"Bluebeard," Kurt Vonnegut. 1987.

my favorite vonnegut i’ve read so far is his last, timequake, and while i’d never read this before now, i can definitely feel echoes (ha ha) of him starting to experiment with the structural and stylistic pinnings that eventually hit me in the head like a mallet when i read timequake in bluebeard. not that bluebeard is lesser-than or less fully formed, it’s just narrower in scope. extremely lovely, funny, warm, bitter, acerbic, and as always wickedly clever and infinitely humanistic. an end-of-life bildungsroman as rabo slowly starts unlearning all of his defenses and taking down the walls he’s built until he finally says something