{"product_id":"bluebeard-isbn-9780385333511","title":"Bluebeard","description":"\u003cb\u003e“Ranks with Vonnegut’s best and goes one step beyond . . . joyous, soaring fiction.”—\u003ci\u003eThe Atlanta Journal and Constitution\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBroad humor and bitter irony collide in this fictional autobiography of Rabo Karabekian, who, at age seventy-one, wants to be left alone on his Long Island estate with the secret he has locked inside his potato barn. But then a voluptuous young widow badgers Rabo into telling his life story—and Vonnegut in turn tells us the plain, heart-hammering truth about man’s careless fancy to create or destroy what he loves.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePraise for \u003ci\u003eBluebeard\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Vonnegut is at his edifying best.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe Philadelphia Inquirer\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“The quicksilver mind of Vonnegut is at it again. . . . He displays all his talents—satire, irony, ridicule, slapstick, and even a shaggy dog story of epic proportions.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe Cincinnati Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“[Kurt Vonnegut is] a voice you can trust to keep poking holes in the social fabric.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eSan Francisco Chronicle\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“It has the qualities of classic Bosch and \u003ci\u003eSlaughterhouse\u003c\/i\u003e Vonnegut. . . . \u003ci\u003eBluebeard\u003c\/i\u003e is uncommonly feisty.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eUSA Today\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“Is Bluebeard good? Yes! . . . This is vintage Vonnegut—good wine from his best grapes.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe Detroit News\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“A joyride . . . Vonnegut is more fascinated and puzzled than angered by the human stupidities and contradictions he discerns so keenly. So hop in his rumble seat. As you whiz along, what you observe may provide some new perspectives.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eKansas City Star\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e“Ranks with Vonnegut’s best and goes one step beyond . . . joyous, soaring fiction.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe Atlanta Journal and Constitution \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Vonnegut is at his edifying best.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe Philadelphia Inquirer\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“The quicksilver mind of Vonnegut is at it again. . . . He displays all his talents—satire, irony, ridicule, slapstick, and even a shaggy dog story of epic proportions.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe Cincinnati Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “[Kurt Vonnegut is] a voice you can trust to keep poking holes in the social fabric.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eSan Francisco Chronicle\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “It has the qualities of classic Bosch and \u003ci\u003eSlaughterhouse\u003c\/i\u003e Vonnegut. . . . \u003ci\u003eBluebeard\u003c\/i\u003e is uncommonly feisty.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eUSA Today\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Is Bluebeard good? Yes! . . . This is vintage Vonnegut—good wine from his best grapes.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe Detroit News\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “A joyride . . . Vonnegut is more fascinated and puzzled than angered by the human stupidities and contradictions he discerns so keenly. So hop in his rumble seat. As you whiz along, what you observe may provide some new perspectives.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eKansas City Star\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003eKurt Vonnegut\u003c\/b\u003e’s humor, satiric voice, and incomparable imagination first captured America’s attention in \u003ci\u003eThe Sirens of Titan\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003ein 1959 and established him as “a true artist” (\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e) with\u003ci\u003e Cat’s Cradle\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003ein 1963. He was, as Graham Greene declared, “one of the best living American writers.” Mr. Vonnegut passed away in April 2007.Having written \"The End\" to this story of my life, I find it prudent to scamper back here to before the beginning, to my front door, so to speak, and to make this apology to arriving guests: \"I promised you an autobiography, but something went wrong in the kitchen. It turns out to be a \u003ci\u003ediary\u003c\/i\u003e of this past troubled summer, too! We can always send out for pizzas if necessary. Come \u003ci\u003ein\u003c\/i\u003e, come \u003ci\u003ein\u003c\/i\u003e.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI am the erstwhile American painter Rabo Karabekian, a one-eyed man. I was born of immigrant parents in San Ignacio, California, in 1916. I begin this autobiography seventy-one years later. To those unfamiliar with the ancient mysteries of arithmetic, that makes this year 1987.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI was not born a cyclops. I was deprived of my left eye while commanding a platoon of Army Engineers, curiously enough artists of one sort or another in civilian life, in Luxembourg near the end of World War Two. We were specialists in camouflage, but at that time were fighting for our lifes as ordinary infantry. The unit was composed of artists, since it was the theory of someone in the Army that we would be especially good at camouflage.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd so we were! And we were! What hallucinations we gave the Germans as to what was dangerous to them behind our lines, and what was not. Yes, and we were allowed to live like artists, too, hilariously careless in matters of dress and military courtesy. We were never attached to a unit as quotidian as a division or even a corps. We were under orders which came directly from the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force, which assigned us temporarily to this or that general, who had heard of our astonishing illusions. He was our patron for just a little while, permissive and fascinated and finally grateful.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThen off we went again.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSince I had joined the regular Army and become a lieutenant two years before the United States backed into the war, I might have attained the rank of lieutenant colonel at least by the end of the wear. But I refused all promotions beyond captain in order to remain with my happy family of thirty-six men. That was my first experience with a family that large. My second came after the war, when I found myself a friend and seeming peer of those American painters who have now entered art history as founders of the Abstract Expressionist school.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy mother and father had families bigger than those two of mine back in the Old World--and of course their relatives back there were \u003ci\u003eblood\u003c\/i\u003e relatives. They lost their blood relatives to a massacre by the Turkish Empire of about one million of its Armenian citizens, who were thought to be treacherous for two reasons: first because they were clever and educated, and second because so many of them had relatives on the other side of Turkey's border with its enemy, the Russian Empire.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt was an age of Empires. So is this one, not all that well disguised.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe German Empire, allied with the Turks, sent impassive military observers to evaluate this century's first genocide, a word which did not exist in any language then. The word is now understood everywhere to mean a carefully planned effort to kill every member, be it man, woman, or child, of a perceived subfamily of the human race.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe problems presented by such ambitious projects are purely industrial: how to kill that many big, resourceful animals cheaply and quickly, make sure that nobody gets away, and dispose of mountains of meat and bones afterwards. The Turks, in their pioneering effort, had neither the aptitude for really big business nor the specialized machinery required. The Germans would exhibit both par excellence only one quarter of a century later. The Turks simply took all the Armenians they could find in their homes or places of work or refreshment or play or worship or education or whatever, marched them out into the countryside, and kept them away from food and water and shelter, and shot and bashed them and so on until they all appeared to be dead. It was up to dogs and vultures and rodents and so on, and finally worms, to clean up the mess afterwards.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy mother, who wasn't yet my mother, only pretended to be dead among the corpses.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy father, who wasn't yet her husband, hid in the shit and piss of a privy behind the schoolhouse where he was a teacher when the soldiers came. The school day was over, and my father-to-be was all alone in the schoolhouse writing poetry, he told me one time. Then he heard the soldiers coming and understood what they meant to do. Father never saw or heard the actual killing. For him, the stillness of the village, of which he was the only inhabitant at nightfall, all covered with shit and piss, was his most terrible memory of the massacre.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAlthough my mother's memories from the Old World were more gruesome than my father's, since she was right there in the killing fields, she somehow managed to put the massacre behind her and find much to like in the United States, and to daydream about a family future here.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy father \u003ci\u003enever\u003c\/i\u003e did.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI am a widower. My wife, nee Edith Taft, who was my second such, died two years ago. She left me this nineteen-room house on the waterfront of East Hampton, Long Island, which had been in her Anglo-Saxon family from Cincinnati, Ohio, for three generations. Her ancestors surely never expected it to fall into the hands of a man with a name as exotic as Rabo Karabekian.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIf they haunt this place, they do it with such Episcopalian good manners that no one has so far noticed them. If I were to come upon the spook of one of them on the grand staircase, and he or she indicated that I had no rights to this house, I would say this to him or her: \"Blame the Statue of Liberty.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDear Edith and I were happily married for twenty years. She was a grandniece of William Howard Taft, the twenty-seventh president of the United States and the tenth chief justice of the Supreme Court. She was the widow of a Cincinnati sportsman and investment banker named Richard Fairbanks, Jr., himself descended from Charles Warren Fairbanks, a United States senator from Indiana and then vice-president under Theodore Roosevelt.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe came to know each other long before her husband died when I persuaded her, and him, too, although this was her property, not his, to rent their unused potato barn to me for a studio. They had never been potato farmers, of course. They had simply bought land from a farmer next door, to the north, away from the beach, in order to keep it from being developed. With it had come the potato barn.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEdith and I did not come to know each other well until after her husband died and my first wife, Dorothy, and our two sons, Terry and Henri, moved out on me. I sold our house, which was in the village of Springs, six miles north of here, and made Edith's barn not only my studio but my home.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThat improbable dwelling, incidentally, is invisible from the main house, where I am writing now.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEdith had no children by her first husband, and she was past childbearing when I transmogrified her from being Mrs. Richard Fairbanks, Jr., into being Mrs. Rabo Karabekian instead.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSo we were a very tiny family indeed in this great big house, with its two tennis courts and swimming pool, and its carriage house and its potato barn--and its three hundred yards of private beach on the open Atlantic Ocean.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOne might think that my two sons, Terry and Henri Karabekian, whom I named in honor of my closest friend, the late Terry Kitchen, and the artist Terry and I most envied, Henri Matisse, might enjoy coming here with their families. Terry has two sons of his own now. Henri has a daughter.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut they do not speak to me.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"So be it! So be it!\" I cry in this manicured wilderness. \"Who gives a damn!\" Excuse this outburst.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDear Edith, like all great Earth Mothers, was a multitude. Even when there were only the two of us and the servants here, she filled this Victorian ark with love and merriment and hands-on domesticity. As privileged as she had been all her life, she cooked with the cook, gardened with the gardener, did all our food shopping, fed the pets and birds, and made personal friends of wild rabbits and squirrels and raccoons.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut we used to have a lot of parties, too, and guests who sometimes stayed for weeks--\u003ci\u003eher\u003c\/i\u003e friends and relatives, mostly. I have already said how matters stood and stand with my own few blood relatives, alienated descendants all. As for my synthetic relatives in the Army: some were killed in the little battle in which I was taken prisoner, and which cost me one eye. Those who survived I have never seen or heard from since. It may be that they were not as fond of me as I was of them.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThese things happen.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe members of my other big synthetic family, the Abstract Expressionists, are mostly dead now, having been killed by everything from mere old age to suicide. The few survivors, like my blood relatives, no longer speak to me.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"So be it! So be it!\" I cry in this manicured wilderness. \"Who gives a damn!\" Excuse this outburst.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAll of our servants quit soon after Edith died. They said it had simply become too lonely here. So I hired some new ones, paying them a great deal of money to put up with me and all the loneliness. When Edith was alive, and the house was alive, the gardener and the two maids and the cook all lived here. Now only the cook, and, as I say, a different cook, lives in, and has the entire servants' quarters on the third floor of the ell to herself and her fifteen-year-old daughter. She is a divorced woman, a native of East Hampton, about forty, I would say. Her daughter, Celeste, does no work for me, but simply lives here and eats my food, and entertains her loud and willfully ignorant friends on my tennis courts and in my swimming pool and on my private oceanfront.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe and her friends ignore me, as though I were a senile veteran from some forgotten war, daydreaming away what little remains of his life as a museum guard. Why should I be offended? This house, in addition to being a home, shelters what is the most important collection of Abstract Expressionist paintings still in private hands. Since I have done no useful work for decades, what else am I, really, but a museum guard?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd, just as a paid museum guard would have to do, I answer as best I can the question put to me by visitor after visitor, stated in various ways, of course: \"What are these pictures supposed to \u003ci\u003emean\u003c\/i\u003e?\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThese paintings, which are about absolutely nothing but themselves, were my own property long before I married Edith. They are worth at least as much as all the real estate and stocks and bonds, including a one-quarter share in the Cincinnati Bengals professional football team, which Edith left to me. So I cannot be stigmatized as an American fortune-hunter.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI may have been a lousy painter, but what a collector I turned out to be!","brand":"Dial Press Trade Paperback","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304196821221,"sku":"NP9780385333511","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780385333511.jpg?v=1767722857","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/bluebeard-isbn-9780385333511","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}