Vonnegut's 13th book is my fifth(fif) and is turning out to be hands down one of my favorite Vonnegut books of all time. This will probably be my last Vonnegut book for a while and talk about going out with a bang. So it's the autobiography of Expressionist painter Rabo Karabekian, a minor character some of may remember from Breakfast of Champions. Living in the Hamptons with his cook and her premiscious daughter he meets up with a widow from Baltimore who stays with him and encourages him to right his story. The whole time she pretty much turns his house and friends upside down and at times against him. All the while the book jumps back to his parents coming to America, his migration to New York as a teenager to study under a great Armeian artist, his days hanging out in Union Square with Jackson Pollack, and of course the mystery of what's in his potatoe barn. Which, by the way, that meddling widow is always trying to find out what exactly is in there. OK I don't know if this makes any sense but you'll just have to read it to take in it's awesomeness.
Here's a summary from Library Journal :
Vonnegut rounds up several familiar themes and character types for his 13th novel: genocide, the surreality of the modern world, fluid interplay of the past and present, and the less-than-heroic figure taking center stage to tell his story. Here he elevates to narrator a minor character from Breakfast of Champions , wounded World War II veteran and abstract painter Rabo Karabekian. At the urging of enchantress-as-bully Circe Berman, Karabekian writes his "hoax autobiography." Vonnegut uses the tale to satirize art movements and the art-as-investment mind-set and to explore the shifting shape of reality.
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