- Paperback: 336 pages
- Publisher: Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group (1 Feb 1999)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 038533351X
- ISBN-13: 978-0385333511
- Product Dimensions: 13.2 x 1.5 x 20.1 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 921,580 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Bluebeard: A Novel (Kurt Vonnegut Series)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
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.
About the Author
Kurt Vonnegut has been described by Thomas M. Disch as 'an artist surely destined for canonisation,' in the Times Literary Supplement. His novels include: Galapagos, SlaughterHouse- Five, Breakfast of Champions, Jailbird and Deadeye Dick.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
HAVING WRITTEN "The End" to this story of my life, I find it prudent to scamper back here to before the beginning, to my front door, so to speak, and to make this apology to arriving gusts: "I promised you an autobiography, but something went wrong in the kitchen. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt
HAVING WRITTEN "The End" to this story of my life, I find it prudent to scamper back here to before the beginning, to my front door, so to speak, and to make this apology to arriving gusts: "I promised you an autobiography, but something went wrong in the kitchen. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Mass Market Paperback
We've all got a potato barn, it's just not always that easy to see that anyone else will give a damn whether it's full of spuds, or nuggets. A witty, perhaps in places bleak, but ultimately hopeful journey through a life. This book is packed full of juicy nuggets right up to the point that its final vista emerges from the splendid isolation born out of decades of self-deprocation. Quite brilliantly crafted writing from an ever peculiar, and yet strangely relevant, stand-point. Some day we will all come to see the world this way and laugh. Someday. So it goes.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Vonnegut rounds up several familiar themes and character types for his 13th novel: genocide, the surreality of the modern world, fluid interplay of the past and present, and the less-than-heroic figure taking center stage to tell his story. Here he elevates to narrator a minor character from Breakfast of Champions , wounded World War II veteran and abstract painter Rabo Karabekian. At the urging of enchantress-as-bully Circe Berman, Karabekian writes his "hoax autobiography." Vonnegut uses the tale to satirize art movements and the art-as-investment mind-set and to explore the shifting shape of reality.
Vonnegut re-encapsulates several of his favorite themes: absurdity of war, America's prevalent loneliness, how the rich become rich. However, an interesting theme specific to Bluebeard is the discussion about art. What is art? Circe Berman stays on the best seller's list by generating volumes of teen novels while Paul Salinger lives a suicidal and depressed existence trying to create introspective critiques of humanity. Dan Gregory makes paintings equivalent to being a "taxidermist" where his subjects look more real on his canvas than in real life, while the abstract expressionists make unintelligible topics. Paul Salinger and the abstract expressionists look down on the others, but which is really better? The answer might be provided with the Rabo's greatest secret. Kept in a potato barn behind his mansion, its ultimate disclosure to the world makes a dramatic statement about art.
Here we have Vonnegut at his most focused on a long time, tearing off page after page that will make you laugh and stop and think at the same time. The reader will enjoy this book on several political and philosophical levels in addition to enjoying a fine story. It is tender yet sometimes loveless, a blending of wisdom and insanity.
This is the most fun I've had with a Vonnegut book in long time. Probably one of his more obscure works, it deserves to be read along with his other classics.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Mass Market Paperback
Pretty much everything Vonnegut wrote is worth reading, but Bluebeard is one of his very best. The sheer warm-hearted humanity of the man - as he details the life and work of Abstract Expressionist painter Rabo Karabekian - makes this a moving, wise must-read.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Time is liquid
Kurt Vonnegut has news for George Santayana, the philosopher who stated that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Read more
Published 10 months ago by Eileen Shaw
Great beach book
I'm a person who enjoys more than a trashy romance for the beach. this book is a surprisingly good yarn. Read more
Published on 23 July 2004 by E. Oliver
a really good shaggy dog story
If you only ever read one Vonnegut story then it should be this one. It's just a great piece of story-telling. Read more
Published on 6 Oct 2001 by J. Tuffin
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