"That's the best way I can describe this book: simply beautiful. The story is very funny, sad, yet touching. And of course, you're dying to know what's in the potato barn. That revelation is one of the nicest surprises that a book has ever given me and is what really left me with a lasting impression. It's surprising that Vonnegut could write something so heartfelt compared to his other books, but I guess that just shows what a great author he is. For all the fun he pokes at modern society, Vonnegut actually provides some hope for a change in this book."
The premises of these novels are so ridiculous and absurd, they're genius, and, God, help me, I can't get enough. No one would take this stuff seriously, except, it's Kurt Vonnegut, so, why would you? Enough said. And then some. This particular gem weaves a moroseful tale of woe in the form of a feigned (maybe) autobiography of an Armenian modern artist whose life was ruined, along with his paintings, after an unfortunate turn with newly-developed postwar chemical-based wall paints. The paints destroyed the canvasses they were applied to, along with Rabo's career, constituting, in essence, the acts of a pack of polychromous suicide bombers intent on the destruction of the entire modern art establishment. A-men! Thank you, Sateen Dura-Lux! "The whole planet is now FUBAR with postwar miracles, but, back in the early 1960s, I was one of the first persons to be totally wrecked by one - an acrylic wall-paint whose colors, according to advertisements of the day, would '...outlive the smile on the Mona Lisa.'" Or not.
The novel is named for Bluebeard, a character who kills all his wives, one after another, in quick succession, after they look into the one room in the castle where they're forbidden to go. Curiosity killed the cat. Think along the lines of that scene in the Beauty and the Beast cartoon, where she goes into the West Wing and finds the enchanted rose, not ending so well. The monstrous betrayal occurs when Marilee and Rabo are caught by his patron and her abusive husband Dan Gregory, whose one request of them was to never go into the Museum of Modern Art; little does he know that they have been betraying him regularly, visiting often the institution which he despises. "I don't give a hoot what pictures you look at... all I asked was that you not pay your respects to an institution which thinks that the smears and spatters and splotches and daubs and dribbles and vomit of lunatics and degenerates and charlatans are great treasures we should all admire... and it's not your going in there which is the most insulting. No, it isn't that. It's how happy you were when you were coming out!"
(Some) joking aside: this is actually quite a complex novel, with multiple threads and layers of meaning. Most of the familiar Vonnegut themes make an appearance, including war, anti-war, death, relationships, especially filial estrangement, which seems another common theme (the same appears in Jailbird), human nature, and, chief among them in this novel, an ardent hatred of modernity (or the pernicious children it spawned) and a palpable distrust of technology. One key passage reads: "the Second World war had many of the promised characterstics of Armageddon, a final war between good and evil, so that nothing would do but that it be followed by miracles. Instant coffee was one. DDT was another. It was going to kill all the bugs, and nearly did. Nuclear energy was going to make electricty so cheap that it might not even be metered. It would also make another war unthinkable. Talk about loaves and fishes! Antibiotics would defeat all diseases. Lazarus would never die: how was that for a scheme to make the Son of God obsolete. Yes, and there were miraculous breakfast foods and would soon be helicopters for every family. There were miraculous new fibers which could be washed in cold water and need no ironing afterwards! Talk about a war well worth fighting!"
On the whole, the central theme of war appears again, and frames the whole of the novel. Rabo was eventually wounded in the war, losing an eye, and early on, KV foreshadows this unavoidable event. In the person of a salty newspaper editor, KV speaks: "just remember that the Europeans around you, who you think are so much more civilized than Americans, are looking forward to just one thing: the time when it will become legal to kill each other and knock everything down again. If I had my way... American geography books would call those European countries by their right names: 'The Syphilis Empire,' 'The Republic of Suicide,' 'Dementia Praecox,' which of course borders on beautiful 'Paranoia.' .... I've spoiled Europe for you, and you haven't even seen it yet."
This view was probably reflective of what KV was experiencing at the time of writing, during the Cold War, which many believed to be yet another Interwar period between impending cataclysms, the next likely to be the final one, unless one counts the possibility of a fourth world war, involving sticks and stones: "That was an ordinary way for a patriotic American to talk back then. It's hard to believe how sick of war we used to be. We used to boast of how small our Army and Navy were, and how little influence generals and admirals had in Washington. We used to call armaments manufactures 'Merchants of Death.' Can you imagine that?"
As a rule, Vonnegut's works extrapolate in genius form the inane, quotidian things that seemingly irk him, but this one accomplishes this feat to a superlative degree. As in his other novels, he characteristically and assiduously dismantles and ultimately annihilates them, hurling such derision at the things he finds bothersome or absurd that they essentially come to nothing. For example, one will, I wager, never again look at modern art the same way, after reading this - Vonnegut's lighthearted yet scathing treatment couched in seemingly-innocuous farce is more impactful than the pedantic scorn of a roomful of pretentious critics. And a lot more clever, too.
I usually do a bit more analysis and less quoting, but this novel in particular had so many relevant passages, it's difficult to pass them up. I admit, I had fun with this one. The following passage summarizes nicely: "She nodded in the direction of the [Jackson] Pollock [painting]. 'All anybody could do with a picture like that is illustrate an advertisement for a hangover remedy or seasick pills.'" Circe's common sense is sagacious, and terrifying. It threatens an entire house-of-cards world and way of life. The reader is left with the question: is her "kitsch" the more banal, or Rabo's pretentious abstract art? Are they both, or is art simply an intangible, its value held solely in the eye of the beholder? Circe comes into his life in an almost supernatural manner, fate and whatnot. And she hates modern art, as did the artist's hyper-realist master, Dan Gregory, who made Rabo recite, "The emperor has no clothes," which has become something of a mantra to those who hate today's modern art. "I want you to say that out loud and with just that degree of conviction... anytime anyone has anything good to say about so-called modern art.... It's the work of swindlers and lunatics and degenerates, and the fact that many people are now taking it seriously proves to me that the world has gone mad. I hope you agree."
This novel is more Dickensian than many of his others. You get the sense that KV sympathizes with several (but, admittedly, not all) of these characters to a far greater degree, especially the embattled, somewhat pathetic protagonist, what with his enigmatic secret entombed in a potato barn, leading some to speculate that this was KV's autobiography of sorts as well (but I think all his novels are, in a way, as they reveal the episodes of his life in a haphazard, schizophrenic arrangement, typical of his style, that readers have to piece together like a jigsaw puzzle before a comprehensive portrait is revealed). Several other novels of his focus on tragedy as well, but this one is particularly heavy, embodied by the suicide victims and even the survivors, including the artist's parents, who escaped the Armenian genocide, but it also speaks strongly to loss: the loss of Rabo's eye, the loss of Dear Edith, and a surfeit of his friends, and even himself, in some respects.
The message here is, I think: survival is a matter of perspective.
-------------- NOTABLE PASSAGES-----------------
Edith, like all great Earth Mothers, was a multitude.
Judging from your pictures, you hate facts like poison.
My own father would have laughed as hard as anybody when my paintings, thanks to unforeseen chemical reactions between the sizing of my canvasses and the acrylic wall-paint and colored tapes I had applied to them, all destroyed themselves. I mean - people who had paid fifteen- or twenty- or even thirty thousand dollars for a picture of mine found themselves gazing at a blank canvas, all ready for a new picture, and ringlets of colored tapes and what looked like moldy Rice Krispies on the floor.
'Never trust a survivor... until you find out what he did to stay alive.'
Nowhere has the number ZERO been of more philosophical value than in the United States.
All that has changed, in my opinion, is that, thanks to television, we can hide a Great Depression. We may even be hiding a Third World War.
Most kids can't afford to go to Harvard to be misinformed.
Life, by definition, is never still. Where is it going? From birth to death, with no stops on the way. Even a picture of a bowl of pears on a checkerboard tablecloth is liquid, if laid on canvas by the brush of a master.
Who is to be more pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?
A lot of people were opposed to it. A lot of people were for it. I myself think about it as little as possible.
One would soon go mad if one took such coincidences too seriously. One might be led to suspect that there were all sorts of things going on in the Universe which he or she did not thoroughly understand.
and, to sum up:
"I think you're talking about TYPING instead of WRITING." -Truman Capote
The novel is named for Bluebeard, a character who kills all his wives, one after another, in quick succession, after they look into the one room in the castle where they're forbidden to go. Curiosity killed the cat. Think along the lines of that scene in the Beauty and the Beast cartoon, where she goes into the West Wing and finds the enchanted rose, not ending so well. The monstrous betrayal occurs when Marilee and Rabo are caught by his patron and her abusive husband Dan Gregory, whose one request of them was to never go into the Museum of Modern Art; little does he know that they have been betraying him regularly, visiting often the institution which he despises. "I don't give a hoot what pictures you look at... all I asked was that you not pay your respects to an institution which thinks that the smears and spatters and splotches and daubs and dribbles and vomit of lunatics and degenerates and charlatans are great treasures we should all admire... and it's not your going in there which is the most insulting. No, it isn't that. It's how happy you were when you were coming out!"
(Some) joking aside: this is actually quite a complex novel, with multiple threads and layers of meaning. Most of the familiar Vonnegut themes make an appearance, including war, anti-war, death, relationships, especially filial estrangement, which seems another common theme (the same appears in Jailbird), human nature, and, chief among them in this novel, an ardent hatred of modernity (or the pernicious children it spawned) and a palpable distrust of technology. One key passage reads: "the Second World war had many of the promised characterstics of Armageddon, a final war between good and evil, so that nothing would do but that it be followed by miracles. Instant coffee was one. DDT was another. It was going to kill all the bugs, and nearly did. Nuclear energy was going to make electricty so cheap that it might not even be metered. It would also make another war unthinkable. Talk about loaves and fishes! Antibiotics would defeat all diseases. Lazarus would never die: how was that for a scheme to make the Son of God obsolete. Yes, and there were miraculous breakfast foods and would soon be helicopters for every family. There were miraculous new fibers which could be washed in cold water and need no ironing afterwards! Talk about a war well worth fighting!"
On the whole, the central theme of war appears again, and frames the whole of the novel. Rabo was eventually wounded in the war, losing an eye, and early on, KV foreshadows this unavoidable event. In the person of a salty newspaper editor, KV speaks: "just remember that the Europeans around you, who you think are so much more civilized than Americans, are looking forward to just one thing: the time when it will become legal to kill each other and knock everything down again. If I had my way... American geography books would call those European countries by their right names: 'The Syphilis Empire,' 'The Republic of Suicide,' 'Dementia Praecox,' which of course borders on beautiful 'Paranoia.' .... I've spoiled Europe for you, and you haven't even seen it yet."
This view was probably reflective of what KV was experiencing at the time of writing, during the Cold War, which many believed to be yet another Interwar period between impending cataclysms, the next likely to be the final one, unless one counts the possibility of a fourth world war, involving sticks and stones: "That was an ordinary way for a patriotic American to talk back then. It's hard to believe how sick of war we used to be. We used to boast of how small our Army and Navy were, and how little influence generals and admirals had in Washington. We used to call armaments manufactures 'Merchants of Death.' Can you imagine that?"
As a rule, Vonnegut's works extrapolate in genius form the inane, quotidian things that seemingly irk him, but this one accomplishes this feat to a superlative degree. As in his other novels, he characteristically and assiduously dismantles and ultimately annihilates them, hurling such derision at the things he finds bothersome or absurd that they essentially come to nothing. For example, one will, I wager, never again look at modern art the same way, after reading this - Vonnegut's lighthearted yet scathing treatment couched in seemingly-innocuous farce is more impactful than the pedantic scorn of a roomful of pretentious critics. And a lot more clever, too.
I usually do a bit more analysis and less quoting, but this novel in particular had so many relevant passages, it's difficult to pass them up. I admit, I had fun with this one. The following passage summarizes nicely: "She nodded in the direction of the [Jackson] Pollock [painting]. 'All anybody could do with a picture like that is illustrate an advertisement for a hangover remedy or seasick pills.'" Circe's common sense is sagacious, and terrifying. It threatens an entire house-of-cards world and way of life. The reader is left with the question: is her "kitsch" the more banal, or Rabo's pretentious abstract art? Are they both, or is art simply an intangible, its value held solely in the eye of the beholder? Circe comes into his life in an almost supernatural manner, fate and whatnot. And she hates modern art, as did the artist's hyper-realist master, Dan Gregory, who made Rabo recite, "The emperor has no clothes," which has become something of a mantra to those who hate today's modern art. "I want you to say that out loud and with just that degree of conviction... anytime anyone has anything good to say about so-called modern art.... It's the work of swindlers and lunatics and degenerates, and the fact that many people are now taking it seriously proves to me that the world has gone mad. I hope you agree."
This novel is more Dickensian than many of his others. You get the sense that KV sympathizes with several (but, admittedly, not all) of these characters to a far greater degree, especially the embattled, somewhat pathetic protagonist, what with his enigmatic secret entombed in a potato barn, leading some to speculate that this was KV's autobiography of sorts as well (but I think all his novels are, in a way, as they reveal the episodes of his life in a haphazard, schizophrenic arrangement, typical of his style, that readers have to piece together like a jigsaw puzzle before a comprehensive portrait is revealed). Several other novels of his focus on tragedy as well, but this one is particularly heavy, embodied by the suicide victims and even the survivors, including the artist's parents, who escaped the Armenian genocide, but it also speaks strongly to loss: the loss of Rabo's eye, the loss of Dear Edith, and a surfeit of his friends, and even himself, in some respects.
The message here is, I think: survival is a matter of perspective.
-------------- NOTABLE PASSAGES-----------------
Edith, like all great Earth Mothers, was a multitude.
Judging from your pictures, you hate facts like poison.
My own father would have laughed as hard as anybody when my paintings, thanks to unforeseen chemical reactions between the sizing of my canvasses and the acrylic wall-paint and colored tapes I had applied to them, all destroyed themselves. I mean - people who had paid fifteen- or twenty- or even thirty thousand dollars for a picture of mine found themselves gazing at a blank canvas, all ready for a new picture, and ringlets of colored tapes and what looked like moldy Rice Krispies on the floor.
'Never trust a survivor... until you find out what he did to stay alive.'
Nowhere has the number ZERO been of more philosophical value than in the United States.
All that has changed, in my opinion, is that, thanks to television, we can hide a Great Depression. We may even be hiding a Third World War.
Most kids can't afford to go to Harvard to be misinformed.
Life, by definition, is never still. Where is it going? From birth to death, with no stops on the way. Even a picture of a bowl of pears on a checkerboard tablecloth is liquid, if laid on canvas by the brush of a master.
Who is to be more pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?
A lot of people were opposed to it. A lot of people were for it. I myself think about it as little as possible.
One would soon go mad if one took such coincidences too seriously. One might be led to suspect that there were all sorts of things going on in the Universe which he or she did not thoroughly understand.
and, to sum up:
"I think you're talking about TYPING instead of WRITING." -Truman Capote
