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Bluebeard
The Autobiography of Rabo Karabekian (1916-1988)
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Narrated by:
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Mark Bramhall
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Written by:
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Kurt Vonnegut
About this listen
Bluebeard, published in 1987, is Vonnegut's meditation on art, artists, surrealism, and disaster.
Meet Rabo Karabekian, a moderately successful surrealist painter who we meet late in life and see struggling (like all of Vonnegut's key characters) with the dregs of unresolved pain and the consequences of brutality. Loosely based on the legend of Bluebeard (best realized in Bela Bartok's one-act opera), the novel follows Karabekian through the last events in his life, which are heavy with women, painting, artistic ambition, artistic fraudulence, and as of yet unknown consequence. Vonnegut's intention here is not so much satirical (although the contemporary art scene would be easy enough to deconstruct), nor is it documentary (although Karabekian does carry elements of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko). Instead Vonnegut is using art for the same purpose he used science fiction clichés in Slaughterhouse-Five: as a filter through which he can illuminate the savagery, cruelty, and essentially comic misdirection of human existence.
Listeners will recognize familiar Vonnegut character types and archetypes as they drift in and out through the background; meanwhile Karabekian, betrayed and betrayer, sinks through a bottomless haze of recollection. Like most of Vonnegut's late works, this is both science fiction and cruel, contemporary realism at once, using science fiction as metaphor for human damage as well as failure to perceive.
Listeners will find that Vonnegut's protagonists can never really clarify for us whether they are ultimately unwitting victims or simple barbarians, leaving it up to the listener to determine in which genre this audiobook really fits, if any at all.
©1987 Kurt Vonnegut (P)2015 Audible, Inc.You may also enjoy...
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Hocus Pocus
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- Narrated by: LJ Ganser
- Length: 8 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Eugene Debs Hartke describes an odyssey from college professor to prison inmate to prison warden back again to prisoner in another of Vonnegut's bitter satirical explorations of how and where (and why) the American dream begins to die. Employing his characteristic narrative device - a retrospective diary in which the protagonist retraces his life at its end, a desperate and disconnected series of events here in Hocus Pocus show Vonnegut with his mask off and his rhetorical devices unshielded.
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Written by: Kurt Vonnegut
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- Narrated by: Eric Michael Summerer
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- Unabridged
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- Length: 8 hrs and 1 min
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Overall
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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Book was full of "meh"
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Written by: Kurt Vonnegut
What listeners say about Bluebeard
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- Justin S.
- 2019-10-01
meh.
not his best work. kinda goes nowhere and doesn't have much to say at the end. meh.
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