Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut

"Read this, it's garbage!" the back cover may as well state of this fictional autobiography. "I am old and sick of this crap but you greedy readers keep pulling for more, so here it is. Here is my garbage. Have a good look. I have not disguised it but know you will read it anyway. Enjoy!" Vonnegut may as well write in his customary note of introduction. And thus begins one of the most redundant novels ever written. An aging and wealthy Armenian painter, Rabo, lives in a large lonely mansion in the Hamptons. The house used to belong to the Taft family, a family Rabo married into by luck. Now it is also occupied by an especially pushy widow/successful pop culture novelist who shoves her tacky ambitions into Rabo's home and life. In the first 30 pages or so Vonnegut - oops, Rabo - tells us the entire story. He also mentions there is a mysterious something in the potato barn. Rabo's friends and perhaps his readers are horribly curious about that mystery. Curious enough to listen to an old man ramble off his life story, repeating an event five times before it happens, describing the moment in detail, and repeating it again five times after the fact. Rabo is particularly fixated on his first sexual experience, an encounter with an older woman. It is made clear that this was his only moment of real love in life, probably due to the fact he's clung to it alone all these decades.

It's like Vonnegut was determined to test the loyalty of his readers: be patient and maybe, when I am finished, I'll swing open the door of my potato barn to reveal a morsel of undiscovered wisdom/wit. There is a lot about abstract art, war, soul and meat.

This book is written in first person and separated into tiny readable sections for even those readers with virtually no attention span. The characters are at once pretentious, sentimental, and absurd; as alive as a dead fly on the windowsill. This is not Vonnegut at his best. I kept waiting for snappy little explanations which never came and instead left sections unrelated and random. Maybe his earlier works (e.g. Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat's Cradle, and The Sirens of Titan to name a few) set expectations too high. Worth reading for fools and other die hard Vonnegut fans.

Um?
2 out of 5
Buy this Book: Bluebeard: A Novel