Bluebeard

Having written "The End" to this story of my life, I find it prudent to scamper back here to before the beginning, to my front door, so to speak, and to make this apology to arriving guests: "I promised you an autobiography, but something went wrong in the kitchen. It turns out to be a diary of this past troubled summer, too! We can always send out for pizzas if necessary. Come in, come in."

I am the erstwhile American painter Rabo Karabekian, a one-eyed man. I was born of immigrant parents in San Ignacio, California, in 1916. I begin this autobiography seventy-one years later. To those unfamiliar with the ancient mysteries of arithmetic, that makes this year 1987.

I was not born a cyclops. I was deprived of my left eye while commanding a platoon of Army Engineers, curiously enough artists of one sort or another in civilian life, in Luxembourg near the end of World War Two. We were specialists in camouflage, but at that time were fighting for our lifes as ordinary infantry. The unit was composed of artists, since it was the theory of someone in the Army that we would be especially good at camouflage.

And so we were! And we were! What hallucinations we gave the Germans as to what was dangerous to them behind our lines, and what was not. Yes, and we were allowed to live like artists, too, hilariously careless in matters of dress and military courtesy. We were never attached to a unit as quotidian as a division or even a corps. We were under orders which came directly from the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force, which assigned us temporarily to this or that general, who had heard of our astonishing illusions. He was our patron for just a little while, permissive and fascinated and finally grateful.

Then off we went again.

Since I had joined the regular Army and become a lieutenant two years before the United States backed into the war, I might have attained the rank of lieutenant colonel at least by the end of the wear. But I refused

Kurt Vonnegut s humor, satiric voice, and incomparable imagination first captured America s attention in The Sirens of Titan in 1959 and established him as a true artist (The New York Times) with Cat s Cradle in 1963. He was, as Graham Greene declared, one of the best living American writers. Mr. Vonnegut passed away in April 2007.

Ranks with Vonnegut s best and goes one step beyond . . . joyous, soaring fiction. The Atlanta Journal and Constitution

Vonnegut is at his edifying best. The Philadelphia Inquirer

The quicksilver mind of Vonnegut is at it again. . . . He displays all his talents satire, irony, ridicule, slapstick, and even a shaggy dog story of epic proportions. The Cincinnati Post
 
[Kurt Vonnegut is] a voice you can trust to keep poking holes in the social fabric. San Francisco Chronicle
 
It has the qualities of classic Bosch and Slaughterhouse Vonnegut. . . . Bluebeard is uncommonly feisty. USA Today
 
Is Bluebeard good? Yes! . . . This is vintage Vonnegut good wine from his best grapes. The Detroit News
 
A joyride . . . Vonnegut is more fascinated and puzzled than angered by the human stupidities and contradictions he discerns so keenly. So hop in his rumble seat. As you whiz along, what you observe may provide some new perspectives. Kansas City Star