Always clever, Vonnegut makes you feel like you’re in with him on the joke. A fictional autobiography that likely borrows from the author’s real lived experience… love the glimpse into the modern artists, always happy for a rothko mention!

A nice little escape, a fake autobiography of a fake person is fun. And with that good ol' Vonnegut sense of humor.

This was the slowest Vonnegut for me but did I love it? Yes! I used to read Vonnegut books when a book I finished stayed with me too much. His books are like reboots for me. But I need another reboot book after I finish Bluebeard.

Had some absolutely devastating passages for an artist to read but I thoroughly enjoyed the book despite being stopped dead in my tracks several times.

Only Vonnegut could put something like this together and make it sing.

I'd call this Vonnegut's sweetest novel, but then again I'm a big ol' softie.

5 stars. He's made similar points before but this one ends up achingly tender. Really shows Vonnegut's range and skill, plucking heartstrings so forcefully with so few words.

Excellent later-in-life Vonnegut novel! Perhaps his most grounded work since Mother Night. Stronger female characters than most of his output. Great discourse on technique/craft versus artistry.

Bluebeard is very atypical of Vonnegut’s fiction. It feels more honest, more literary, and more conflicted than the majority of his work.

In it, we read the forcibly penned autobiography of retired impressionist artist and WWII vet Rabo Karabekian. After a very long and complicated life of self-loathing, he has retired himself so deeply that me might as well be dead. With the arrival of a boisterous female novelist on his doorstep, he is flung into a new lease on life, throughout which he is forced to reflect on the better part of a century of living.

The writing style, language, and perspective in this book is Vonnegut through and through, but there is little comedy in Rabo’s reflections. The book is sort of a treatise from Solomon’s book, about being lost and alone, about finding that every high ambition, whether failed or succeeded, feels worthless in hindsight. Vonnegut continues to take shots at the ways the world has settled into, but he does so with a much more human confusion than is typical for his novels. He makes mention of nearly every slighted or marginalized people group in the past few hundred years, but the sorrow has not the typical zest of bitterness. Bluebeard feels like Vonnegut with the steam taken from his sails, and what it loses in wit it makes up in sincerity.