New York in public relations for General Electric. He attributed his unadorned writing style to his reporting work.
His experiences as an advance scout in the Battle of the Bulge, and in particular his witnessing of the bombing of Dresden, Germany whilst a prisoner of war, would inform much of his work. This event would also form the core of his most famous work, Slaughterhouse-Five, the book which would make him a millionaire. This acerbic 200-page book is what most people mean when they describe a work as "Vonnegutian" in scope.
Vonnegut was a self-proclaimed humanist and socialist (influenced by the style of Indiana's own Eugene V. Debs) and a lifelong supporter of the American Civil Liberties Union.
The novelist is known for works blending satire, black comedy and science fiction, such as Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Cat's Cradle (1963), and Breakfast of Champions (1973)
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 2,289 reviews
November 20, 2025
Bluebird is a sort of the narrator’s autobiography…
He is a widower… He is a recluse… “I may have been a lousy painter, but what a collector I turned out to be!” His only friend – a destitute writer – calls his house, full of other painters’ pictures, a museum…
He invited a woman – a younger accidental acquaintance – to sojourn for a while in his house… And the lady turned out to be domineering and manipulative… And she made him write his biography and did many other things… And similar to Bluebeard, the protagonist keeps from the world some mysterious secret… And what is art, anyway?
Does the style create fashion or does fashion order the style?
I am the erstwhile American painter Rabo Karabekian, a one-eyed man…
I was not born a cyclops. I was deprived of my left eye while commanding a platoon of Army Engineers, curiously enough artists of one sort or another in civilian life, in Luxembourg near the end of World War Two. We were specialists in camouflage, but at that time were fighting for our lives as ordinary infantry. The unit was composed of artists, since it was the theory of someone in the Army that we would be especially good at camouflage.
He is a widower… He is a recluse… “I may have been a lousy painter, but what a collector I turned out to be!” His only friend – a destitute writer – calls his house, full of other painters’ pictures, a museum…
I, old Rabo Karabekian, having disgraced myself in the visual arts, am now having a go at literature. A true child of the Great Depression, though, playing it safe, I am hanging on to my job as a museum guard.
He invited a woman – a younger accidental acquaintance – to sojourn for a while in his house… And the lady turned out to be domineering and manipulative… And she made him write his biography and did many other things… And similar to Bluebeard, the protagonist keeps from the world some mysterious secret… And what is art, anyway?
“I’ve done my best to understand and respect your pictures,” she said. “Why won’t you do the same for mine?”
“Do you know the meaning of the word “kitsch”?” I said.
“You don’t call these pictures of little girls on swings serious art?” jeered Mrs. Berman. “Try thinking what the Victorians thought when they looked at them, which was how sick or unhappy so many of these happy, innocent little girls would be in just a little while – diphtheria, pneumonia, smallpox, miscarriages, violent husbands, poverty, widowhood, prostitution – death and burial in potter’s field.”
Does the style create fashion or does fashion order the style?
March 31, 2007
One thing I've discovered is that people tend to have different favorites of Vonnegut's work. Many prefer Slaughter House Five, some love Breakfast of Champions, and my sister's favorite is Galapagos.
The only person I've ever met whose favorite Vonnegut book is Bluebeard is... me. So it goes.
The book follows former abstract expressionist painter Rabo Karabekian, serving as his autobiography and a mystery story simultaneously. The mystery? What is Rabo keeping in the huge potato barn on his large estate.
Some of you may remember Mr. Karabekian from Breakfast of Champions; he was largely the same character, albeit younger in years. He's famous for his paintings, you see: he would take huge canvases, spray paint them all one color, and put pieces of colored tape on them.
There's several jokes regarding Rabo's paintings, one of which he gave away in Breakfast: his work is Rabo's view of the human soul. When you strip away all of the unnecessary crap that makes us up, we're all basically glowing shafts of light, represented by the pieces of tape.
I won't give away the other joke, but it's a good one.
Anyway, this book is a lot of things: a reflection on an imaginary life, a faux biography, and a moral we could all probably take to heart. And we do get to find out what Bluebeard keeps in his potato barn. It's a darned big thing.
The only person I've ever met whose favorite Vonnegut book is Bluebeard is... me. So it goes.
The book follows former abstract expressionist painter Rabo Karabekian, serving as his autobiography and a mystery story simultaneously. The mystery? What is Rabo keeping in the huge potato barn on his large estate.
Some of you may remember Mr. Karabekian from Breakfast of Champions; he was largely the same character, albeit younger in years. He's famous for his paintings, you see: he would take huge canvases, spray paint them all one color, and put pieces of colored tape on them.
There's several jokes regarding Rabo's paintings, one of which he gave away in Breakfast: his work is Rabo's view of the human soul. When you strip away all of the unnecessary crap that makes us up, we're all basically glowing shafts of light, represented by the pieces of tape.
I won't give away the other joke, but it's a good one.
Anyway, this book is a lot of things: a reflection on an imaginary life, a faux biography, and a moral we could all probably take to heart. And we do get to find out what Bluebeard keeps in his potato barn. It's a darned big thing.
October 13, 2019
“Everything about life is a joke. Don't you know that?”
From beginning to end, Bluebeard has Kurt Vonnegut written all over it. His irreverent tone, summed up in the quote above, along with his concomitant exploration of what it means to be human, brings together familiar themes in Vonnegut’s work. Bluebeard is the mock autobiography of abstract expressionist painter, Rabo Karabekian, a character who first appeared in Breakfast of Champions. This is a book about what art is and what it can do in a society in which, according to Karabekian, “the young people of today seemed to be trying to get through life with as little information as possible.”
For Karabekian, such information offers a connection to humanity and all of its symbols and cultural artifacts. It thus goes to the heart of what it means to be an artist. However, best-selling popular writer, Circe Berman (who moves in with Karabekian) tells him that such knowledge is useless. Their relationship reflects a debate between high and low culture. It is no surprise then that Karabekian and Berman have a very different view of the abstract expressionism Karabekian espouses. Karabekian is repeatedly asked to explain what his art is about. However, in a response that works for the artist as well as the writer, he repeatedly maintains that the artist doesn’t owe it to the public to give them what they want. What’s really wanted is a challenge.
Not sure how I’ll place it with other Vonnegut classics, but I really enjoyed Bluebeard! 4.5 stars
“The darkest secret of this country, I am afraid, is that too many of its citizens imagine that they belong to a much higher civilization somewhere else. That higher civilization doesn’t have to be another country. It can be the past instead—the United States as it was before it was spoiled by immigrants and the enfranchisement of the blacks.”
From Bluebeard (1987)
August 8, 2019
This is Vonnegut, so it’s quirky, knowing, silly, intelligent, funny, mysterious (what IS in the potato barn?) and anti-war – amongst many other things. It's conversational, and broken into very short chunks, but don't be deceived into thinking it's lightweight.
It claims to be the autobiography of Rabo Karabekian, an Armenian-American WW2 veteran who became a major figure in Abstract Expressionism, after an apprenticeship with realist illustrator, Dan Gregory. It reads more as a memoir, interspersed with “Bulletin from the present” sections which cover the eventful months he wrote it. The backstory is relatively straight; the present day, more comical. (All the main characters are fictitious, but a few real names are dropped, such as Jackson Pollock.)
It’s the 1980s, Rabo is in his 70s, and is living alone in a huge house in the Hamptons. He no longer paints, but is wealthy from his art collection and from property he inherited on the death of his second wife, Edith. He’s not actually alone, as his cook lives in, with her daughter, and his writer friend, Paul Slazenger, practically lives there. But he wants to be alone, or thinks he does – until it looks as if it’s going to happen (his mother thought “the most pervasive American disease was loneliness”). Then the widow Circe Berman turns up, and everything changes.
Image: abstract expressionist picture by Willem de Kooning, The Visit 1966–7. (Source.)
The Meaning and Value of Art
“How can you tell a good painting from a bad one? All you have to do… is look at a million paintings, and they you can never be mistaken.”
Should paintings – and their titles – communicate? (If not, what’s the point?) This is a recurring question, with a variety of answers. Old, lonely, and guarding his Abstract Expressionist paintings, Rabo says that they “are about absolutely nothing but themselves”, and lack of passion and message in his works was why he was rejected by art school. When Circe first sees his abstract works, she declares “you hate facts like poison”. And yet Rabo CAN draw – very well; the fact he doesn’t is “because it’s just too fucking easy.”
In contrast, Dan Gregory’s works are hyper-realistic, and Rabo describes them as “truthful about material things, but they lied about time” because Dan was “a taxidermist… [of] great moments”. One of the first things he taught Rabo was the importance of the phrase “The Emperor has no clothes”. It’s for the reader to decide which art that applies to.
There is a visceral thrill: “I discovered something as powerful and irresponsible as shooting up with heroin: if I start laying on just one colour of paint to a huge canvas, I could make the whole world drop away”. But it doesn’t work like that for everyone: of one artist, “I would look into his eyes and there wasn’t anybody home any more”, and he says similar about someone else.
Inflated art prices (and exploitative venture capitalists and investment bankers) are lampooned, especially by the fact that “My paintings, thanks to unforeseen chemical reactions… all destroyed themselves”, including ones that sold for $20,000. Sateen Dura-Luxe proved to be anything but durable. In contrast, his teenage works were made with the best possible materials, given to him from the stores of a successful artist.
Writing is another art form central to the narrative: Rabo is now writing; his friends Circe Berman and Paul Slazenger are also writers, of varying success, and the letters of Dan Gregory’s PA, Marilee, are crucial to the story. The secret is “to write for just one person”. How you decide who that is, is unclear.
Circe Berman
The widow Berman is a wonderful comic creation; I’d love to meet her, though hate to share a home with her. Her opening line on meeting Rabo is “Tell me how your parents died”, because “hello” means “don’t talk about anything important”. It’s also symptomatic of her pathological inquisitiveness (“the most ferocious enemy of privacy I ever knew”). His father died alone in a cinema, and she immediately asks “What was the movie?” – shades of Graham Greene’s short story, A Shocking Incident.
Her chutzpah is breath-taking – the way she storms into Rabo’s life and takes control of him, his house, his time and those around him. He is staggered, outraged… and compliant: “’Who is she to reward and punish me, and what the hell is this: a nursery school or a prison camp?’ I don’t asker that, because she might take away all my privileges.”
Bluebeard and What's in the Potato Barn
I read this book because I wanted to read another Vonnegut, and I was intrigued to see to what extent the title reflected the traditional story of Bluebeard (see my review of Angela Carter's version HERE), or even its echoes in Jane Eyre (see my review HERE).
It’s a gentle nod, but it helps if you’re aware of the original: In the grounds, Rabo has a potato barn that used to be his studio. It is now locked up, and its contents secret: “I am Bluebeard, and my studio is my forbidden chamber”, but “there are no bodies in my barn”.
Much of the book is an elaborate tease as to what’s in there, why, and whether the reader will ever find out. In contrast to his allegedly message-less paintings, Rabo says that the barn contains “the emptiest and yet the fullest of human messages”.
There are other forbidden places: Dan Gregory’s is the Museum Of Modern Art, Paul Slazenger’s is his Theory of Revolution, currently in his head, and Circe Berman must have something, but I don’t know what or where.
War, Death, and Resurrection
The main character is an injured veteran who came to the US as a child refugee from another war. It’s not a ranting pacifist book, and Rabo himself has fond memories of the army, but Vonnegut’s anti-war opinions shine through, especially at the end. Sometimes this is poignant: Rabo is utterly repulsed by the scarring around his missing eye, and always wears a patch. Sometimes it is more satirical: WW2 was promoted to Americans on promises of “a final war between good and evil, so that nothing would do but that it be followed by miracles, Instant coffee was one. DDT was another. It was going to kill all the bugs, and almost did. Nuclear energy was going to make electricity so cheap that it might not even be metered… Antibiotics would defeat all diseases. Lazarus would never die: How was that for a scheme to make the Son of God obsolete?”
In fact, it’s Rabo who is Lazarus. Circe explicitly says so when he complains about her intrusion into and control of him, “I brought you back to life… You’re my Lazarus”, and his beloved second wife, Edith, had had a similar effect.
As a youth, Rabo assumed society had evolved so that people would no longer be fooled by the apparent romance of war, but as an old man, he observes “you can buy a machine gun with a plastic bayonet for your little kid”.
The Inimitable Dan Gregory (Refrain)
The central third of the book feels as much like a biography of Dan Gregory as of Rabo.
Where Slaughterhouse Five has the recurring phrase “so it goes”, in this, it’s a series of superlatives about Dan Gregory: “Nobody could [do x] like Dan Gregory”. His achievements include: “draw cheap, mail-order clothes”, “paint grime”, “counterfeit rust and rust-stained oak”, “counterfeit plant diseases”, “counterfeit more accents from stage, screen and radio”, “counterfeit images in dusty mirrors”, “paint black people”, “put more of the excitement of a single moment into the eyes of stuffed animals”.
Quotes
• “Never trust a survivor… until you find out what he did to stay alive.”
• “Perfectly beautiful cowboy boots… dazzling jewelry for manly feet.”
• “She had life. I had accumulated anecdotes.”
• Old canvases “Purged of every trace of Sateen Dura-Luxe, and restretched and reprimed… dazzling white in their restored virginity.”
• “They are a negation of art! They aren’t just neutral. They are black holes from which no intelligence or skill can ever escape. Worse than that, they suck up the dignity, the self-respect, of anybody unfortunate enough to have to look at them.” (What Rabo thinks of Circe’s choice of pictures.)
Suggested by Rand, as being in a similar vein to Vonnegut's excellent Galapogos (see my review HERE).
It claims to be the autobiography of Rabo Karabekian, an Armenian-American WW2 veteran who became a major figure in Abstract Expressionism, after an apprenticeship with realist illustrator, Dan Gregory. It reads more as a memoir, interspersed with “Bulletin from the present” sections which cover the eventful months he wrote it. The backstory is relatively straight; the present day, more comical. (All the main characters are fictitious, but a few real names are dropped, such as Jackson Pollock.)
It’s the 1980s, Rabo is in his 70s, and is living alone in a huge house in the Hamptons. He no longer paints, but is wealthy from his art collection and from property he inherited on the death of his second wife, Edith. He’s not actually alone, as his cook lives in, with her daughter, and his writer friend, Paul Slazenger, practically lives there. But he wants to be alone, or thinks he does – until it looks as if it’s going to happen (his mother thought “the most pervasive American disease was loneliness”). Then the widow Circe Berman turns up, and everything changes.
Image: abstract expressionist picture by Willem de Kooning, The Visit 1966–7. (Source.)
The Meaning and Value of Art
“How can you tell a good painting from a bad one? All you have to do… is look at a million paintings, and they you can never be mistaken.”
Should paintings – and their titles – communicate? (If not, what’s the point?) This is a recurring question, with a variety of answers. Old, lonely, and guarding his Abstract Expressionist paintings, Rabo says that they “are about absolutely nothing but themselves”, and lack of passion and message in his works was why he was rejected by art school. When Circe first sees his abstract works, she declares “you hate facts like poison”. And yet Rabo CAN draw – very well; the fact he doesn’t is “because it’s just too fucking easy.”
In contrast, Dan Gregory’s works are hyper-realistic, and Rabo describes them as “truthful about material things, but they lied about time” because Dan was “a taxidermist… [of] great moments”. One of the first things he taught Rabo was the importance of the phrase “The Emperor has no clothes”. It’s for the reader to decide which art that applies to.
There is a visceral thrill: “I discovered something as powerful and irresponsible as shooting up with heroin: if I start laying on just one colour of paint to a huge canvas, I could make the whole world drop away”. But it doesn’t work like that for everyone: of one artist, “I would look into his eyes and there wasn’t anybody home any more”, and he says similar about someone else.
Inflated art prices (and exploitative venture capitalists and investment bankers) are lampooned, especially by the fact that “My paintings, thanks to unforeseen chemical reactions… all destroyed themselves”, including ones that sold for $20,000. Sateen Dura-Luxe proved to be anything but durable. In contrast, his teenage works were made with the best possible materials, given to him from the stores of a successful artist.
Writing is another art form central to the narrative: Rabo is now writing; his friends Circe Berman and Paul Slazenger are also writers, of varying success, and the letters of Dan Gregory’s PA, Marilee, are crucial to the story. The secret is “to write for just one person”. How you decide who that is, is unclear.
Circe Berman
The widow Berman is a wonderful comic creation; I’d love to meet her, though hate to share a home with her. Her opening line on meeting Rabo is “Tell me how your parents died”, because “hello” means “don’t talk about anything important”. It’s also symptomatic of her pathological inquisitiveness (“the most ferocious enemy of privacy I ever knew”). His father died alone in a cinema, and she immediately asks “What was the movie?” – shades of Graham Greene’s short story, A Shocking Incident.
Her chutzpah is breath-taking – the way she storms into Rabo’s life and takes control of him, his house, his time and those around him. He is staggered, outraged… and compliant: “’Who is she to reward and punish me, and what the hell is this: a nursery school or a prison camp?’ I don’t asker that, because she might take away all my privileges.”
Bluebeard and What's in the Potato Barn
I read this book because I wanted to read another Vonnegut, and I was intrigued to see to what extent the title reflected the traditional story of Bluebeard (see my review of Angela Carter's version HERE), or even its echoes in Jane Eyre (see my review HERE).
It’s a gentle nod, but it helps if you’re aware of the original: In the grounds, Rabo has a potato barn that used to be his studio. It is now locked up, and its contents secret: “I am Bluebeard, and my studio is my forbidden chamber”, but “there are no bodies in my barn”.
Much of the book is an elaborate tease as to what’s in there, why, and whether the reader will ever find out. In contrast to his allegedly message-less paintings, Rabo says that the barn contains “the emptiest and yet the fullest of human messages”.
There are other forbidden places: Dan Gregory’s is the Museum Of Modern Art, Paul Slazenger’s is his Theory of Revolution, currently in his head, and Circe Berman must have something, but I don’t know what or where.
War, Death, and Resurrection
The main character is an injured veteran who came to the US as a child refugee from another war. It’s not a ranting pacifist book, and Rabo himself has fond memories of the army, but Vonnegut’s anti-war opinions shine through, especially at the end. Sometimes this is poignant: Rabo is utterly repulsed by the scarring around his missing eye, and always wears a patch. Sometimes it is more satirical: WW2 was promoted to Americans on promises of “a final war between good and evil, so that nothing would do but that it be followed by miracles, Instant coffee was one. DDT was another. It was going to kill all the bugs, and almost did. Nuclear energy was going to make electricity so cheap that it might not even be metered… Antibiotics would defeat all diseases. Lazarus would never die: How was that for a scheme to make the Son of God obsolete?”
In fact, it’s Rabo who is Lazarus. Circe explicitly says so when he complains about her intrusion into and control of him, “I brought you back to life… You’re my Lazarus”, and his beloved second wife, Edith, had had a similar effect.
As a youth, Rabo assumed society had evolved so that people would no longer be fooled by the apparent romance of war, but as an old man, he observes “you can buy a machine gun with a plastic bayonet for your little kid”.
The Inimitable Dan Gregory (Refrain)
The central third of the book feels as much like a biography of Dan Gregory as of Rabo.
Where Slaughterhouse Five has the recurring phrase “so it goes”, in this, it’s a series of superlatives about Dan Gregory: “Nobody could [do x] like Dan Gregory”. His achievements include: “draw cheap, mail-order clothes”, “paint grime”, “counterfeit rust and rust-stained oak”, “counterfeit plant diseases”, “counterfeit more accents from stage, screen and radio”, “counterfeit images in dusty mirrors”, “paint black people”, “put more of the excitement of a single moment into the eyes of stuffed animals”.
Quotes
• “Never trust a survivor… until you find out what he did to stay alive.”
• “Perfectly beautiful cowboy boots… dazzling jewelry for manly feet.”
• “She had life. I had accumulated anecdotes.”
• Old canvases “Purged of every trace of Sateen Dura-Luxe, and restretched and reprimed… dazzling white in their restored virginity.”
• “They are a negation of art! They aren’t just neutral. They are black holes from which no intelligence or skill can ever escape. Worse than that, they suck up the dignity, the self-respect, of anybody unfortunate enough to have to look at them.” (What Rabo thinks of Circe’s choice of pictures.)
Suggested by Rand, as being in a similar vein to Vonnegut's excellent Galapogos (see my review HERE).
April 28, 2023
Poate vreți să experimentați o non epifanie și nu știți cum. Atunci să-l luăm pe Vonnegut ca magistru...
Nu e puțin lucru să izbucnești în rîs la (aproape) fiecare paragraf. Umorul lui Kurt Vonnegut e devastator. Îl admir de mai bine de 3 decenii. Despre ce e vorba în Barbă Albastră? Firește, firește, de o cămară secretă, ca în povestea lui Charles Perrault. Există, totuși, o mică diferență între roman și poveste. De data aceasta, Barbă Albastră (alias pictorul Rabo Karabekian) se lasă convins să deschidă ușa cămării interzise. Dar ceea ce vede însoțitoarea lui Rabo (prozatoarea Circe Berman) este și mai terifiant decît ceea ce a văzut soția lui Barbă Albastră.
Dacă vă plac umorul, salturile temporale și întorsăturile destinului, nu pregetați să citiți romanul lui Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Ați trăit vreodată o non-epifanie? Cum, nu știți ce înseamnă o non-epifanie? Atunci studiați cu atenție acest pasaj: „Personal n-am avut nevoie de nici un fel de instrucțiuni din partea femeii mai în vîrstă ca mine și mai experimentată [Marilee Kemp, n.m.]. Am nimerit ținta, am nimerit ținta și iar am nimerit ținta!” A trăi o astfel de întîmplare, precizează prietenul lui Rabo, Terry Kitchen, înseamnă „a experimenta o non-epifanie”...
P. S. Un amănunt anecdotic: în data de 22 august 2012, prolifica Amélie Nothomb a publicat (două sute de mii de exemplare, primul tiraj!) un roman de enorm succes cu titlul Barbă Albastră, tradus instantaneu în 46 de limbi și elogiat prompt, în L’Express și Le Soir, de critici literari foarte versați.
Nu e puțin lucru să izbucnești în rîs la (aproape) fiecare paragraf. Umorul lui Kurt Vonnegut e devastator. Îl admir de mai bine de 3 decenii. Despre ce e vorba în Barbă Albastră? Firește, firește, de o cămară secretă, ca în povestea lui Charles Perrault. Există, totuși, o mică diferență între roman și poveste. De data aceasta, Barbă Albastră (alias pictorul Rabo Karabekian) se lasă convins să deschidă ușa cămării interzise. Dar ceea ce vede însoțitoarea lui Rabo (prozatoarea Circe Berman) este și mai terifiant decît ceea ce a văzut soția lui Barbă Albastră.
Dacă vă plac umorul, salturile temporale și întorsăturile destinului, nu pregetați să citiți romanul lui Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Ați trăit vreodată o non-epifanie? Cum, nu știți ce înseamnă o non-epifanie? Atunci studiați cu atenție acest pasaj: „Personal n-am avut nevoie de nici un fel de instrucțiuni din partea femeii mai în vîrstă ca mine și mai experimentată [Marilee Kemp, n.m.]. Am nimerit ținta, am nimerit ținta și iar am nimerit ținta!” A trăi o astfel de întîmplare, precizează prietenul lui Rabo, Terry Kitchen, înseamnă „a experimenta o non-epifanie”...
P. S. Un amănunt anecdotic: în data de 22 august 2012, prolifica Amélie Nothomb a publicat (două sute de mii de exemplare, primul tiraj!) un roman de enorm succes cu titlul Barbă Albastră, tradus instantaneu în 46 de limbi și elogiat prompt, în L’Express și Le Soir, de critici literari foarte versați.
March 17, 2017
“What a fool I would have been to let self-respect interfere with my happiness!”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Bluebeard
A pseudo memoir of Rabo Karabekian a minor Abstract Expressionist whose art literally disappeared (thanks to a poor choice in paints). It is hard to relay what the book essentially is, but obviously it is an autobiography of an almost loner, a hermit with a roommate. He lives in his big house in the Hamptons among the art he bought cheap (Rothkos, Pollocks, etc) years ago. He is being bullied into writing his memoirs by Polly Madison, a writer of cheap blockbuster novels. At its heart, this novel is Vonnegut working his way through some of his previous big themes (war, isolation, humanism, pacifism) along with explorations of art, commerce, &c.
This isn't one of his better novels, but is firmly in the middle of the pack. I personally wish Vonnegut spent more time playing with the artistic canvas, but the sections he spent dealing with Rabo apprenticing under Dan Gregory (I get a N.C. Wyeth or Howard Pyle vibe), a very popular illustrator, is worth the entire cost of reading anything clunky in some of the other sections.
― Kurt Vonnegut, Bluebeard
A pseudo memoir of Rabo Karabekian a minor Abstract Expressionist whose art literally disappeared (thanks to a poor choice in paints). It is hard to relay what the book essentially is, but obviously it is an autobiography of an almost loner, a hermit with a roommate. He lives in his big house in the Hamptons among the art he bought cheap (Rothkos, Pollocks, etc) years ago. He is being bullied into writing his memoirs by Polly Madison, a writer of cheap blockbuster novels. At its heart, this novel is Vonnegut working his way through some of his previous big themes (war, isolation, humanism, pacifism) along with explorations of art, commerce, &c.
This isn't one of his better novels, but is firmly in the middle of the pack. I personally wish Vonnegut spent more time playing with the artistic canvas, but the sections he spent dealing with Rabo apprenticing under Dan Gregory (I get a N.C. Wyeth or Howard Pyle vibe), a very popular illustrator, is worth the entire cost of reading anything clunky in some of the other sections.
February 7, 2017
Όλη η ουσία κρυμμένη στο μυστικό της κλειδαμπαρωμένης παλιάς παταταποθήκης.
Μέχρι να αποκαλυφθεί το μυστήριο του Κυανοπώγωνα μπαίνουμε σε μια ιστορία ζωής παράδοξη και συμβατή με παγιωμένες αντιπολεμικές απόψεις,τραυματικά βιώματα και την αυτοκαταστροφή της καλλιτεχνικής ψυχής στο βωμό της Τέχνης.
Ο αφηγητής μας είναι ένας μονόφθαλμος βετεράνος του Β´παγκοσμίου πολέμου,γεννημένος απο γονείς που επιβίωσαν στην γενοκτονία των Αρμενίων και έζησαν ως μετανάστες στην Αμερική.
Ο ίδιος ένας αποτυχημένος ζωγράφος,φρικτός σύζυγος και απαράδεκτος πατέρας δυστυχώς κατανοεί πλήρως την ανεπάρκεια του σε όλους τους τομείς της ζωής και ζει απομονωμένος σε μια εξοχική πολυτελέστατη κατοικία 19 δωματίων με ιδιωτική παραλία,την οποία έχει μετατρέψει σε μουσείο για τα έργα των φίλων του. Όλοι οι υποτιθέμενοι φίλοι του ήταν στην μεταπολεμική Αμερική καλλιτέχνες του αφηρημένου εξπρεσιονισμού.
Όταν το κίνημα του αφηρημένου εξπρεσιονισμού θα αναγνωριστεί επισήμως,εκείνος ως κορυφαίος συλλέκτης θα αποκτήσει περιουσία εκατομμυρίων και ακράδαντη πεποίθηση πως δεν υπάρχει κανένα νόημα στην γερασμένη αναμονή.. για την έναρξη της αληθινής ζωής και των ανεκπλήρωτων προσδοκιών.
Στο φθινόπωρο της ζωής του είναι πάμπλουτος και συνειδητοποιημένος πως στο ατελιέ της ψυχής του δεν υπάρχει πλέον κανένα ουσιώδες έργο τέχνης.
Το ταξίδι μας γίνεται αναχρονιστικά στην Αμερική της οικονομικής κρίσης του '30, στην μεταπολεμική Αμερική της απαξίωσης του '50 και στην Αμερική του '80 και της κλεμμένης ιστορίας και νοοτροπίας.
Είναι μια θλιβερή ιστορία με χιούμορ.
Υπάρχει και ...«ένας πόλεμος για κάθε πελάτη».
Ξεκινάμε απο την γενοκτονία των Αρμενίων,προχωράμε στη φασιστική Ιταλία και τα αίσχη,συνεχίζουμε με το μακελειό του Β´παγκοσμίου πολέμου και τις εξελίξεις που μπορεί να επιφέρει η αιματοχυσία του πλανήτη,ακολουθεί η βαρβαρότητα του Πολέμου της Κορέας και απο πίσω της ο Πόλεμος του Βιετνάμ κατεβάζει για λίγο την αυλαία στο θέατρο της τραγικότητας της ύπαρξης.
Η φρίκη για τον άγριο και άδικο θάνατο καθώς και η παράνοια και η αυτοχειρία ως μέσω λύτρωσης στις ευαίσθητες και πολυτάλαντες ψυχές, αντιπαρατίθενται με το χιούμορ,την ειρωνία και τον εύστοχο σαρκασμό σε όλη την διάρκεια και την εξέλιξη της πλοκής.
Με κούρασαν οι αναφορές στις ιδιότητες της τέχνης ως μέσο επικοινωνιακό ή αυτόκλητο και μοναχικό.
Δεν κατάφερα να κατανοήσω αν πρέπει τελικά να αξιολογώ την τέχνη ως ανώτερη αναλόγως με την ρεαλιστική ή την αφηρημένη μορφή της,σύμφωνα με τον συγγραφέα.
Με όχημα το μαύρο χιούμορ και τις ανθρωπιστικές αξίες μας οδηγεί μέσα στους πολέμους,την ανέχεια,την περιορισμένη ευθύνη της αυτογνωσίας και την αξιοθαύμαστη επιρροή της τέχνης στην ανθρώπινη ύπαρξη.
Ευκολοδιάβαστο και με θλιβερά πικρό νόημα το βιβλίο τούτο.
Παρόλα αυτά δεν ικανοποίησε τα λάγνα αναγνωστικά μου ένστικτα.
Δεν κατάφερε να κορυφώσει τις αναγνωστικές μου εμμονές!
Καλή ανάγνωση
Πολλούς ασπασμούς.
Μέχρι να αποκαλυφθεί το μυστήριο του Κυανοπώγωνα μπαίνουμε σε μια ιστορία ζωής παράδοξη και συμβατή με παγιωμένες αντιπολεμικές απόψεις,τραυματικά βιώματα και την αυτοκαταστροφή της καλλιτεχνικής ψυχής στο βωμό της Τέχνης.
Ο αφηγητής μας είναι ένας μονόφθαλμος βετεράνος του Β´παγκοσμίου πολέμου,γεννημένος απο γονείς που επιβίωσαν στην γενοκτονία των Αρμενίων και έζησαν ως μετανάστες στην Αμερική.
Ο ίδιος ένας αποτυχημένος ζωγράφος,φρικτός σύζυγος και απαράδεκτος πατέρας δυστυχώς κατανοεί πλήρως την ανεπάρκεια του σε όλους τους τομείς της ζωής και ζει απομονωμένος σε μια εξοχική πολυτελέστατη κατοικία 19 δωματίων με ιδιωτική παραλία,την οποία έχει μετατρέψει σε μουσείο για τα έργα των φίλων του. Όλοι οι υποτιθέμενοι φίλοι του ήταν στην μεταπολεμική Αμερική καλλιτέχνες του αφηρημένου εξπρεσιονισμού.
Όταν το κίνημα του αφηρημένου εξπρεσιονισμού θα αναγνωριστεί επισήμως,εκείνος ως κορυφαίος συλλέκτης θα αποκτήσει περιουσία εκατομμυρίων και ακράδαντη πεποίθηση πως δεν υπάρχει κανένα νόημα στην γερασμένη αναμονή.. για την έναρξη της αληθινής ζωής και των ανεκπλήρωτων προσδοκιών.
Στο φθινόπωρο της ζωής του είναι πάμπλουτος και συνειδητοποιημένος πως στο ατελιέ της ψυχής του δεν υπάρχει πλέον κανένα ουσιώδες έργο τέχνης.
Το ταξίδι μας γίνεται αναχρονιστικά στην Αμερική της οικονομικής κρίσης του '30, στην μεταπολεμική Αμερική της απαξίωσης του '50 και στην Αμερική του '80 και της κλεμμένης ιστορίας και νοοτροπίας.
Είναι μια θλιβερή ιστορία με χιούμορ.
Υπάρχει και ...«ένας πόλεμος για κάθε πελάτη».
Ξεκινάμε απο την γενοκτονία των Αρμενίων,προχωράμε στη φασιστική Ιταλία και τα αίσχη,συνεχίζουμε με το μακελειό του Β´παγκοσμίου πολέμου και τις εξελίξεις που μπορεί να επιφέρει η αιματοχυσία του πλανήτη,ακολουθεί η βαρβαρότητα του Πολέμου της Κορέας και απο πίσω της ο Πόλεμος του Βιετνάμ κατεβάζει για λίγο την αυλαία στο θέατρο της τραγικότητας της ύπαρξης.
Η φρίκη για τον άγριο και άδικο θάνατο καθώς και η παράνοια και η αυτοχειρία ως μέσω λύτρωσης στις ευαίσθητες και πολυτάλαντες ψυχές, αντιπαρατίθενται με το χιούμορ,την ειρωνία και τον εύστοχο σαρκασμό σε όλη την διάρκεια και την εξέλιξη της πλοκής.
Με κούρασαν οι αναφορές στις ιδιότητες της τέχνης ως μέσο επικοινωνιακό ή αυτόκλητο και μοναχικό.
Δεν κατάφερα να κατανοήσω αν πρέπει τελικά να αξιολογώ την τέχνη ως ανώτερη αναλόγως με την ρεαλιστική ή την αφηρημένη μορφή της,σύμφωνα με τον συγγραφέα.
Με όχημα το μαύρο χιούμορ και τις ανθρωπιστικές αξίες μας οδηγεί μέσα στους πολέμους,την ανέχεια,την περιορισμένη ευθύνη της αυτογνωσίας και την αξιοθαύμαστη επιρροή της τέχνης στην ανθρώπινη ύπαρξη.
Ευκολοδιάβαστο και με θλιβερά πικρό νόημα το βιβλίο τούτο.
Παρόλα αυτά δεν ικανοποίησε τα λάγνα αναγνωστικά μου ένστικτα.
Δεν κατάφερε να κορυφώσει τις αναγνωστικές μου εμμονές!
Καλή ανάγνωση
Πολλούς ασπασμούς.
June 26, 2024
«Синя Борода», можливо, мій улюблений роман Курта Воннеґута. Звісно, я ще не прочитала всі тексти класика, але вже можу складати власний рейтинг. І «Синя Борода» впевнено обійняла перше місце. Через легкість й дотепність, тому, що цю книжку не хочеться відкладати, з цим сюжетом хочеться бути ще і ще, він манить і затягує.
Це книжка-автобіографія, у якій художник Рабо Карабекян фрагмент за фрагментом складає пазл власної біографії. Він пише епізод, а потім щось його відволікає, а потім він повертається назад до основної оповіді, а далі якісь міркування відтягують його увагу, а ще розповіді про друзів-письменників й друзів-художників, тих, хто впливав безпосередньо чи опосередковано на світовідчуття Рабо.
Якось Рабо зустрів на пляжі жінку-письменницю Цірцею, яка спровокувала його (але зрештою він зізнається, що прагнув такої провокації, а її компанія дає йому відчуття життя) зайнятися нарешті чимось корисним… і написати про своє життя. Він ведеться на цю провокацію й крок за кроком намагається зрозуміти, а що ж з ним відбувалося протягом 70-ти років. Тож ця автобіографія – це:
- спроба поміркувати про батьків-еміґрантів, які втікали від геноциду вірмен й так і не стали своїми в Америці;
- міркування про усвідомлення себе вірменином поза батьківщиною і мовою;
- шлях хлопчика, який мріє бути художником, до вчителя й інструментів, до визнання й винагороди;
- доля художника-авангардиста, якого так і не зрозуміла власна родина, але якому хотілося безупинно творити і знаходити способи говоріння;
- дім колекціонера сучасного мистецтва, який одноосібно насолоджувався своїм багатством, бо ніхто не міг сповна оцінити унікальність робіт та винятковість колекції;
- страх самотності й самотність, неможливість бути з іншою людиною і усвідомлення, чому інші люди не можуть бути з тобою (не лише у шлюбі, хоча і там теж);
- привид Другої світової, який повсякчас нависає над тим, хто бачив перемоги, поразки і полон (за ініціативою Рабо зʼявився цілий камуфляжний підрозділ, бо краще ніж художники ніхто не впорається із цим заваднням: «Ми так добре робили камуфляж, що половину того, що ми ховали від противника, і до сьогодні ще не знайшли!»);
- можливість поставити питання про те, що таке мистецтво і доки художник може називатися художником, якщо не займається мистецькою практикою («Вона ніколи не бачила, щоб я малював, — бо я гадав, що відмова від малювання і всього, що я знав про живопис, дасть мені магічний ключ, завдяки якому я зроблюся серйозним художником»).
У героя казки про Синю Бороду була кімната з секретом, а у Рабо Карабекяна секретів дуже багато і більшість з них ми так і не розгадаємо. Чому? Бо оповідач сам Рабо, але чи можемо ми йому довіритися? Це зовсім не спойлер, що він зрештою відкриє для Цірцеї свою картопляну комору, бо спойлером було би, якби я розповіла, що ж там усередині за твір (це відкриття – вишенька на торті життя Карабекяна, вишенька, яка була з ним завжди).
У книжці є багато гарних візуальних рішень, які пропонують ще один шар метафор. Колба на обкладинці наповнена синьою фарбою (сейтін-дюра-люкс), бо остання «важлива» (і прекрасна, і ганебна) робота Карабекяна – «Віндзорський синій
номер сімнадцять» (це назва фарби і водночас суто роботи), банки синього ніколи не завершуються, їх навіть у самій книжці вдосталь. А ще у колбі з обкладинки безліч іграшок, якими була наповнена майстерня Дена Ґреґорі – славетного художника, на якого взорувався Карабекян, у якого він вчився, якого він боявся, якого він прагнув перевершити.
«Вона каже, що художникам слід наймати письменників, які вигадували б назви для їхніх картин. Ось назви кар��ин, що висять у мене на стінах: «Опус номер дев’ять», «Синій і палений помаранчевий» тощо. Моє власне славетне полотно, якого більше не існує, мало розмір аж шістдесят чотири фути завдовжки і вісім футів заввишки і прикрашало вестибюль штаб-квартири компанії GEFFCo на Парк-Авеню, і називалося воно просто «Віндзорський синій номер сімнадцять». Віндзорський синій — це був відтінок фарби сейтін-дюра-люкс, прямо з бляшанки.
— Назви не повинні бути комунікативними, — сказав я.
— Який сенс жити, — відрекла вона, — якщо ви не збираєтеся здійснювати комунікацію?»
Це книжка-автобіографія, у якій художник Рабо Карабекян фрагмент за фрагментом складає пазл власної біографії. Він пише епізод, а потім щось його відволікає, а потім він повертається назад до основної оповіді, а далі якісь міркування відтягують його увагу, а ще розповіді про друзів-письменників й друзів-художників, тих, хто впливав безпосередньо чи опосередковано на світовідчуття Рабо.
Якось Рабо зустрів на пляжі жінку-письменницю Цірцею, яка спровокувала його (але зрештою він зізнається, що прагнув такої провокації, а її компанія дає йому відчуття життя) зайнятися нарешті чимось корисним… і написати про своє життя. Він ведеться на цю провокацію й крок за кроком намагається зрозуміти, а що ж з ним відбувалося протягом 70-ти років. Тож ця автобіографія – це:
- спроба поміркувати про батьків-еміґрантів, які втікали від геноциду вірмен й так і не стали своїми в Америці;
- міркування про усвідомлення себе вірменином поза батьківщиною і мовою;
- шлях хлопчика, який мріє бути художником, до вчителя й інструментів, до визнання й винагороди;
- доля художника-авангардиста, якого так і не зрозуміла власна родина, але якому хотілося безупинно творити і знаходити способи говоріння;
- дім колекціонера сучасного мистецтва, який одноосібно насолоджувався своїм багатством, бо ніхто не міг сповна оцінити унікальність робіт та винятковість колекції;
- страх самотності й самотність, неможливість бути з іншою людиною і усвідомлення, чому інші люди не можуть бути з тобою (не лише у шлюбі, хоча і там теж);
- привид Другої світової, який повсякчас нависає над тим, хто бачив перемоги, поразки і полон (за ініціативою Рабо зʼявився цілий камуфляжний підрозділ, бо краще ніж художники ніхто не впорається із цим заваднням: «Ми так добре робили камуфляж, що половину того, що ми ховали від противника, і до сьогодні ще не знайшли!»);
- можливість поставити питання про те, що таке мистецтво і доки художник може називатися художником, якщо не займається мистецькою практикою («Вона ніколи не бачила, щоб я малював, — бо я гадав, що відмова від малювання і всього, що я знав про живопис, дасть мені магічний ключ, завдяки якому я зроблюся серйозним художником»).
У героя казки про Синю Бороду була кімната з секретом, а у Рабо Карабекяна секретів дуже багато і більшість з них ми так і не розгадаємо. Чому? Бо оповідач сам Рабо, але чи можемо ми йому довіритися? Це зовсім не спойлер, що він зрештою відкриє для Цірцеї свою картопляну комору, бо спойлером було би, якби я розповіла, що ж там усередині за твір (це відкриття – вишенька на торті життя Карабекяна, вишенька, яка була з ним завжди).
У книжці є багато гарних візуальних рішень, які пропонують ще один шар метафор. Колба на обкладинці наповнена синьою фарбою (сейтін-дюра-люкс), бо остання «важлива» (і прекрасна, і ганебна) робота Карабекяна – «Віндзорський синій
номер сімнадцять» (це назва фарби і водночас суто роботи), банки синього ніколи не завершуються, їх навіть у самій книжці вдосталь. А ще у колбі з обкладинки безліч іграшок, якими була наповнена майстерня Дена Ґреґорі – славетного художника, на якого взорувався Карабекян, у якого він вчився, якого він боявся, якого він прагнув перевершити.
«Вона каже, що художникам слід наймати письменників, які вигадували б назви для їхніх картин. Ось назви кар��ин, що висять у мене на стінах: «Опус номер дев’ять», «Синій і палений помаранчевий» тощо. Моє власне славетне полотно, якого більше не існує, мало розмір аж шістдесят чотири фути завдовжки і вісім футів заввишки і прикрашало вестибюль штаб-квартири компанії GEFFCo на Парк-Авеню, і називалося воно просто «Віндзорський синій номер сімнадцять». Віндзорський синій — це був відтінок фарби сейтін-дюра-люкс, прямо з бляшанки.
— Назви не повинні бути комунікативними, — сказав я.
— Який сенс жити, — відрекла вона, — якщо ви не збираєтеся здійснювати комунікацію?»
February 5, 2016
Kurt Vonnegut wrote so many books that sometimes a real gem gets lost in the shuffle. "Bluebeard" is just such a novel. I don't know many people who have read it, and that is simply a shame! It is a unique text (it varies greatly from the so called "Vonnegut style") and is a pretty conventional narrative that deals with many of the standard Vonnegut themes in a more easily accessible manner.
The novel is the autobiography of an artist who has become a footnote in the history of Abstract Expressionism and the mid twentieth century art movement in the United States. He is a wealthy inhabitant of the Hamptons, the child of Armenian immigrants, and a man waiting for death. His name is Rabo Karabekian. He also has a secret locked under tight security in his potato barn. Those are all the plot points you are going to get from me.
With this rather simple premise, we are given an exploration of the usual Vonnegut fare: God (and man's connection to him) war (especially WW II) man's inhumanity to man, friendship, the accidental nature of life and love, and the power of that divine in all of us...the soul. No one can bring these disparate elements together in a manner more interesting than Kurt Vonnegut, and "Bluebeard' does so in a very pleasing and rather un-ironic (for Vonnegut) way.
"Bluebeard' is written as a sort of diary, from the first person perspective of the novel's protagonist, Rabo Karabekian, and is told in the conventional linear format, with flashbacks seemingly every other paragraph. For Mr. Vonnegut, that is linear! The text has its up and downs, and the reader experiences the highs and lows of Rabo's life. There are no "spectacular" moments that pop up in the book, just life moments, some good and some bad. The book builds to a climax that is the most uplifting and life affirming that I have come across, so far, in the Vonnegut oeuvre and I was stunned and pleased by it. It was unexpected, tidy, and very appropriate.
Life is good and ill mixed together, but that does not mean that we are not supposed to enjoy it, or be dismissive of its importance. Rather, we are to be as Rabo says, "A Lazarus". We all need from time to time to be woken from the dead dreary depression of life. Vonnegut seems to be saying that if we hang on to that hope, and practice it when we can then that is enough and we should be content. I think he might just be right.
The novel is the autobiography of an artist who has become a footnote in the history of Abstract Expressionism and the mid twentieth century art movement in the United States. He is a wealthy inhabitant of the Hamptons, the child of Armenian immigrants, and a man waiting for death. His name is Rabo Karabekian. He also has a secret locked under tight security in his potato barn. Those are all the plot points you are going to get from me.
With this rather simple premise, we are given an exploration of the usual Vonnegut fare: God (and man's connection to him) war (especially WW II) man's inhumanity to man, friendship, the accidental nature of life and love, and the power of that divine in all of us...the soul. No one can bring these disparate elements together in a manner more interesting than Kurt Vonnegut, and "Bluebeard' does so in a very pleasing and rather un-ironic (for Vonnegut) way.
"Bluebeard' is written as a sort of diary, from the first person perspective of the novel's protagonist, Rabo Karabekian, and is told in the conventional linear format, with flashbacks seemingly every other paragraph. For Mr. Vonnegut, that is linear! The text has its up and downs, and the reader experiences the highs and lows of Rabo's life. There are no "spectacular" moments that pop up in the book, just life moments, some good and some bad. The book builds to a climax that is the most uplifting and life affirming that I have come across, so far, in the Vonnegut oeuvre and I was stunned and pleased by it. It was unexpected, tidy, and very appropriate.
Life is good and ill mixed together, but that does not mean that we are not supposed to enjoy it, or be dismissive of its importance. Rather, we are to be as Rabo says, "A Lazarus". We all need from time to time to be woken from the dead dreary depression of life. Vonnegut seems to be saying that if we hang on to that hope, and practice it when we can then that is enough and we should be content. I think he might just be right.
June 4, 2013
This is maybe the fourth or fifth Vonnegut book I've read, having only been introduced to him recently, sadly. I'm becoming quite a fan of his writing. What I like about him is that a lot of deep truths mask the ironic and humorous statements he makes. Definitely a must-read for those who like satire.
May 12, 2024
"—simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but the world’s champions."
Nobody could spin a story like Kurt Vonnegut. The usual—Great Depression, WWII, New York City, a father estranged from his children, an inordinate sum of money—along with a potato barn in East Hampton. And a writer of young adult fiction. And a town called San Ignacio. And an illustrator fanboying for Mussolini. And God knows how many cans of Sateen Dura-Luxe. Full of writers not writing and painters not painting. No longer will the Hamptons call to mind only Grey Gardens and A Widow for One Year. Masterful!
November 12, 2018
Come Dancing
By the time I reached the last chapter of this novel, I realised that Kurt Vonnegut had taken me dancing, just as Rabo Karabekian had finally taken Mrs Circe Berman dancing.
Unforgettable!
71 year old Rabo sets off to write his autobiography, but soon discovers that it has equally become a diary of the summer of its writing in his elegant mansion on Long Island (inherited from his recently deceased second wife, Edith).
Rabo started his working life as a cartoonist and illustrator, devoted much of it to Abstract Expressionism (which he tired of) and ceased painting, but for one last work which tries to fill the gap between facile populist art ("They are a negation of art! They aren't just neutral. They are black holes from which no intelligence or skill can escape. Worse than that, they suck up the dignity, the self-respect, of anybody unfortunate enough to have to look at them") and post-modernist art works which aren't supposed to mean anything, and are "about absolutely nothing but themselves."
Self-Reflexiveness
There's a nice irony about this self-reflexiveness, because it's actually a concern of the novel itself, which is much more and far greater than a run of the mill work of white American male metafiction.
Rabo the illustrator and painter was an expert, if self-trained, draughtsman ("you could really draw"), a skill he largely abandoned, when he became part of the New York Abstract Expressionist movement. His work reflected meat, but not soul, and that ultimately is the principal concern of the narrative. How can Rabo get his soul/groove (his "pure essence of human wonder") back? The answer might be in the potato barn he has used for a studio.
The Anti-Modernist Mentor
Rabo's early mentor was Dan Gregory, a highly successful master of fake or counterfeit realism (much in the style of Norman Rockwell). His obituary describes him as "possibly the best-known American artist in history."
Gregory knew he had succeeded when he learned to pass a fake bank note for a real one. Gregory makes Rabo promise to learn by heart the sentence, "The Emperor has no clothes." He regards modern art (as found in the Museum of Modern Art) as "the work of swindlers and lunatics and degenerates."
How is that for trivia?
The Kitsch Writer
Circe Berman is actually a popular author of kitsch young adult novels that are "useful, frank and intelligent, but as literature hardly more than workmanlike" (under the pseudonym, Polly Madison), who is writing a biography of her deceased husband, Abe (a brain surgeon).
Rabo talks to her about the most pleasing aspects of being an artist. She asks if it is "having my first one-man show, getting a lot of money for a picture, the comradeship with fellow painters, being praised by a critic?"
Rabo asks Mrs Berman whether, for a writer, it is "getting great reviews, or a terrific advance, or selling a book to the movies, or seeing somebody reading your book?"
The Laying on of Paint
It's interesting to contrast painting and writing.
Rabo seems to emphasise the process of painting - the laying on of paint. Mrs Berman says it's handing in a finished manuscript and never wanting to see it again.
Regrettably, too many post-modernist authors rely more heavily on critical acclaim (or the acclaim of their coterie), especially those who derive their primary income from academia (or writing courses that duplicate their own style). "Nowadays, of course, every novelty is celebrated immediately as a masterpiece!"
Vonnegut, while claimed by post-modernists as one of their own when trying to assert the importance of their movement, is more often scorned because of his popular and commercial success, i.e., for developing a large and appreciative audience beyond the coterie/ the gang.
So be it.
There Ain't Nothing You Can't Do
Earlier, an art lecturer says to Rabo:
He adds:
Rabo's last painting remedies this defect, except that we can only perceive it in words. Initially, he describes it as a "watchamacallit". But eventually he tells us it is a portrait of a happy valley and the people who have been transported there at the end of the war in Europe.
Bluebeard
The title of the novel comes from a comment by Rabo to Mrs Berman:
But that's not where the novel ends.
Goodbye. It's your turn now.
SOUNDTRACK:
By the time I reached the last chapter of this novel, I realised that Kurt Vonnegut had taken me dancing, just as Rabo Karabekian had finally taken Mrs Circe Berman dancing.
Unforgettable!
71 year old Rabo sets off to write his autobiography, but soon discovers that it has equally become a diary of the summer of its writing in his elegant mansion on Long Island (inherited from his recently deceased second wife, Edith).
Rabo started his working life as a cartoonist and illustrator, devoted much of it to Abstract Expressionism (which he tired of) and ceased painting, but for one last work which tries to fill the gap between facile populist art ("They are a negation of art! They aren't just neutral. They are black holes from which no intelligence or skill can escape. Worse than that, they suck up the dignity, the self-respect, of anybody unfortunate enough to have to look at them") and post-modernist art works which aren't supposed to mean anything, and are "about absolutely nothing but themselves."
Self-Reflexiveness
There's a nice irony about this self-reflexiveness, because it's actually a concern of the novel itself, which is much more and far greater than a run of the mill work of white American male metafiction.
Rabo the illustrator and painter was an expert, if self-trained, draughtsman ("you could really draw"), a skill he largely abandoned, when he became part of the New York Abstract Expressionist movement. His work reflected meat, but not soul, and that ultimately is the principal concern of the narrative. How can Rabo get his soul/groove (his "pure essence of human wonder") back? The answer might be in the potato barn he has used for a studio.
The Anti-Modernist Mentor
Rabo's early mentor was Dan Gregory, a highly successful master of fake or counterfeit realism (much in the style of Norman Rockwell). His obituary describes him as "possibly the best-known American artist in history."
Gregory knew he had succeeded when he learned to pass a fake bank note for a real one. Gregory makes Rabo promise to learn by heart the sentence, "The Emperor has no clothes." He regards modern art (as found in the Museum of Modern Art) as "the work of swindlers and lunatics and degenerates."
How is that for trivia?
The Kitsch Writer
Circe Berman is actually a popular author of kitsch young adult novels that are "useful, frank and intelligent, but as literature hardly more than workmanlike" (under the pseudonym, Polly Madison), who is writing a biography of her deceased husband, Abe (a brain surgeon).
Rabo talks to her about the most pleasing aspects of being an artist. She asks if it is "having my first one-man show, getting a lot of money for a picture, the comradeship with fellow painters, being praised by a critic?"
Rabo asks Mrs Berman whether, for a writer, it is "getting great reviews, or a terrific advance, or selling a book to the movies, or seeing somebody reading your book?"
The Laying on of Paint
It's interesting to contrast painting and writing.
Rabo seems to emphasise the process of painting - the laying on of paint. Mrs Berman says it's handing in a finished manuscript and never wanting to see it again.
Regrettably, too many post-modernist authors rely more heavily on critical acclaim (or the acclaim of their coterie), especially those who derive their primary income from academia (or writing courses that duplicate their own style). "Nowadays, of course, every novelty is celebrated immediately as a masterpiece!"
Vonnegut, while claimed by post-modernists as one of their own when trying to assert the importance of their movement, is more often scorned because of his popular and commercial success, i.e., for developing a large and appreciative audience beyond the coterie/ the gang.
So be it.
There Ain't Nothing You Can't Do
Earlier, an art lecturer says to Rabo:
"Technically speaking, there's nothing you can't do...I think - I think - it is somehow very useful, and maybe even essential, for a fine artist to have to somehow make his peace on the canvas with all the things he cannot do. That is what attracts us to serious paintings, I think: that shortfall, which we might call 'personality,' or maybe even 'pain'."
He adds:
"[The very first picture in your portfolio] told me, 'Here is a man without passion.' And I asked myself what I now ask you: 'Why should I teach him the language of painting, since there seems to be absolutely nothing which he is desperate to talk about?' "
Rabo's last painting remedies this defect, except that we can only perceive it in words. Initially, he describes it as a "watchamacallit". But eventually he tells us it is a portrait of a happy valley and the people who have been transported there at the end of the war in Europe.
Bluebeard
The title of the novel comes from a comment by Rabo to Mrs Berman:
"I am Bluebeard, and my studio is my forbidden chamber as far as you're concerned."
But that's not where the novel ends.
Goodbye. It's your turn now.
SOUNDTRACK:
November 5, 2019
Rabo Karabekian was the artist in the art exhibit in Midland City, Ohio that caused so many people to dislike art in Vonnegut’s 1973 novel Breakfast of Champions.
An abstract expressionist, he had sold to the art festival a huge painting that was a green canvas with a piece of orange tape vertically affixed to it. For this he had been paid thousands of dollars. The local economy was struggling at the time and many non-artists resented him and his high falooting ways. (He was something of a snooty ass).
But when a cocktail waitress confronted him for his arrogance and the apparent fraud he had committed by selling the meaningless painting, he stole the show in one of the finest scenes from that novel by explaining that he had demonstrated in minimalist fashion the ascendancy of a soul reaching for heaven.
Fourteen years later, Kurt Vonnegut returns to Rabo for what is ostensibly an autobiography of the aging artist but what is of course another witty and cynical book by one of America’s greatest novelists.
Rabo describes his life as an Armenian American, whose parents had escaped the Turkish genocide of their people only to be swindled by another Armenian on their way to California. From these humble beginnings we follow Rabo to New York where he is an apprentice to a famous illustrator to World War II and beyond to his fleeting success as an artist.
Here’s the thing:
The paint he used on all of his abstract expressionist paintings was defective and fell apart by and by.
So we follow Kurt Vonnegut on another journey, this time exploring art, and humanity, and love, and insanity, and war and capitalism and culture.
And like the scene from Breakfast of Champions, we learn that there is more to Rabo Karabekian, like most of us, than meets the eye.
An abstract expressionist, he had sold to the art festival a huge painting that was a green canvas with a piece of orange tape vertically affixed to it. For this he had been paid thousands of dollars. The local economy was struggling at the time and many non-artists resented him and his high falooting ways. (He was something of a snooty ass).
But when a cocktail waitress confronted him for his arrogance and the apparent fraud he had committed by selling the meaningless painting, he stole the show in one of the finest scenes from that novel by explaining that he had demonstrated in minimalist fashion the ascendancy of a soul reaching for heaven.
Fourteen years later, Kurt Vonnegut returns to Rabo for what is ostensibly an autobiography of the aging artist but what is of course another witty and cynical book by one of America’s greatest novelists.
Rabo describes his life as an Armenian American, whose parents had escaped the Turkish genocide of their people only to be swindled by another Armenian on their way to California. From these humble beginnings we follow Rabo to New York where he is an apprentice to a famous illustrator to World War II and beyond to his fleeting success as an artist.
Here’s the thing:
The paint he used on all of his abstract expressionist paintings was defective and fell apart by and by.
So we follow Kurt Vonnegut on another journey, this time exploring art, and humanity, and love, and insanity, and war and capitalism and culture.
And like the scene from Breakfast of Champions, we learn that there is more to Rabo Karabekian, like most of us, than meets the eye.
May 16, 2021
I have read several Kurt Vonnegut books and this one is excellent. I enjoyed this one because the tone felt different in comparison his other works. This book was not necessarily positive or upbeat, but was optimistic. Feelings of sentiment, reflection, and loneliness were rich in the story.
The story told by main character, Rabo Karabekian, who is an artist writing his autobiography. I felt Rabo was cleansing and purging his past emotional pains and experiences through art: in both painting and writing.
I thought the overarching theme was perseverance: surviving the Armenian Genocide, being resilient and overcoming, facing forward and having courage in war, and enduring as an apprentice only to become an "just an artist". The final painting in the barn muraled pain, death & suffering, and survival all on one canvas.
I really liked this one because it was sentimental. I would recommend this one in addition to 'Slaughterhouse-Five', 'Mother Night', and 'Player Piano' if you are new to Kurt Vonnegut. Thanks!
"You don't write for the whole world, and you don't write for ten people, or two. You write for just one person."
The story told by main character, Rabo Karabekian, who is an artist writing his autobiography. I felt Rabo was cleansing and purging his past emotional pains and experiences through art: in both painting and writing.
I thought the overarching theme was perseverance: surviving the Armenian Genocide, being resilient and overcoming, facing forward and having courage in war, and enduring as an apprentice only to become an "just an artist". The final painting in the barn muraled pain, death & suffering, and survival all on one canvas.
I really liked this one because it was sentimental. I would recommend this one in addition to 'Slaughterhouse-Five', 'Mother Night', and 'Player Piano' if you are new to Kurt Vonnegut. Thanks!
"You don't write for the whole world, and you don't write for ten people, or two. You write for just one person."
November 16, 2025
Kurt spreads his metaphorical paint brush and offers us toxic Sateen DuraLuxe, a toxic brand of paint that disintegrates over time. The human species disintegrates over time as well. Proof is in the potato barn.
The human condition is not just disintegration is it also embarrassment. At least that is what one character, writer Paul Slazenger, claims to his friend and narrator Rabo Karabekian. He was onto something. Thinking back to all of Vonnegut’s novel so far there may be more embarrassment about humanity and its condition than I realised.
(“Never is heard a discouraging word, and the skies are not cloudy all day,” he might say. These, of course, are words from the American song “Home on the Range,” which he had translated into Armenian. He found them idiotic.)
Karabekian’s father thought that Home on the Range was embarrassing. He also suffered survivor’s syndrome. Did Vonnegut suffer the same? Proof is in the potato barn.
This is a great book, so great that I have no idea what to read next other than nonfiction so as to let this all settle.
Read Ian’s review as I am not going to reinvent this dance. I bow to its superiority to anything I can conjure up, it would be embarrassing, abstract and soulless meat if I attempt.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Cecily's is outanding as well.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
I will leave a bunch of extracts from this book for anyone interested in this amazing book by the great Kurt Vonnegut Jn.
---------------------------
HOW GOOD were those pictures of mine which Dan Gregory looked at so briefly before he shoved Marilee down the stairs? Technically, if not spiritually, they were pretty darn good for a kid my age—a kid whose self-imposed lessons had consisted of copying, stroke by stroke, illustrations by Dan Gregory. I was obviously born to draw better than most people, just as the widow Berman and Paul Slazinger were obviously born to tell stories better than most people can. Other people are obviously born to sing and dance or explain the stars in the sky or do magic tricks or be great leaders or athletes, and so on. I think that could go back to the time when people had to live in small groups of relatives—maybe fifty or a hundred people at the most. And evolution or God or whatever arranged things genetically, to keep the little families going, to cheer them up, so that they could all have somebody to tell stories around the campfire at night, and somebody else to paint pictures on the walls of the caves, and somebody else who wasn’t afraid of anything and so on. That’s what I think. And of course a scheme like that doesn’t make sense anymore, because simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world’s champions. The entire planet can get along nicely now with maybe a dozen champion performers in each area of human giftedness. A moderately gifted person has to keep his or her gifts all bottled up until, in a manner of speaking, he or she gets drunk at a wedding and tap-dances on the coffee table like Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers. We have a name for him or her. We call him or her an “exhibitionist.” How do we reward such an exhibitionist? We say to him or her the next morning, “Wow! Were you ever drunk last night!”
---------------------------
At the very end, her brain-surgeon husband couldn’t talk anymore, but he could still scrawl short messages with his left hand, although he was normally right handed. His left hand was all he had left that still worked a little bit. According to Circe, this was his ultimate communiqué: “I was a radio repairman.”
---------------------------
So we had supper together. His wife was out of town lecturing, he said. She was a prominent sexologist. I asked him as delicately as I could if making love to a woman so sophisticated in sexual techniques was in any way unusually burdensome. He replied, rolling his eyes at the ceiling, that I had certainly hit the nail on the head. “I have to reassure her that I really love her practically incessantly,” he said.
---------------------------
To return to the past: After Dan Gregory at our first meeting ordered me to make a super-realistic painting of his studio, he said that there was a very important sentence he wanted me to learn by heart. This was it: “The Emperor has no clothes.” “Let me hear you say it,” he said. “Say it several times.” So I did. “The Emperor has no clothes, the Emperor has no clothes, the Emperor has no clothes.” “That was a really fine performance,” he said, “really topping, really first rate.” He clapped his hands appreciatively. How was I supposed to respond to that? I felt like Alice in Wonderland. “I want you to say that out loud and with just that degree of conviction,” he said, “anytime anyone has anything good to say about so-called modern art.” “O.K.,” I said. “It’s the work of swindlers and lunatics and degenerates,” he said, “and the fact that many people are now taking it seriously proves to me that the world has gone mad. I hope you agree.” “I do, I do,” I said. It sounded right to me. “Mussolini thinks so, too,” he said. “Do you admire Mussolini as much as I do?” “Yes, sir,” I said. “You know the first two things Mussolini would do if he took over this country?” he said. “No, sir,” I said. “He would burn down the Museum of Modern Art and outlaw the word democracy. After that he would make up a word for what we really are, make us face up to what we really are and always have been, and then strive for efficiency. Do your job right or drink castor oil!” About a year later, I got around to asking him what he thought the people of the United States really were, and he said, “Spoiled children, who are begging for a frightening but just Daddy to tell them exactly what to do.”
---------------------------
Circe Berman argues that the inclusion of once-taboo words into ordinary conversations is a good thing, since women and children are now free to discuss their bodies without shame, and so to take care of themselves more intelligently. I said to her, “Maybe so. But don’t you think all this frankness has also caused a collapse of eloquence?” I reminded her of the cook’s daughter’s habit of referring to anybody she didn’t like for whatever reason as “an asshole.” I said: “Never did I hear Celeste give a thoughtful explanation of what it was that such a person might have done to earn that protological sobriquet.”
---------------------------
His life had been all downhill since World War One, when he had discovered a gift for flying rattletrap kites which were machine-gun platforms. The first time he got his hands on the joystick of an airplane, he must have felt what Terry Kitchen felt when he gripped a spray gun. He must have felt like Kitchen again when he fired his machine guns up in the wild blue yonder, and saw a plane in front of him draw a helix of smoke and flame—ending in a sunburst far below. What beauty! So unexpected and pure! So easy to achieve! Fred Jones told me one time that the smoke trails of falling airplanes and observation balloons were the most beautiful things he ever expected to see. And I now compare his elation over arcs and spirals and splotches in the atmosphere with what Jackson Pollock used to feel as he watched what dribbled paint chose to do when it struck a canvas on his studio floor. Same sort of happiness! Except that what Pollock did lacked that greatest of all crowd pleasers, which was human sacrifice.
---------------------------
Celeste and her friends are back in school, and she asked me this morning what I knew about the Universe. She has to write a theme about it. “Why ask me?” I said. “You read The New York Times every day,” she said. So I told her that the Universe began as an eleven-pound strawberry which exploded at seven minutes past midnight three trillion years ago. “I’m serious!” she said. “All I can tell you is what I read in The New York Times,” I said.
---------------------------
The Contessa was surely way ahead of her time, too, in believing that men were not only useless and idiotic, but downright dangerous. That idea wouldn’t catch on big in her native country until the last three years of the Vietnam War.
I drew portraits on the kitchen wall of our two boys, who were asleep in front of the fireplace in the living room. I just did their heads—life size. I didn’t even go into the living room to look at them first. The wall was new Sheetrock which I had nailed over the cracked plaster. I hadn’t got around to filing and taping the joints between the sheets yet, and covering the nailheads. I never would. “Dorothy was flabbergasted,” I said to Circe. “She said to me: ‘Why don’t you do that all the time?’ And I said to her, and this was the first time I ever said ‘fuck’ to her, no matter how angry we might have been with each other: ‘It’s just too fucking easy.’”
---------------------------
“SOLDIERS, SOLDIERS, SOLDIERS,” she marveled. “Uniforms, uniforms, uniforms.” The uniforms, what was left of them, were as authentic as I could make them. That was my homage to my master, Dan Gregory. “Fathers are always so proud, the first time they see their sons in uniform,” she said. “I know Big John Karpinski was,” I said. He is my neighbor to the north, of course. Big John’s son Little John did badly in high school, and the police caught him selling dope. So he joined the Army while the Vietnam War was going on. And the first time he came home in uniform, I never saw Big John so happy, because it looked to him as though Little John was all straightened out and would finally amount to something. But then Little John came home in a body bag.
---------------------------
My review of number 1 Player Piano.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
My review of number 2 The Sirens Of Titan. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
My review of number 3 Mother Night.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
My review of number 4 Cats Cradle.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
My review of number 5 God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
My review of number 6 Slaughter House Five
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
My review of number 7 Breakfast Of Champions.
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My review of number 8 Slapstick, or Lonesome No More!
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My review of number 9 Jailbird.
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My review of number 10 Deadeye Dick.
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My review of number 11 Galapagos.
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The human condition is not just disintegration is it also embarrassment. At least that is what one character, writer Paul Slazenger, claims to his friend and narrator Rabo Karabekian. He was onto something. Thinking back to all of Vonnegut’s novel so far there may be more embarrassment about humanity and its condition than I realised.
(“Never is heard a discouraging word, and the skies are not cloudy all day,” he might say. These, of course, are words from the American song “Home on the Range,” which he had translated into Armenian. He found them idiotic.)
Karabekian’s father thought that Home on the Range was embarrassing. He also suffered survivor’s syndrome. Did Vonnegut suffer the same? Proof is in the potato barn.
This is a great book, so great that I have no idea what to read next other than nonfiction so as to let this all settle.
Read Ian’s review as I am not going to reinvent this dance. I bow to its superiority to anything I can conjure up, it would be embarrassing, abstract and soulless meat if I attempt.
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Cecily's is outanding as well.
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I will leave a bunch of extracts from this book for anyone interested in this amazing book by the great Kurt Vonnegut Jn.
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HOW GOOD were those pictures of mine which Dan Gregory looked at so briefly before he shoved Marilee down the stairs? Technically, if not spiritually, they were pretty darn good for a kid my age—a kid whose self-imposed lessons had consisted of copying, stroke by stroke, illustrations by Dan Gregory. I was obviously born to draw better than most people, just as the widow Berman and Paul Slazinger were obviously born to tell stories better than most people can. Other people are obviously born to sing and dance or explain the stars in the sky or do magic tricks or be great leaders or athletes, and so on. I think that could go back to the time when people had to live in small groups of relatives—maybe fifty or a hundred people at the most. And evolution or God or whatever arranged things genetically, to keep the little families going, to cheer them up, so that they could all have somebody to tell stories around the campfire at night, and somebody else to paint pictures on the walls of the caves, and somebody else who wasn’t afraid of anything and so on. That’s what I think. And of course a scheme like that doesn’t make sense anymore, because simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world’s champions. The entire planet can get along nicely now with maybe a dozen champion performers in each area of human giftedness. A moderately gifted person has to keep his or her gifts all bottled up until, in a manner of speaking, he or she gets drunk at a wedding and tap-dances on the coffee table like Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers. We have a name for him or her. We call him or her an “exhibitionist.” How do we reward such an exhibitionist? We say to him or her the next morning, “Wow! Were you ever drunk last night!”
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At the very end, her brain-surgeon husband couldn’t talk anymore, but he could still scrawl short messages with his left hand, although he was normally right handed. His left hand was all he had left that still worked a little bit. According to Circe, this was his ultimate communiqué: “I was a radio repairman.”
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So we had supper together. His wife was out of town lecturing, he said. She was a prominent sexologist. I asked him as delicately as I could if making love to a woman so sophisticated in sexual techniques was in any way unusually burdensome. He replied, rolling his eyes at the ceiling, that I had certainly hit the nail on the head. “I have to reassure her that I really love her practically incessantly,” he said.
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To return to the past: After Dan Gregory at our first meeting ordered me to make a super-realistic painting of his studio, he said that there was a very important sentence he wanted me to learn by heart. This was it: “The Emperor has no clothes.” “Let me hear you say it,” he said. “Say it several times.” So I did. “The Emperor has no clothes, the Emperor has no clothes, the Emperor has no clothes.” “That was a really fine performance,” he said, “really topping, really first rate.” He clapped his hands appreciatively. How was I supposed to respond to that? I felt like Alice in Wonderland. “I want you to say that out loud and with just that degree of conviction,” he said, “anytime anyone has anything good to say about so-called modern art.” “O.K.,” I said. “It’s the work of swindlers and lunatics and degenerates,” he said, “and the fact that many people are now taking it seriously proves to me that the world has gone mad. I hope you agree.” “I do, I do,” I said. It sounded right to me. “Mussolini thinks so, too,” he said. “Do you admire Mussolini as much as I do?” “Yes, sir,” I said. “You know the first two things Mussolini would do if he took over this country?” he said. “No, sir,” I said. “He would burn down the Museum of Modern Art and outlaw the word democracy. After that he would make up a word for what we really are, make us face up to what we really are and always have been, and then strive for efficiency. Do your job right or drink castor oil!” About a year later, I got around to asking him what he thought the people of the United States really were, and he said, “Spoiled children, who are begging for a frightening but just Daddy to tell them exactly what to do.”
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Circe Berman argues that the inclusion of once-taboo words into ordinary conversations is a good thing, since women and children are now free to discuss their bodies without shame, and so to take care of themselves more intelligently. I said to her, “Maybe so. But don’t you think all this frankness has also caused a collapse of eloquence?” I reminded her of the cook’s daughter’s habit of referring to anybody she didn’t like for whatever reason as “an asshole.” I said: “Never did I hear Celeste give a thoughtful explanation of what it was that such a person might have done to earn that protological sobriquet.”
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His life had been all downhill since World War One, when he had discovered a gift for flying rattletrap kites which were machine-gun platforms. The first time he got his hands on the joystick of an airplane, he must have felt what Terry Kitchen felt when he gripped a spray gun. He must have felt like Kitchen again when he fired his machine guns up in the wild blue yonder, and saw a plane in front of him draw a helix of smoke and flame—ending in a sunburst far below. What beauty! So unexpected and pure! So easy to achieve! Fred Jones told me one time that the smoke trails of falling airplanes and observation balloons were the most beautiful things he ever expected to see. And I now compare his elation over arcs and spirals and splotches in the atmosphere with what Jackson Pollock used to feel as he watched what dribbled paint chose to do when it struck a canvas on his studio floor. Same sort of happiness! Except that what Pollock did lacked that greatest of all crowd pleasers, which was human sacrifice.
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Celeste and her friends are back in school, and she asked me this morning what I knew about the Universe. She has to write a theme about it. “Why ask me?” I said. “You read The New York Times every day,” she said. So I told her that the Universe began as an eleven-pound strawberry which exploded at seven minutes past midnight three trillion years ago. “I’m serious!” she said. “All I can tell you is what I read in The New York Times,” I said.
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The Contessa was surely way ahead of her time, too, in believing that men were not only useless and idiotic, but downright dangerous. That idea wouldn’t catch on big in her native country until the last three years of the Vietnam War.
I drew portraits on the kitchen wall of our two boys, who were asleep in front of the fireplace in the living room. I just did their heads—life size. I didn’t even go into the living room to look at them first. The wall was new Sheetrock which I had nailed over the cracked plaster. I hadn’t got around to filing and taping the joints between the sheets yet, and covering the nailheads. I never would. “Dorothy was flabbergasted,” I said to Circe. “She said to me: ‘Why don’t you do that all the time?’ And I said to her, and this was the first time I ever said ‘fuck’ to her, no matter how angry we might have been with each other: ‘It’s just too fucking easy.’”
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“SOLDIERS, SOLDIERS, SOLDIERS,” she marveled. “Uniforms, uniforms, uniforms.” The uniforms, what was left of them, were as authentic as I could make them. That was my homage to my master, Dan Gregory. “Fathers are always so proud, the first time they see their sons in uniform,” she said. “I know Big John Karpinski was,” I said. He is my neighbor to the north, of course. Big John’s son Little John did badly in high school, and the police caught him selling dope. So he joined the Army while the Vietnam War was going on. And the first time he came home in uniform, I never saw Big John so happy, because it looked to him as though Little John was all straightened out and would finally amount to something. But then Little John came home in a body bag.
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My review of number 1 Player Piano.
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My review of number 2 The Sirens Of Titan. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
My review of number 3 Mother Night.
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My review of number 4 Cats Cradle.
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My review of number 5 God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.
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My review of number 6 Slaughter House Five
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My review of number 7 Breakfast Of Champions.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
My review of number 8 Slapstick, or Lonesome No More!
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
My review of number 9 Jailbird.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
My review of number 10 Deadeye Dick.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
My review of number 11 Galapagos.
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January 16, 2008
Wow. This was a novel that's going to keep me thinking for a long, long time. It was everything jam packed into a small little book: clever, tragic, engrossing, laugh out loud funny, imaginative, unexpected, and even transformative, I think. There are so many layers to this book I'm sure I'll be thinking about it off and on for the next several months at least and will almost definitely re-read this book a number of times before I reach room temperature.
Check it out: The protagonist/autobiographer is a veteran who lost an eye in WWII who later becomes one of the biggest jokes of the Abstract Expressionist art movement because all of his art disintegrates due to a poor choice of paint. He started life as an illustrator who couldn't make it as a 'real' artist because his paintings lacked depth and vision. And then he goes off to WWII and LITERALLY LOSES HIS SENSE OF DEPTH by having one of his eyes shot out. Ironically, I think it's this literal and figurative lack of depth perception that enables him to survive and not commit suicide while all of his other artist friends don't. There is more to this thing about eyes and perception, too. When both his father and some other artists are at their most creative, their eyes become dead. Half of this guy's eyes are already dead, so he's not able to see what they're seeing, so he can't be harmed/driven to suicide by it. It's only at the very end of the book, perhaps when he's finally old/strong/mature/stable enough to cope with everything he's seen is he really able to paint something that combines the objective reality of illustration and the visceral experience of abstract expressionism. This shit was some mind-freeing stuff for me. Reading it right now for some reason.
And then there's the whole thing about forbidden rooms and curiosity...the name of the book itself, and whatever it is that the guy has locked away in the potato barn. Both the original Bluebeard story and Vonnegut's have curious, prying women, too.
But the thing that's occupying my mind about the book right now is endings. In one part of the book, a female character talks about how Ibsen's The Doll House ended the wrong way. The Doll House's female lead leaves the house and everyone's left to assume she goes to Happily Ever After. But the woman in Bluebeard believes she throws herself in front of a train. Mostly because there really was no Happily Ever After for women at that time. Only more doll houses. I read that and I'm, like, "Yeah, life is harsh and it's crappy to have books end happily. Good books gotta end sad." So then this book goes and ends on a positive note. At first I was pretty bummed that everything works out in the end. But then I thought, "It's only ME who tacks on the 'Happily Ever After' part. Even though he has started the process of healing, this guy has a whole long row to hoe that is not going to be happy, pretty or any other easy positive word." In the same way that Vonnegut's character has finally found a way to combine literal but soulless illustration with abstract expressionism, maybe I'm getting closer to being able to see 'happily ever after,' and 'life is still super hard' as two sides of the same simultaneously experienced reality.
I have been going on like this in my head since I finished this book 24 hours ago and things just seem to be speeding up, as far as I can tell. The sign of a great book, in my book.
Check it out: The protagonist/autobiographer is a veteran who lost an eye in WWII who later becomes one of the biggest jokes of the Abstract Expressionist art movement because all of his art disintegrates due to a poor choice of paint. He started life as an illustrator who couldn't make it as a 'real' artist because his paintings lacked depth and vision. And then he goes off to WWII and LITERALLY LOSES HIS SENSE OF DEPTH by having one of his eyes shot out. Ironically, I think it's this literal and figurative lack of depth perception that enables him to survive and not commit suicide while all of his other artist friends don't. There is more to this thing about eyes and perception, too. When both his father and some other artists are at their most creative, their eyes become dead. Half of this guy's eyes are already dead, so he's not able to see what they're seeing, so he can't be harmed/driven to suicide by it. It's only at the very end of the book, perhaps when he's finally old/strong/mature/stable enough to cope with everything he's seen is he really able to paint something that combines the objective reality of illustration and the visceral experience of abstract expressionism. This shit was some mind-freeing stuff for me. Reading it right now for some reason.
And then there's the whole thing about forbidden rooms and curiosity...the name of the book itself, and whatever it is that the guy has locked away in the potato barn. Both the original Bluebeard story and Vonnegut's have curious, prying women, too.
But the thing that's occupying my mind about the book right now is endings. In one part of the book, a female character talks about how Ibsen's The Doll House ended the wrong way. The Doll House's female lead leaves the house and everyone's left to assume she goes to Happily Ever After. But the woman in Bluebeard believes she throws herself in front of a train. Mostly because there really was no Happily Ever After for women at that time. Only more doll houses. I read that and I'm, like, "Yeah, life is harsh and it's crappy to have books end happily. Good books gotta end sad." So then this book goes and ends on a positive note. At first I was pretty bummed that everything works out in the end. But then I thought, "It's only ME who tacks on the 'Happily Ever After' part. Even though he has started the process of healing, this guy has a whole long row to hoe that is not going to be happy, pretty or any other easy positive word." In the same way that Vonnegut's character has finally found a way to combine literal but soulless illustration with abstract expressionism, maybe I'm getting closer to being able to see 'happily ever after,' and 'life is still super hard' as two sides of the same simultaneously experienced reality.
I have been going on like this in my head since I finished this book 24 hours ago and things just seem to be speeding up, as far as I can tell. The sign of a great book, in my book.
April 21, 2017
This was a lovely reintroduction to Vonnegut after a nearly eight year hiatus. I remember loving his style and staccato rhythm of his prose. Slaughterhouse-Five remains one of my favourite novels and was one of the first that made me think science fiction could be much more than explosions and cool scenes. Bluebeard, by contrast, is an entirely realist novel about the abstract expressionist art movement.
Although it's only a little bit about that too.
What it's really about is Rabo Karabekian, ageing hermit, art collector, and life-regretter with a secret something in his potato barn. His hermitage is interrupted by Circe Berman, a writer of what sure sounds like YA novels, who endeavours to change his life, much to his chagrin. The novel involves many other characters who would be poorly introduced by myself in comparison to their richness as presented by Vonnegut. All the characters here are wonderfully realized and I was sad to see them go by novel's end.
I love how Vonnegut is able to tie tethers through time to connect a character's past to their actions throughout their lives without shoving it down the reader's throat. If Rabo is suffering, he does so without expending page upon page in melancholy and it's to Vonnegut's credit that he makes the reader feel it in a sentence or two. The novel is structured as Rabo's memoirs, but plays loosely with linearity in a way that felt more playful than willfully experimental. In fact, it's a trait I remember loving from my earlier readings of Vonnegut.
I'm not sure if this is a well-known Vonnegut novel, but I was pleasantly surprised when it was chosen as our latest book club read. It was compelling, hilarious, heartfelt, and manages to be an uplifting story despite having some portions which seem like they would be highly unpleasant to have lived. I was touched by many scenes and inexplicably astounded by the reveal in the potato barn even though it is no immense twist. Bluebeard was a surprise and managed to slowly creep up on me with its charm. This one is definitely worth a read and has helped to rekindle my love for Vonnegut.
Although it's only a little bit about that too.
What it's really about is Rabo Karabekian, ageing hermit, art collector, and life-regretter with a secret something in his potato barn. His hermitage is interrupted by Circe Berman, a writer of what sure sounds like YA novels, who endeavours to change his life, much to his chagrin. The novel involves many other characters who would be poorly introduced by myself in comparison to their richness as presented by Vonnegut. All the characters here are wonderfully realized and I was sad to see them go by novel's end.
I love how Vonnegut is able to tie tethers through time to connect a character's past to their actions throughout their lives without shoving it down the reader's throat. If Rabo is suffering, he does so without expending page upon page in melancholy and it's to Vonnegut's credit that he makes the reader feel it in a sentence or two. The novel is structured as Rabo's memoirs, but plays loosely with linearity in a way that felt more playful than willfully experimental. In fact, it's a trait I remember loving from my earlier readings of Vonnegut.
I'm not sure if this is a well-known Vonnegut novel, but I was pleasantly surprised when it was chosen as our latest book club read. It was compelling, hilarious, heartfelt, and manages to be an uplifting story despite having some portions which seem like they would be highly unpleasant to have lived. I was touched by many scenes and inexplicably astounded by the reveal in the potato barn even though it is no immense twist. Bluebeard was a surprise and managed to slowly creep up on me with its charm. This one is definitely worth a read and has helped to rekindle my love for Vonnegut.
May 17, 2024
I'd call this Vonnegut's sweetest novel, but then again I'm a big ol' softie.
5 stars. He's made similar points before but this one ends up achingly tender. Really shows Vonnegut's range and skill, plucking heartstrings so forcefully with so few words.
5 stars. He's made similar points before but this one ends up achingly tender. Really shows Vonnegut's range and skill, plucking heartstrings so forcefully with so few words.
January 31, 2024
Daily Vonnegut – Day 10.
Again, not much to say here. I have aged almost as much as Rabo Karabekian, the Armenian-American artist that is the narrator of Bluebeard. I don’t regret anything in this journey so far, because it feels good to do completionist adventures, no matter how you come to think of the material in the end.
This one is cute and slightly haunting, as the focus of our theme shifts to looking back on a life. The reason it’s more pressing now is because it comes at a time where the reflections in the book closely resemble those of Vonnegut’s actual life. I know for a fact that Hocus Pocus and Timequake, his final two novels, will be similar in theme. What else could they be?
How much is hidden in Karabekian’s implicit plea to be liked and remembered by the masses? Well, not much. Nothing is hidden. It’s all right there. I think Vonnegut’s stature speaks for itself.
Again, not much to say here. I have aged almost as much as Rabo Karabekian, the Armenian-American artist that is the narrator of Bluebeard. I don’t regret anything in this journey so far, because it feels good to do completionist adventures, no matter how you come to think of the material in the end.
This one is cute and slightly haunting, as the focus of our theme shifts to looking back on a life. The reason it’s more pressing now is because it comes at a time where the reflections in the book closely resemble those of Vonnegut’s actual life. I know for a fact that Hocus Pocus and Timequake, his final two novels, will be similar in theme. What else could they be?
How much is hidden in Karabekian’s implicit plea to be liked and remembered by the masses? Well, not much. Nothing is hidden. It’s all right there. I think Vonnegut’s stature speaks for itself.
February 3, 2023
Not his best. Actually, maybe his worst.
After reading many of Vonnegut's books, some elements begin to get tiresome, like a (fairy) tale told several times with little variations. Casual encounters, big fortunes, and so on. But there are too many bizarre coincidences in this one. War is bad, capitalism too, money is great though, and so on and so forth. Can't reach the level of Galápagos, etc. Felt a bit too Anglo-Saxon mainstream on some occasions, despite being so full of insights into American society, as valid then as now. The dialogues are bland, sometimes awful, and the last fifth of the novel offers a sickening sweet-sentimental plot, not to call it kitsch as hell.
Still, there are some bright moments, and Vonnegut makes always for an entertaining read.
After reading many of Vonnegut's books, some elements begin to get tiresome, like a (fairy) tale told several times with little variations. Casual encounters, big fortunes, and so on. But there are too many bizarre coincidences in this one. War is bad, capitalism too, money is great though, and so on and so forth. Can't reach the level of Galápagos, etc. Felt a bit too Anglo-Saxon mainstream on some occasions, despite being so full of insights into American society, as valid then as now. The dialogues are bland, sometimes awful, and the last fifth of the novel offers a sickening sweet-sentimental plot, not to call it kitsch as hell.
Still, there are some bright moments, and Vonnegut makes always for an entertaining read.
May 23, 2019
Vonnegut's 1987 indictment of the fickle subjectivism surrounding the art and artists of the post-war era. Vonnegut candles the egg, if you will, of expressionism and throws a little light on the lunacy that often surrounds 'modern art.'
This novel, like every Vonnegut novel I've ever read, is tragic - but it has that patented KV infusion of humor and that familiar air of decency and humanity that makes it oh so enjoyable to read.
This novel, like every Vonnegut novel I've ever read, is tragic - but it has that patented KV infusion of humor and that familiar air of decency and humanity that makes it oh so enjoyable to read.
September 29, 2018
Πέμπτο βιβλίο του Κερτ Βόνεγκατ που διαβάζω, αλλά τόσα χρόνια που πέρασαν από την τελευταία φορά που διάβασα βιβλίο του (Μάιος του 2011), είναι σαν να τον γνωρίζω για πρώτη φορά. Ειλικρινά δεν ξέρω γιατί απείχα τόσα πολλά χρόνια από τα βιβλία του, ενώ τα προηγούμενα λίγο έως πολύ με είχαν ξετρελάνει (εκτός, ίσως, από το "Σλάπστικ", που θυμάμαι ότι μου είχε φανεί κάπως αδύναμο). Πρόκειται για ένα ιδιαίτερο και σχετικά ιδιόρρυθμο βιβλίο, μια μίξη αυτοβιογραφίας και ημερολογίου, το οποίο εν πολλοίς μιλάει για την Τέχνη, την καλλιτεχνική φύση, τον πόλεμο και την αυτογνωσία, με ύφος έντονα σαρκαστικό και αρκετά κυνικό. Η γραφή είναι πραγματικά εξαίσια, ρέει σαν γάργαρο νερό, μόνο αυτή αρκεί για να λατρέψει κανείς το βιβλίο, ανεξάρτητα αν βρει του γούστου την πλοκή ή τους χαρακτήρες. Η πλοκή δεν λέει και πολλά πράγματα εδώ που τα λέμε, αλλά φυσικά ένα τέτοιο βιβλίο δεν χρειάζεται καμία πλοκή για να καταπλήξει με θετικό τρόπο τους αναγνώστες. Περνάει μηνύματα, προσφέρει εικόνες και συναισθήματα χάρη στην φοβερή γραφή, οι χαρακτήρες έχουν και αυτοί το ενδιαφέρον τους όντας κάπως ιδιόρρυθμοι, οπότε υποθέτω ότι αυτά αρκούν για να αγαπήσει κανείς το βιβλίο. Και, εντάξει, μιλάμε για βιβλίο του Βόνεγκατ, οπότε δύσκολα δεν θα μείνει κάτι στον αναγνώστη μετά το τέλος της ανάγνωσης.
April 30, 2025
I got addicted to Vonnegut at university. I was probably insufferable; I even had a t-shirt with the gravestone from Slaughterhouse-5 and the massive letters EVERYTHING WAS BEAUTIFUL AND NOTHING HURT emblazed on it. Like Hemingway, I read too much too quickly.
So this is my 8th or 9th Vonnegut novel, but my first in a good few years. In a way, I'm disappointed. I've been reading it on and off for weeks. Though I certainly enjoyed elements of it, I didn't find myself looking forward to picking it up. I didn't feel like digging that old t-shirt out either. But what this novel has in absolute abundance, the very thing I was looking for, ironically, is heart. I've talked a lot with numerous people about sincerity recently. Namely Alan, a colleague of mine, too. We realised, Alan and I particularly, that we are sick to death of ironic, sly postmodern schmucks (Vonnegut is a postmodernist! I hear you say and Yes, yes, I say); we realised a novel meant nothing to us if it had no sincerity and no heart. The problem is, a novel with heart is usually kitsch. I'd even call Vonnegut kitsch, but he's kitsch with style. Deliberate kitsch? I don't know. Either way, it's got heart, and the ending did give me a (remote) fuzzy feeling in my tummy.
So this is my 8th or 9th Vonnegut novel, but my first in a good few years. In a way, I'm disappointed. I've been reading it on and off for weeks. Though I certainly enjoyed elements of it, I didn't find myself looking forward to picking it up. I didn't feel like digging that old t-shirt out either. But what this novel has in absolute abundance, the very thing I was looking for, ironically, is heart. I've talked a lot with numerous people about sincerity recently. Namely Alan, a colleague of mine, too. We realised, Alan and I particularly, that we are sick to death of ironic, sly postmodern schmucks (Vonnegut is a postmodernist! I hear you say and Yes, yes, I say); we realised a novel meant nothing to us if it had no sincerity and no heart. The problem is, a novel with heart is usually kitsch. I'd even call Vonnegut kitsch, but he's kitsch with style. Deliberate kitsch? I don't know. Either way, it's got heart, and the ending did give me a (remote) fuzzy feeling in my tummy.
August 28, 2011
I read Vonnegut now. Vonnegut is cool.
I have vague memories of reading Vonnegut before—I have some very old, very pulp editions of some of his other novels that I … er … “liberated” from my father. I swear I’ve read Breakfast of Champions before, and I’m pretty sure I read either Cat’s Cradle or Player Piano at my sister’s wedding. I remember this because I was only 15, but the server still offered me wine (I declined). Suffice it to say, although Vonnegut is associated with some interesting memories, this is really the first of his novels that I have read as an adult, and the first one I remember well enough to review.
Bluebeard is easy to read and, therefore, easy to dismiss. Thanks to the conversational first person narration and the consistent switching between Rabo’s reminiscences and the present day at his home in the Hamptons, Bluebeard feels like a light novel. Yet this is also a story about genocide survivors, abusive relationships, the horror of war, and the horror of mediocrity. This book is an excellent example of how levity can be just as good at delivering a polemic against war as more gritty, realistic depictions like you might find in The Kindly Ones or in Hollywood movies.
Vonnegut has some choice words for the way movies, in general, portray war. His narrator, Rabo Karabekian, points out that most of the veterans in those movies are the age he was when he returned home, and not the young striplings whose lives are shattered on the front. In general, as one familiar with Vonnegut might expect, utter disdain for war and for the glorification of war pervades Bluebeard, almost dripping off the pages. What makes the book so impressive—and so successful—is how Vonnegut manages to do this in such a pithy way:
Coming from a country whose armed forces are routinely ridiculed for their perceived lack of personnel or equipment, I totally can, Rabo. I love this passage so much, because it demonstrates the irony of contemporary ideas of American patriotism—failing to support the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan somehow makes one “un-American”, or at the very least constitutes a “suspicious” action, a black mark on one’s patriotism. Vonnegut, the Vietnam War no doubt weighing heavily in his mind as he wrote this, wanted to remind us that the militaristic mindset that accompanied the United States’ rise as a twentieth-century superpower was not always the status quo.
Rabo Karabekian is an awesome narrator in general, because he does not bullshit. He strikes me as a man who knows exactly who he is, who is comfortable with his place in the world, who accepts his flaws and failures and position of mediocrity. In the end, he is as divested of illusions as it is possible for a human to be. This is an incredibly refreshing type of narrator to have. Rabo doesn’t ask for forgiveness and doesn’t offer up excuses (beyond joining us in shaking our heads at his youthful naïvety). He is self-deprecating, but he does not wallow in self-pity. He has been through war. He married, divorced, married again, and survived his second wife. He is American in citizenship and, mostly, in sentiment, yet he has taken up the flag of his father to carry on their cultural heritage as Armenians��he leaves all his property and wealth to his estranged sons, on the condition that they legally change their names and those of his grandchildren back to “Karabekian”.
So Rabo is complex yet comfortable, and he is definitely the heart of this story. That might seem obvious given that Bluebeard is a fictional autobiography, but I would argue that there’s a difference between being the main character in one’s story and being its heart. In the end, despite invoking a number of famous people (both real and fictional), the story and its lessons are about and for Rabo Karabekian. A different Rabo, one less sympathetic or more clever, would still be the main character of his own life, but would he make the book enjoyable? Would he be able to pull off the levity that allows Vonnegut to juxtapose war with abstract art? I’m not sure, but I’m glad I don´t have to find out!
Rabo owes this state of grace in part to his artistic struggles and the conflict between his technical mastery and his stillborn passion. He also owes it, however, to the effects of Circe Berman, a widow who shows up on his private beach, invites herself to stay at his place, and slowly transforms his home and his life. Overbearing and irksome, Circe is nevertheless a positive influence on Rabo. I say this knowing full well that if some woman redirected my foyer without my permission, I, being the incorrigible 21-year-old that I am, would probably not handle it as well as Rabo does, all things considered! :D The interaction between Rabo and Circe is by far one of the best aspects of Bluebeard, because it is rife both with real tension and with real respect between the two parties. This is evident in how Rabo decides to reveal the contents of his potato barn to Circe.
At one point, Rabo has a very frank conversation with his cook and her daughter, Celeste, in which we learn that despite employing her for years, Rabo has never remembered his cook’s name (it’s Allison, Allison White). Indeed, when Rabo kicks out Circe, Allison gives notice, stating that she can’t stand working for him any more without Circe around to improve the atmosphere of the house. It’s not that Rabo is a bad person, but he has fallen out of practice interacting with people as human beings, and Allison accuses him of being “scared to death of women”. Rabo’s relationships with women throughout Bluebeard are certainly interesting and rocky. As an adolescent, he forms an attachment to Marilee Kemp, who is eleven years his senior and takes on the role of guardian angel/patron saint, ultimately bringing Rabo to New York to apprentice to Dan Gregory. Rabo eventually loses his virginity to Marilee and then foolishly takes her “you have to leave now” speech at face value, always thinking of her for years but never trying to win her back.
When next they meet, she upbraids him thoroughly for this, and through her Vonnegut has some harsh words to deliver about war and women:
The “condition” to which Marilee refers is the situation of being desperate for food and protection for themselves and their children. Viewed in this way, war is a mechanism for the oppression of women. The reward for participating in this oppression is glory and power, which is exactly what is promised for participating in colonialism/imperialism as well:
It’s all very tongue-in-cheek, but there is also a layer of seriousness here, because Vonnegut is both condemning the imperialism of the past (which is easy to do) and criticizing our society for letting it continue. We acknowledge the wrongs of the past even as we deny those of the present. I know that, for me personally, we learned about atrocities like the residential schools in Canadian history class, but there was always this subtext that “things are better now”. Well, they are better, in some ways, and maybe in other ways they’re worse too. When you grow up and leave the history classroom for the less comfortable world outside, you realize that nothing is really so simple as the textbook makes it appear. And so I conclude with my single most favourite quotation from Bluebeard:
I was born in 1989, so I can’t attest to the zeitgeist Vonnegut was addressing when he wrote Bluebeard. Nevertheless, the above quotation certainly captures my mind in 2011. We celebrate—and rightly so—the declarations of human rights, of equality regardless of gender or ethnicity or sports team, the victories we have so far achieved. Yet there is still so much to do, so much inequality to address, not only within countries that lack or struggle with democracy but even in so-called “developed” countries like Canada and the United States. Yes, in 1867 we became an independent dominion, and a parliamentary democracy as well. But it wasn’t until 1918 that women could vote federally. And, I did not know this, but according to Wikipedia, prior to 1960, First Nations people had to give up their status in order to vote! So we can be proud of being 144 years old, Canada, but it has been a long, hard road towards equality, and we still aren’t there yet.
But I digress. I digress, because even though Bluebeard is a thin book with a light tone, it makes me meditate upon weighty subjects. I have to commend Vonnegut for this, for he has created a book that raises important questions yet still leaves me curiously uplifted. With that secret in the potato barn, I feel like Rabo is saying to us, “Come on, people, let’s get our act together: we can do this!” We can remember the past, learn from the past, and avoid repeating its mistakes. But first we must remove the scales from our eyes and sacrifice our illusions to see the world as it is. And this is where I attempt to connect all of this to the motif of abstract art, which thus far I have lamentably neglected. Rabo can draw so realistically that it is scary; he doesn’t exercise this talent, however, because, “it’s just too fucking easy”. And as we see repeatedly throughout Bluebeard, depicting the world ultra-realistically is not the same thing as seeing it. Sometimes a strip of tape is secretly six deer in a forest glade.
I have vague memories of reading Vonnegut before—I have some very old, very pulp editions of some of his other novels that I … er … “liberated” from my father. I swear I’ve read Breakfast of Champions before, and I’m pretty sure I read either Cat’s Cradle or Player Piano at my sister’s wedding. I remember this because I was only 15, but the server still offered me wine (I declined). Suffice it to say, although Vonnegut is associated with some interesting memories, this is really the first of his novels that I have read as an adult, and the first one I remember well enough to review.
Bluebeard is easy to read and, therefore, easy to dismiss. Thanks to the conversational first person narration and the consistent switching between Rabo’s reminiscences and the present day at his home in the Hamptons, Bluebeard feels like a light novel. Yet this is also a story about genocide survivors, abusive relationships, the horror of war, and the horror of mediocrity. This book is an excellent example of how levity can be just as good at delivering a polemic against war as more gritty, realistic depictions like you might find in The Kindly Ones or in Hollywood movies.
Vonnegut has some choice words for the way movies, in general, portray war. His narrator, Rabo Karabekian, points out that most of the veterans in those movies are the age he was when he returned home, and not the young striplings whose lives are shattered on the front. In general, as one familiar with Vonnegut might expect, utter disdain for war and for the glorification of war pervades Bluebeard, almost dripping off the pages. What makes the book so impressive—and so successful—is how Vonnegut manages to do this in such a pithy way:
That was an ordinary way for a patriotic American to talk back then. It’s hard to believe how sick of war we used to be. We used to boast of how small our Army and Navy were, and how little influence generals and admirals had in Washington. We used to call armaments manufacturers “Merchants of Death.”
Can you imagine that?
Coming from a country whose armed forces are routinely ridiculed for their perceived lack of personnel or equipment, I totally can, Rabo. I love this passage so much, because it demonstrates the irony of contemporary ideas of American patriotism—failing to support the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan somehow makes one “un-American”, or at the very least constitutes a “suspicious” action, a black mark on one’s patriotism. Vonnegut, the Vietnam War no doubt weighing heavily in his mind as he wrote this, wanted to remind us that the militaristic mindset that accompanied the United States’ rise as a twentieth-century superpower was not always the status quo.
Rabo Karabekian is an awesome narrator in general, because he does not bullshit. He strikes me as a man who knows exactly who he is, who is comfortable with his place in the world, who accepts his flaws and failures and position of mediocrity. In the end, he is as divested of illusions as it is possible for a human to be. This is an incredibly refreshing type of narrator to have. Rabo doesn’t ask for forgiveness and doesn’t offer up excuses (beyond joining us in shaking our heads at his youthful naïvety). He is self-deprecating, but he does not wallow in self-pity. He has been through war. He married, divorced, married again, and survived his second wife. He is American in citizenship and, mostly, in sentiment, yet he has taken up the flag of his father to carry on their cultural heritage as Armenians��he leaves all his property and wealth to his estranged sons, on the condition that they legally change their names and those of his grandchildren back to “Karabekian”.
So Rabo is complex yet comfortable, and he is definitely the heart of this story. That might seem obvious given that Bluebeard is a fictional autobiography, but I would argue that there’s a difference between being the main character in one’s story and being its heart. In the end, despite invoking a number of famous people (both real and fictional), the story and its lessons are about and for Rabo Karabekian. A different Rabo, one less sympathetic or more clever, would still be the main character of his own life, but would he make the book enjoyable? Would he be able to pull off the levity that allows Vonnegut to juxtapose war with abstract art? I’m not sure, but I’m glad I don´t have to find out!
Rabo owes this state of grace in part to his artistic struggles and the conflict between his technical mastery and his stillborn passion. He also owes it, however, to the effects of Circe Berman, a widow who shows up on his private beach, invites herself to stay at his place, and slowly transforms his home and his life. Overbearing and irksome, Circe is nevertheless a positive influence on Rabo. I say this knowing full well that if some woman redirected my foyer without my permission, I, being the incorrigible 21-year-old that I am, would probably not handle it as well as Rabo does, all things considered! :D The interaction between Rabo and Circe is by far one of the best aspects of Bluebeard, because it is rife both with real tension and with real respect between the two parties. This is evident in how Rabo decides to reveal the contents of his potato barn to Circe.
At one point, Rabo has a very frank conversation with his cook and her daughter, Celeste, in which we learn that despite employing her for years, Rabo has never remembered his cook’s name (it’s Allison, Allison White). Indeed, when Rabo kicks out Circe, Allison gives notice, stating that she can’t stand working for him any more without Circe around to improve the atmosphere of the house. It’s not that Rabo is a bad person, but he has fallen out of practice interacting with people as human beings, and Allison accuses him of being “scared to death of women”. Rabo’s relationships with women throughout Bluebeard are certainly interesting and rocky. As an adolescent, he forms an attachment to Marilee Kemp, who is eleven years his senior and takes on the role of guardian angel/patron saint, ultimately bringing Rabo to New York to apprentice to Dan Gregory. Rabo eventually loses his virginity to Marilee and then foolishly takes her “you have to leave now” speech at face value, always thinking of her for years but never trying to win her back.
When next they meet, she upbraids him thoroughly for this, and through her Vonnegut has some harsh words to deliver about war and women:
“The whole point of war is to put women everywhere in that condition. It’s always men against women, with the men only pretending to fight among themselves.”
“They can pretend pretty hard sometimes,” I said.
“They know that the ones who pretend the hardest,” she said, “get their pictures in the paper and medals afterwards.”
The “condition” to which Marilee refers is the situation of being desperate for food and protection for themselves and their children. Viewed in this way, war is a mechanism for the oppression of women. The reward for participating in this oppression is glory and power, which is exactly what is promised for participating in colonialism/imperialism as well:
Lecturers traveled all over Northern Europe with such pictures in olden times. With assistants to unroll one end and roll up the other, they urged all ambitious and able persons to abandon tired old Europe and lay claim to rich and beautiful properties in the Promised Land, which were practically theirs for the asking.
Why should a real man stay home when he could be raping a virgin continent?
It’s all very tongue-in-cheek, but there is also a layer of seriousness here, because Vonnegut is both condemning the imperialism of the past (which is easy to do) and criticizing our society for letting it continue. We acknowledge the wrongs of the past even as we deny those of the present. I know that, for me personally, we learned about atrocities like the residential schools in Canadian history class, but there was always this subtext that “things are better now”. Well, they are better, in some ways, and maybe in other ways they’re worse too. When you grow up and leave the history classroom for the less comfortable world outside, you realize that nothing is really so simple as the textbook makes it appear. And so I conclude with my single most favourite quotation from Bluebeard:
The darkest secret of this country, I am afraid, is that too many of its citizens imagine that they belong to a much higher civilization somewhere else. That higher civilization doesn’t have to be another country. It can be the past instead—the United States as it was before it was spoiled by immigrants and the enfranchisement of the blacks.
This state of mind allows too many of us to lie and cheat and steal from the rest of us, to sell us junk and addictive poisons and corrupting entertainments. What are the rest of us, after all, but sub-human aborigines?
I was born in 1989, so I can’t attest to the zeitgeist Vonnegut was addressing when he wrote Bluebeard. Nevertheless, the above quotation certainly captures my mind in 2011. We celebrate—and rightly so—the declarations of human rights, of equality regardless of gender or ethnicity or sports team, the victories we have so far achieved. Yet there is still so much to do, so much inequality to address, not only within countries that lack or struggle with democracy but even in so-called “developed” countries like Canada and the United States. Yes, in 1867 we became an independent dominion, and a parliamentary democracy as well. But it wasn’t until 1918 that women could vote federally. And, I did not know this, but according to Wikipedia, prior to 1960, First Nations people had to give up their status in order to vote! So we can be proud of being 144 years old, Canada, but it has been a long, hard road towards equality, and we still aren’t there yet.
But I digress. I digress, because even though Bluebeard is a thin book with a light tone, it makes me meditate upon weighty subjects. I have to commend Vonnegut for this, for he has created a book that raises important questions yet still leaves me curiously uplifted. With that secret in the potato barn, I feel like Rabo is saying to us, “Come on, people, let’s get our act together: we can do this!” We can remember the past, learn from the past, and avoid repeating its mistakes. But first we must remove the scales from our eyes and sacrifice our illusions to see the world as it is. And this is where I attempt to connect all of this to the motif of abstract art, which thus far I have lamentably neglected. Rabo can draw so realistically that it is scary; he doesn’t exercise this talent, however, because, “it’s just too fucking easy”. And as we see repeatedly throughout Bluebeard, depicting the world ultra-realistically is not the same thing as seeing it. Sometimes a strip of tape is secretly six deer in a forest glade.
May 27, 2016
I picked this to read as a little birthday treat to myself and, true to form, Vonnegut didn't let me down.
Once apprentice to 'great man' and famous illustrator Dan Gregory before becoming one of the founders of an important abstract art movement, even if he was the least talented of the lot, Rabo Karabekian is now a septuagenarian content to live out his days in his well-off dead wife's family home, on the proceeds of his extremely valuable art collection and his only company his cook, her daughter and his best friend, Paul Slazenger. But then Rabo meets the widow Circe Berman, who bulldozes her way into his life and his home and immediately starts changing things, including the decor. She's even got him to write the autobiography that we're reading now, probably in the hopes of finding out just what he's got hidden in his potato barn...
As good a read as all of the previous books of Vonnegut's that I've read, while it didn't quite scale the heights of some of his best, his middle efforts still reach much higher than most others.
Once apprentice to 'great man' and famous illustrator Dan Gregory before becoming one of the founders of an important abstract art movement, even if he was the least talented of the lot, Rabo Karabekian is now a septuagenarian content to live out his days in his well-off dead wife's family home, on the proceeds of his extremely valuable art collection and his only company his cook, her daughter and his best friend, Paul Slazenger. But then Rabo meets the widow Circe Berman, who bulldozes her way into his life and his home and immediately starts changing things, including the decor. She's even got him to write the autobiography that we're reading now, probably in the hopes of finding out just what he's got hidden in his potato barn...
As good a read as all of the previous books of Vonnegut's that I've read, while it didn't quite scale the heights of some of his best, his middle efforts still reach much higher than most others.
October 2, 2021
After years of being away from Vonnegut and his world, the return reminded me why I'd left it! I enjoy his humor but the lack of focus and constant switching of time frames drove me nuts! It's a fun story filled with odd ball characters which is one of several trademarks of the author. I enjoy authors who stray from the ordinary but this one did not work for my tastes. I have to give him credit for creative character development though the plot fails to rise to the same level. If you're unfamiliar with his approach, it's worth reading but keep in mind you're in for a battle of time frames and barrage of characters that require a scorecard to keep track!
March 21, 2023
Definitely one of Vonnegut's lesser novels. The trope of an imperfect elderly man looking back over his life is starting to feel repetitive
July 30, 2021
No es frecuente que la sociedad de la postguerra suscite en el escritor el uso de un tono amable y cálido. Antes bien, encontramos auténticos maestros del gris oscuro casi negro. Kurt Vonnegut es una de las grandes excepciones, pues no abandona un profundo pesimismo sobre la condición humana, casi cercano a Schopenhauer, pero con un tono indonfundible de guasa y recochineo, rico en sarcasmos, que despierta las delicias de sus admiradores, entre los que me encuentro.
Si en "Matadero cinco" Vonnegut se despachaba agusto con el militarismo, "Barbazul" se erige como una crítica feroz contra el mundo del arte, concretamente el del expresionismo abstracto, sin dejar de lado la reflexión humanista sobre los conflictos bélicos (nobleza obliga). Por sus párrafos, desfilan mediocres que se disfrazan de artistas incomprendidos, genios confundidos con mediocres, el divismo de los mimados por el stablishment y los gustos populares... y ninguno se salva de la pluma de Vonnegut, aunque muestre cierta predilección por los fracasados.
Es imposible analizar la estructura y el estilo de esta obra sin establecer paralelismos evidentes con la citada "Matadero cinco". Ambas presentan una narración no lineal y de carácter fragmentario, pero en "Matadero cinco" es muy complicado establecer una línea temporal, algo que no sucede en "Barbazul", donde las disgresiones son el principal motor de la mayor parte de los saltos temporales, lo que da un mayor realismo frente a los "viajes astrales" de Billy Pilgrim. El estilo, sobre todo de los diálogos y, en menor medida, de las reflexiones, del joven Rabo Karabekian recuerda a las del Pilgrim soldado, un candor de juventud naïf, adquiriendo un mayor pesimismo cuando la perspectiva cambia a la del Karabekian viejo y recluido. En cualquier caso, es un estilo desenfadado, fresco y sin demasiados retoricismos.
Adoro a Vonnegut. Hace falta más mala leche de este tipo en la literatura actual.
Si en "Matadero cinco" Vonnegut se despachaba agusto con el militarismo, "Barbazul" se erige como una crítica feroz contra el mundo del arte, concretamente el del expresionismo abstracto, sin dejar de lado la reflexión humanista sobre los conflictos bélicos (nobleza obliga). Por sus párrafos, desfilan mediocres que se disfrazan de artistas incomprendidos, genios confundidos con mediocres, el divismo de los mimados por el stablishment y los gustos populares... y ninguno se salva de la pluma de Vonnegut, aunque muestre cierta predilección por los fracasados.
Es imposible analizar la estructura y el estilo de esta obra sin establecer paralelismos evidentes con la citada "Matadero cinco". Ambas presentan una narración no lineal y de carácter fragmentario, pero en "Matadero cinco" es muy complicado establecer una línea temporal, algo que no sucede en "Barbazul", donde las disgresiones son el principal motor de la mayor parte de los saltos temporales, lo que da un mayor realismo frente a los "viajes astrales" de Billy Pilgrim. El estilo, sobre todo de los diálogos y, en menor medida, de las reflexiones, del joven Rabo Karabekian recuerda a las del Pilgrim soldado, un candor de juventud naïf, adquiriendo un mayor pesimismo cuando la perspectiva cambia a la del Karabekian viejo y recluido. En cualquier caso, es un estilo desenfadado, fresco y sin demasiados retoricismos.
Adoro a Vonnegut. Hace falta más mala leche de este tipo en la literatura actual.
February 2, 2018
“What will be found written after the name Rabo Karabekian in the Big Book on Judgment Day?
Soldier: Excellent.
Husband and Father: Floparroo.
Serious artist: Floparroo”
Loved this autobiography of the fictional painter Rabo Karabekian (who briefly appears in Breakfast of Champions and Deadeye Dick). In typical KV fashion, it touches on morality, war, and the human condition. And, of course, there’s that dark humor I so adore.
Soldier: Excellent.
Husband and Father: Floparroo.
Serious artist: Floparroo”
Loved this autobiography of the fictional painter Rabo Karabekian (who briefly appears in Breakfast of Champions and Deadeye Dick). In typical KV fashion, it touches on morality, war, and the human condition. And, of course, there’s that dark humor I so adore.
August 8, 2024
Наш оповідач — одноокий ветеран Другої світової війни, народжений від батьків, які пережили геноцид вірмен і жили як іммігранти в Америці. Оцінювальний погляд на сучасне мистецтво та одвічної Куртової теми повоєнної людини. Його розповіді межують між скорботою та іронією, між відчаєм та захопленням. Текст насичений і це не буде легкою прогулянкою. Але для шанувальників Воннеґутта-молодшого це гарна книга у скарбничку улюблених.
На жаль, з Куртом, окрім Бійні, в мене так і не склалось. Отаке.
На жаль, з Куртом, окрім Бійні, в мене так і не склалось. Отаке.
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