Я не знаю, що написати.
Мене підняло та гепнуло об реальність.

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.

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.

Dry , detailed and perceptive about artmaking, realism, abstraction and meaning. Starts light and flippant, quickly gets deep and makes you really ponder. Any practicing artist should get their head around this novel. Is the artist's mentor meant to be Rockwell? Not sure...welcome to a reimagined 1950s art scene.

Although not one of his most popular novels, this is one of my favorites. Vonnegut combines humor and pathos within a gentle satire in this reflection about war and human destructiveness. To Vonnegut, we're all not far removed from our childhoods and their insecurities, but now we no longer have kind parents to protect us and to appear to answer our questions.

Whether Vonnegut knew of the CIA's funding of abstract expressionism is unknown to me. If not, he anticipates their latterly revealed motives.

absolutely fantastic writing and story telling. never thought i would care so much about what’s in a fictional potato cellar.

Küçük bir uyarı, benim kitabım Can Yayınlarından çıkan 2. baskı ve aralıklarla yaklaşık 20 sayfası eksik basılmış. Yeni satın alacaksanız dikkat edin. Bunun dışında Vonnegut mizahını sevdiğimi daha önce söylemiş olmalıyım. Bana iyi geliyor.

I was sad when it ended. I'll miss the wonderful characters Vonnegut
has created. But like all of Vonnegut's books, it's one I hope to revisit many times in the future.

Bluebeard is a fictional autobiography of a cranky old
Armenian modern painter living alone on a beachside estate. His life
is forever changed one day when he meets Circe Berman and is pressured
by her to write his autobiography – Bluebeard. We spend our time with
Rabo Karabekian divided between the present day, and the past. The
hilarity ensures. I read this mostly on a train to and from work, and
must have looked slightly ridiculous with all the times I shut the
book and just laughed.

This is a book that deals with the Armenian
genocide, a man that beats up his wife, suicide, being maimed in World
War II (our protagonist was not born a Cyclops, he tells us on page 1,
he was deprived of his eye while commanding a platoon of Army
Engineers), and about the desolation a man feels as he looks back at
all his failures in his life. All this, and the book was laugh out
loud funny, never felt too heavy, and concluded so triumphantly and
hopeful, that it got me slightly (very slightly!) teary eyed. Only
Vonnegut.

Vonnegut has a rare gift I don’t think I’ve ever come across. He just
makes writing look so damn easy. He writes as if he was speaking to a
small child, but it is never ever condescending. It just flows with
such ease, elegance, and efficiency.

The plot of the book isn’t really important. This is a prime example
of substance over form. I’ve read and reread many of Vonnegut’s books
and to this day, if you pinned me down and asked me to recall for you
the plot of Breakfast of Champions or of The Sirens of Titan, I would
fail miserably. You don’t read Vonnegut for plots, you read his work
because of that wonderful dark humor- that voice that cries out about
the absurdity of it all. That being said, I think this would be a
great first book for those not familiar with Vonnegut. It’s probably
the most straight forward Vonnegut novel that I’ve read so far; no
zany aliens or time travel.

The absurdity of war is a note that Vonnegut loves to play. Also, his
disdain for the male sex in general:
"After all that men have done to the women and children and every
other defenseless thing on this planet, it is time that not just every
painting, but every piece of music, every statue, every play, ever
poem and every book a man creates, should say only this: "We are much
too horrible for this nice place. We give up. We quit. The end!"

Being a modern painter, Karobekian recalls his years as a struggling
artist. Having been struggling musician myself, a lot of what Vonnegut
writes about rings a bell of truth for me.

"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 the 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 next
morning. "Wow! Were you ever drunk last night!"

But for such a seemingly light and fun read, his message is
surprisingly deep. Not to simplify things, but war really is absurd,
and the media has done a disservice by glorifying it (although this is
a trend seen less and less with more “realistic” portrayals of war
such as Saving Private Ryan and Born on the Fourth of July). I’ll
conclude this with a final quote from Bluebeard's 245th page:

"All the returning veterans in the movies are our age or older," he
said. That was true. In the movies you seldom saw the babies who had
done most of the heavy fighting on the ground in the war.
"Yes- "I said, "and most of the actors in the movies never even went
to war. They came home to the wife and kids and swimming pool after
every grueling day in front of the cameras, after firing off blank
cartridges while men all around them were spitting catsup."
"That's what the young people will think our war was fifty years from
now," said Kitchen, "old men and blanks and catsup." So they would .
So they do.
"Because of the movies," he predicted, "nobody will believe that it
was babies who fought the war."

Ця книга є автобіографією вигаданого Воннегутом художника - Рабо Карабекяна, який розповідає про своє життя від самого початку. Еміграція, дитинство, війна, кохання, творчість, успіх. Написано настільки цікаво, правдиво, що іноді я забувала про те, що все вигадки.

Книга легка, проста, читається швидко, якщо маєте час. Не дарма Роман Маліновський казав, що починати знайомимо з Воннегутом треба з Синьої бороди. Я згодна, це буде безпрограшний варіант.

Вона наповнена гумором, іронією, які я обожнюю, втім і трагізму, суму вистачало. Особливо мені перегукувались думки автора про війну, певно вони будуть актуальні завжди, бо всі війни однаково жахливі і безглузді.

Всі пишуть цитати, на які розбирають книгу і це правда, я і сама таке робила.. підкреслювала стікерами особливо влучні.

my favorite final page/sentence of a book in a really really long time. First Vonnegut besides slaughterhouse five and makes me want to read more :)

The things I miss most about the hamptons are the sad old men that live there

Wow what a book! Easily the best one of Vonnegut's so far. I read the Bulgarian translation in high school but that doesn't really live up to the original.

Some gems (not in page order):

"But he lacked the guts or the wisdom, or maybe just the talent, to indicate somehow that time was liquid, that one moment was no more important than any other, and that all moments quickly run away.
Let me put it another way: Dan Gregory was a taxidermist. He stuffed and mounted and varnished and moth-proofed supposedly great moments, all of which turn out to be depressing dust-catchers, like a moosehead bought at a county auction or a sailfish on the wall of a dentist's waiting room."

"An idea has just come to me from nowhere, to wit: Might not the ancient and nearly universal belief that sperm can be metabolized into noble actions have been the inspiration for Einstein's very similar formula: 'E equals MC squared?' "

" 'Contentedly adrift in the cosmos', were you?" Kitchen said to me. "That is a perfect description of a non-epiphany, that rarest of moments, when God Almighty lets go of the scruff of your neck and lets you be human for a little while."

Here is the solution to the American drug problem suggested a couple of years back by the wife of our President: "Just say no."

"And what is literature, Rabo," he said, "but an insider's newsletter about affairs relating to molecules, of no importance to anything in the Universe but a few molecules who have the disease called 'thought'. "

"And now take my hand and close your eyes. I am going to lead you to the middle, and you can look again."
She closed her eyes, and she followed me as unresistingly as a toy balloon.

And many, many more. What a book! What a book!