poetsquib.com

Some of you may remember the controversy created by Vonnegut in relation to his comments about terrorists when he was interviewed by The Australian, a few years ago. Some of you may also recall that he died last year, aged 84, from a fall and not from smoking unfiltered cigarettes since the age of 12. Well here is a book by him called Bluebeard which I bought because I read Cat’s Cradle (which I think would make a great movie) a long time ago and I thoroughly enjoyed it

This is a wonderful book. I mean just look at this gem

The Contessa was surely way ahead of her time, too, in believing that men were not only useless and idiotic, but downright dangerous.

This is a fictional autobiography of a ‘failed’ Armenian American Abstract Expressionist artist called Rabo Karabekian and the big secret he has in his potato barn (hence the book’s title). I don’t know if people read this novel as a satire intended to ridicule abstract art because I read it as a satire intended to mock representational art, most obvious in Rabo’s descriptions of the illustrator Dan Gregory

Nobody could counterfeit verdigris like Dan Gregory.

Rabo’s failure as an artist is nowhere near as spectacular as Dan’s failure as a person

Anyway this book is enjoyable and it’s funny and it’s moving. If you like absurdist fiction then this is for you. I usually earmark the bottom corners of pages with good quotes and this book ended up with an earmark on every third page, which kind of defeated the purpose. But here are some I picked at random

“If anybody has discovered what life is all about,” Father might say, “it is too late. I am no longer interested.”

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I had made her so unhappy that she had developed a sense of humour…

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Paul Slazinger says, incidentally, that the human condition can be summed up in just one word, and this is the word: Embarrassment.

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I called her a crazy witch, and she called me a freeloader and ‘the spit-filled penny whistle of American literature.’