My last Vonnegut novel. Shit. After all 14 this was a nice one to end on. I think Bluebeard is the closest to a postmodernist and artist manifesto as he ever wrote. Not as emotional or gripping as his other books, and in a way it has the postclimactic drag on for longer than his other books.

It's a defense of abstract art as an antitotalitaran societal tool. Peace through beauty, aesthetic over ideology. I realize this will make no sense to those who haven't read it but these are my notes for myself and right now I am overwhelmed in trying to grasp what all these novels mean.

i actually ended up really liking this !! i’m definitely glad i finished it, i liked it wayyyy more than slaughterhouse 5. really enjoyed the underlying messages & the female characters. felt less batshit than slaughterhouse 5 and more sincere all around. 10/10 would’ve liked it if i was having to analyze it for an english class bc i feel like there is a lotttt in it to unpack that my little brain while speeding thru it didn’t have the time to process. will prob go read some reviews/analysis of it. good stuff

A very middle of the road Vonnegut

Favorite quote:
“She had a life. I had accumulated anecdotes. She was home. Home was somewhere I never thought I’d be.”

Vonnegut's books are hard to summarise as the usual elements are always present and eminently sum-up-able: good-natured satire, moving stories-within-stories, shabby protags who inherit and lose fortunes as naturally as TV remotes, strong women always at the centre of life's mayhem, the ghost of WWII past.

This one hits at the same highs as his other eighties novels, Deadeye Dick and Galápagos, and deserves more attention.

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

•t“Never trust a survivor… until you find out what he did to stay alive.”

•t“Perfectly beautiful cowboy boots… dazzling jewelry for manly feet.”

•t“She had life. I had accumulated anecdotes.”

•tOld canvases “Purged of every trace of Sateen Dura-Luxe, and restretched and reprimed… dazzling white in their restored virginity.”

•t“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).

Գիրքը, ի դեպ, հայերեն թարգմանություն ունի, ու բավական հաջողված։ Կարդալիս անընդհատ սպասում ես՝ ինչ է լինելու։ Վոնեգուտը մնում է նկարագրությունների վարպետ։ «Ռաբո Կարաբեկյան» անուն-ազգանունը, ավելացնում է այս ստեղծագործության գրավչությունը ։)))

"—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!

3,5. Vonnegucie, stary szarlatanie, ja już Cię przejrzałam i wyczuwam zdania i słowa kolejne. Nie przeszkadza mi to, dopóty jeszcze sprawiasz, że zaśmiewam się głośno.
Paul Slazinger pojechał do Polski, jakby nie miał dokąd.

Мене ця книга дуже сильно вразила. Манера оповіді така, що на кожній сторінці тебе постійно осяює щось смішне, чи щось глибоке, чи щось трагічне, або все разом.

У розділі про письменницькі поради Воннеґута в книжці Семківа "Як писали класики" написане таке:

Кожен персонаж має хотіти чогось, навіть якщо це просто склянка води.

Кожне речення мусить робити одне з двох - розвивати когось з персонажів або рухати дію.

В книжці жодного зайвого персонажа. Обмаль описів. Немає зайвих слів. Це - концентрат думки!

Тип викладення - автобіографія у вигляді щоденника. Все в невеликих розділах. Але кожен логічний шматок тексту викликає емоцію. Це просто найефективніший атракціон, на якому я була. Амплітуда та вир емоцій максимальні.

І в мене закінчилися сині наліпки для відзначання розумних, смішних, дивовижних моментів

“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 genialny jak zawsze

I would call this the most mature of any of Vonnegut's books that I have read so far. I know that Vonnegut began his novel writing close to the age of 30 which is considered an adult but his work still lacked maturity. Which can be a good thing as his earlier works were meant to be biting satire and not high literature.

Bluebeard is more melancholy and less slapstick than Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions which he is more renowned for. It has a more subtle humour that lends itself to better storytelling. This perspective and style work really well when looking at life through art. I felt I was looking into Vonnegut's heart and mind as I read each page. The medium is different but the message is the same. This really make's McLuhan's the medium is the message resonate with me. That's not to say he doesn't take the occasional bite out of how we view the art world. He does, and with relish.

I think I've found a new favourite by Mr. Vonnegut and one I would rather use to introduce people to the real brilliance of his writing.