Parks+Journal+Entry+One

Question: What is your favorite book or genre? Why is it your favorite? What does it offer?
It is difficult for me to choose only one Kurt Vonnegut novel as my favorite, but I would have to say that it is probably //Bluebeard//, because it combines three of my favorite things: Vonnegut’s writing, art, and history.

Bluebeard is the mock-autobiography of Rabo Karabekian, a famous Abstract Expressionist painter, who is now retired and keeps a mystery locked in his barn.In the end, it is revealed that the potato barn contains his last painting, which is an enormous photo-realistic picture of Karabekian's experience of World War II where he and five-thousand, two hundred and nineteen other prisoners of war, gypsies, and concentration camp victims were dumped in a valley when the German forces realized that the war was lost. Each of the faces that can be seen in the painting belongs to someone who was actually there. The ending, when the painting ends up becoming a tourist attraction, and some of the families of the people who were there come to see it, and recognize their loved ones’ faces, is so incredibly powerful.

Bluebeard is most likely my favorite simply because of the Introduction, which reads:

"May I say, too, that much of what I put in this book was inspired by the grotesque prices paid for works of art during the past century. Tremendous concentrations of paper wealth have made it possible for a few persons or institutions to endow certain sorts of human playfulness with inappropriate and hence distressing seriousness. I think not only of the mudpies of art, but of children’s games as well - running, jumping, catching, throwing. Or dancing. Or singing songs."

I love the introduction because it puts perfectly into words my exact thoughts on modern art. And that is precisely why I love all of Vonnegut’s novels, he has a way of saying profound and inspiring things in the most simple and understandable manner. Each time I read a Vonnegut novel, I come away with a new question, thought, or way of looking at the world. And that, to me, is what good literature should do – inspire critical and creative thinking in the reader.