Download Bluebeard: The Autobiography of Rabo Karabekian (1916-1988) AudioBook Free
Bluebeard, published in 1987, is Vonnegut's yoga on art, designers, surrealism, and disaster. Meet Rabo Karabekian, a reasonably successful surrealist painter who we meet overdue in life and see struggling (like all of Vonnegut's key individuals) with the dregs of unresolved pain and the results of brutality. Loosely based on the tale of Bluebeard (best understood in Bela Bartok's one-act opera), the novel follows Karabekian through the previous events in his life, that happen to be heavy with women, painting, creative ambition, creative fraudulence, and as of yet unknown outcome. Vonnegut's intention here's not really much satirical (however the contemporary art world would be easy enough to deconstruct), neither is it documentary (although Karabekian does indeed carry elements of Jackson Pollock and Symbol Rothko). Instead Vonnegut is using art work for the same purpose he used technology fiction clichés in Slaughterhouse-Five: as a filtration through which he can illuminate the savagery, cruelty, and essentially comic misdirection of real human lifetime. Listeners will discover familiar Vonnegut persona types and archetypes as they drift in and out through the backdrop; meanwhile Karabekian, betrayed and betrayer, sinks via a bottomless haze of recollection. Like the majority of Vonnegut's overdue works, this is both technology fiction and cruel, modern realism simultaneously, using technology fiction as metaphor for real human harm as well as failure to understand. Listeners will find that Vonnegut's protagonists can never really clarify for all of us whether they are eventually unwitting subjects or simple barbarians, departing it up to the listener to determine where genre this audiobook really meets, if any by any means.
