I’ve recently finished reading two novels by Kurt Vonnegut.

BLUEBEARD

The first, “Bluebeard,” copyrighted in 1987, the paperback  published by Dell, is a fictional autobiography of an artist named Rabo Karabekian. With his usual acerbic, facetious sarcasm, Vonnegut outlines the life of the “Abstract Expressionist” Karabekian; his family history, his fortunate artistic training, his experiences in World War II in the camouflage unit, his art collection (made up largely of paintings other Abstract Expressionists gave him in payment for debts) his dysfunctional marriage, and his subsequent second marriage that left him with a palatial house on a potato farm in New Jersey.

One of the hooks Vonnegut used was curiosity about the “potato barn,” locked up tight with six heavy duty padlocks, and what Karabekian had inside. Many of the novel’s characters (as well as the reader) begged and pleaded to know what was inside. Of course, Karabekian (Vonnegut) refuses to divulge the contents until the very end of the story.

Early on, Vonnegut relates the story of a king named “Bluebeard” and his many wives. Bluebeard told his latest wife she could do anything she liked except open a certain door. Curiosity gets the best of us sooner or later and the new wife couldn’t resist looking into the forbidden room. There she found the remains of all of her husband’s ex-wives! And so on . . .   🙄

So what was in the potato barn? Read it and find out!

GALAPAGOS

The second book was “Galapagos,” a novel narrated one million years in the future by the ghost of Leon Trotsky Trout. Leon is the son of one of Vonnegut’s recurring characters throughout his ouevre, science fiction writer Kilgore Trout. The paperback that I read was published in 1985 by Dell.

The story describes the series of events that causes one man and ten women to wind up on Santa Rosalia, an island on the extreme end of the Galapagos island chain. It starts in Ecuador, where the Bahia de Darwin (Spanish for Darwin Bay) is about to embark on “The Nature Cruise of the Century,” her extravagant maiden voyage to be jam packed with notable celebrities.

However, a world wide economic depression has ruined the Ecuadoran sucre and only six people have arrived to take the cruise. Vonnegut kills most of them off during the insurrection and riots of the starving Ecuadoran people and the ravages of war with neighboring Peru. The captain of the Bahia de Darwin, along with the women who booked the tour and six native children, manage to escape the chaos and eventually wind up on Santa Rosalia.

Leon, a marine in Vietnam haunted by atrocious massacres, went AWOL and fled to Sweden for asylum. There he worked in the shipyard that built the Bahia de Darwin and there he died when a sheet of steel sliced his head off. (Heh, Vonnegut always seems to take life and death so casually. So it goes . . . )

Upon his death, our narrator refuses to enter the “blue tunnel of the afterlife.” The blue tunnel appears four times in the story. In its last appearance his father, Kilgore Trout, appeals to him to leave the tawdry humans he’d been observing and join him in the afterlife, threatening not to return for a million years should Leon refuse. Thus shade Leon has observed the evolution of humanity into creatures similar to seals.

Vonnegut waxes philosophical throughout the novel, shining powerful light on many modern day ironies. In the novel he blames humans’ “big brains” for all of humanity’s shortcomings.

So, is Vonnegut really that much of a pessimist?

Maybe not, eh? The epigraph of Galapagos was a quote from Anne Frank: “In spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at heart.”

In case all you know is Call of Duty or World of Warcraft, Anne Frank was a young Jewish survivor of the Holocaust who wrote a diary about her experiences with her family as they hid in an attic during the German occupation of the Netherlands. Sadly, they were ultimately caught and murdered in 1945. So it goes . . .

Both novels were easy to read, though keeping track of Vonnegut’s timelines isn’t always the easiest thing to do. Vonnegut seems to have an insider’s grasp of the human condition and both novels are profoundly thought provoking. I enjoyed them both.

It’s easy to expand your horizons. Read something!