'Hello' wasn't enough for Widow Berman. Trespassing on my beach she said, "Tell me how your parents died. So I did she scares the pants off me. She has turned me and this household upside down! Here I am, Rabo Karabekian, a one-eyed, old Armenian soldier, a footnote in Art History, writing my autobiography. I go back to the past with the present oipping at my ankles like a rabid fox terrier. Back to the day my parents met having just survived this century's first genocide, through my New York apprenticeship with artist Dan Gregory and my Second World War experiences as a camouflage expert. With the advent of civilian life I married and became one of Three Musketeers, pioneer and collector of abstract Expressionist art. Circe Berman says my Jackson Pollock shouldn't be given house room-she's covered my foyer in wallpaper that features roses as big as cabbages and replaced my modern art collection with Victorian pictures of little girls on swings. She is nosy and manipulative. But I am Bluebeard, and my potato barn is my forbidden chamber as far as she's concerned. She writes novels about abortions and says she's bringing me new life. Perhaps she is. Perhaps she can revive this Lazarus again.
Kurt Vonnegut has surpassed even his own giddy heights of hilariously bitter irony in Bluebeard. It is a novel so funny and yet so terribly serious that you will read it-and then reconsider your own life.