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

The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis - Jose Saramago

A quiet novel from the Nobel Prize winning Portuguese author. The protagonist, Dr. Ricardo Reis, returns to his native city of Lisbon after 16 years of self-imposed exile to Brazil. A poet friend has died. He spends a rather uneventful year in decline, talking to the ghost of his dead friend, mostly living in a hotel where he reads newspapers, wanders the streets, falls in love with a young guest and, of course, sleeps with a maid. With a mixture of magical realism, historical references (it's 1936, war in Europe is eminent and wealthy Spanish refugees slowly clog the city) and careful prose this story has potential to be a captivating and beautiful read. Unfortunately the plot is so stationary in its subtlety that the novel leaves instead an impression of painful tedium, which festers and grows to a near spite by the end when, as throughout, nothing happens. His death, portrayed as his taking his coat and following his dead friend to the graveyard, is a good demonstration of the book as a whole: an old man's detouring, distracted, procrastinated walk to the grave. For readers in reflective, time-abundant situations (patient old people) or academics where each minute detail can be reconstructed and massaged until it releases whatever point is to be found, this book may be good fodder for your arrogance. Otherwise, well worth skipping in a world so full of nourishing drive-thru wisdom.

Um?
2.5 out of 5
Buy this Book: The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis

Caverns - O.U. Levon (U.O. Novel)

This Ken Kesey led group effort by a class of 13 University of Oregon creative writing graduate students is a crap shoot of quality. As explained in the introduction, the goals of the class were "to write, rewrite, and submit a finished novel in the three terms alloted [them]" (Kesey, 1990, Introduction to Caverns). The resulting story of a ragtag crew's quest to quell a mystery shrouded with murder and confused by media attention reveals intriguing glimpses of slightly underdeveloped characters through a shaky and at times tedious plot. The collaboration behind Caverns is perhaps the most compelling part of the mainly fun but frivolous novel. If you're a die hard Kesey fan or happen to find this book near a comfortable toilet (to read while you poop) it may be worth your time.

Um?
2 out of 5
Buy this Book: Caverns

Welcome to the Monkey House - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Spanning nearly two decades and covering the breadth of Vonnegut's topics, Welcome to the Monkey House is inconsistent in both style and quality. The stories very from the inane domestic scenarios of 'Go Back to Your Precious Wife and Son' and 'Long Walk to Forever' (clearly aimed at the postwar housewife) to weird science fiction comedies, including 'Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.' The latter type are mostly concerned with overpopulation and the morality of scientific advancement, two issues he seems to have dwelled heavily on in those years. In this collection, frequent Vonnegut readers will find familiar characters (e.g. band director George Helmholtz) and ideas seen in other works, such as volunteer suicide and compulsory handicaps. A couple of the pieces are terribly boring, a few are highly original and amusing, and the story 'Harrison Bergeron' is one of the few examples of a written work that improved in its adaptation to film.

Um?
2.5 out of 5
Buy this book: Welcome to the Monkey House

Absurdistan - Gary Shteyngart

Absurdistan naturally draws comparisons to two satirical masterpieces, A Confederacy of Dunces and Catch-22, as it is the story of a massively obese young rich man caught amidst the international insanity of corporate globalization and war. But lined up against those two works, it simply cannot compare. It is, at times, a highly descriptive, lively, and amusing novel, but not much more - after all, what could a modern novel about the absurdity of war and the military-industrial complex possibly add to what was given to us by Joseph Heller back in 1961? As if aware of this, Shteyngart relies too heavily on the details of today's world theater - oil, the Soviet bloc, hip-hop, McDonald's, Halliburton - as if to gain validity, but its use of all-too familiar, already stigmatized names only limit its power. It seems to be a criticism of specific companies rather than of the underlying system that allows for their operation. His parodies are so obvious that they may make one think they are in on something without actually having to think, and its mockery of American culture is too easy - the protagonist, a mammoth Russian brat, enjoys quoting the Notorious BIG, as if the late rapper wasn't ridiculous enough on his own. Whereas the mysterious Syndicate and painful circular logic of Catch-22 boost that novel to the timeless universal, Absurdistan remains no more than a sometimes entertaining, but mostly annoying, comment on the current age.

Um?
2 out of 5
Buy this book: Absurdistan: A Novel
Download for Kindle: Absurdistan: A Novel