The novel, written in diary form, is easy to follow and amusing in several parts. It can be a little depressing at times, however. Vonnegut once again manages to take a dig at modern art, through the character of Rabbo.

IMO not Vonnegut's strongest work - the narrative was jumpy and unstable, I got bored at some parts. On the ranks of Galapagos, but not BOF (which is in my opinion the worst novel written by him). The character work is interesting -- we have a descendent of the Armenian genocide and POW during WW2, who deal with all of this, and comes to accept himself, through art.

"I couldn't," I said. "I never had." "Anybody who wants to can," she said.

To me, this book is about inspiring, challenging, and helping others.

A work of art.

The characters, timelines, philosophy, scenery, and art, so much happens in such a small space.

Although not the book that usually comes to mind when someone references Vonnegut, Bluebeard is my favorite of his that I have read. It is a fun read, and irreverent throughout. Very much worth a look.

Reading Bluebeard in Kyrgyzstan call that Yurt Vonnegut

It is often worth circling back to books you've already read. When I was in high school, clinging to Vonnegut's complete (at the time) works as a way to stay sane, I was underwhelmed by Bluebeard. Later, when I re-read Breakfast of Champions (again), I realized that the narrator of Bluebeard, painter Rabo Karabekian, has a small walk-on part in that novel where he offers a compelling defense of Abstract Expressionism. So, I have long wanted to re-visit Bluebeard with that in mind. I'm glad I did. While many of the trademarks from Vonnegut's best-known books are still in play here, this is a gentler and more optimistic novel (which is probably why it didn't do much for me as a teenager). It seems to me a meditation on the creative impulse itself -- how much beauty it can bring into the world but also how much pain and destruction (usually self-destruction) can come along with it, especially for those who are trying to create at the highest levels. I found myself deeply moved by this book which includes two writers and several painters among its main characters.

Below are several quotations (some lengthy) that particularly struck me while I was reading:



"I was obviously born to draw better than most people, just as the widow Berman and Paul Slazinger obviously born to tell stories better than most people. Other people are obviously born to sing and dance or explain the stars in the sky or do magic tricks or be great leaders or athletes, and so on.
"I think that could go back to the time when people had to live in small groups of relatives--maybe fifty or a hundred people at the most. And evolution or God or whatever arranged things genetically, to keep the little families going, to cheer them up, so that they could all have somebody to tell stories around the campfire at night, and somebody else to paint pictures on the walls of the caves, and somebody else who wasn't afraid of anything and so on.
"That's what I think. And of course a scheme like that doesn't make sense anymore, because simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. 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 nothing but 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 a coffee table like Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers." (pp 81-82)

* * *

"Slazinger said afterwards that there ought to be some way to persuade people like Pomerantz, and the Hamptons teem with people like Pomerantz, that they had already extorted more than enough from the economy. He suggested that we build a Money Hall of Fame out hee, with busts of arbitrageurs and hostile-take-over specialists and venture capitalists and investment bankers and platinum parachutists in niches, with their statistics cut into stone--how many millions they had stolen legally in how short a time." (121)

* * *

"What do you think love is anyway?" she said.
"I guess I don't know," I said.
"You know the best part--" she said, walking around like this feeling good about everything. If you missed the rest of it, I certainly wouldn't cry for you." (172)


* * *

But when I roamed New York City, knowing so much and capable of speaking so nicely, and yet so lonely, and often hungry and cold, I learned the joke at the core of American self-improvement: knowledge was so much junk to be processed one way or another at great universities. The real treasure the great universities offered was a lifelong membership in a respected artificial extended family. (195)


* * *


"I think it is somehow very useful, and maybe even essential, for a fine artist to have to somehow make his peace on the canvas with all the things he *cannot* do. That is what attracts us to serious paintings, I think: that shortfall, which we might call 'personality,' or even 'pain.' " (201)

* * *

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, ever statue, every play, every poem and book a man creates, should say only this: 'We are much too horrible for this nice place. We give up. We quit. The end!." (254)

One of my favorite books of all time. Well worth the time to read.

Not quite as wild as the other Vonnegut books I've read. There's probably some that appreciate that. Similar subject matter on the horrors of men and war, which is an important subject.
I did really like the ending.