The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski Summary and Reviews
|
List Price: Our Price: $5.74 You Save: $8.26 (59%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $1.65 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of The Painted Bird
Book Review: A Sufferor's Tale of Suffering in Fable Fashion [T]
Summary: 5 Stars
Brothers Grimm meet Soviet novelist. This tale of a childhood adventure has dainty fable-like highlights intermingled with horrific accounts of the savagery of war.
Like Grimm, this tale is not light on death. People are killed the old fashioned way: axes, knives and bludgeoning. Throughout this book, you occasionally have to wince as Kosinski describes such events with incredible detail.
And, the senselessness of many of the deaths grow wider as the book proceeds. Single murders in the early chapter evolve to mass murders in the last chapters. Some of the later murderous events include: bandit raids of villages before the Soviet Reds take over, train wrecks for revenge of a beating and the war's blowing away of villages.
This story revolves around the orphaned protagonist (from ages 6 to 12) who wanders during the horrors of World War II. He witnesses a grotesque overdose of human indecency arising within the Russian citizenry. Just after entering one town, the boy is forced to move to another. Each foster home is a worse nightmare than the prior. One foster parent has children commit incest upon one another. Another has the child hang on hooks all day. Another conceives different ways to beat the child.
By the end, the 12-year old child is a young man with little concern of others' emotions or feelings. Like Cormac McCarthy's protagonist in "Blood Meridian" - he is child transformed into the devil incarnate. Adults tarnish a child's innocence in life. No one but the adults can be held accountable for the child's demise.
But, unlike McCarthy, Kosinski is optimistic. Maybe his personal survival and revival from Holocaust events lead the author to allow the young man to survive his purgatory called childhood. That is good news.
Written in a choppy fashion, similar to a journal kept by a scientist, the reading is stilted and constrained. But, after acclimating to this unique style of writing, it moves well and such writing style accomplishes giving the book a fictional feel to events which probably are oh-too-nonfictional. I believe the horrors are derived more from memories than from literary license.
To those with a weak stomach, stay away from this book. For those who like Grimm, or would like Grimm on steroids, this is your book. And, for those interested in Russian literature or history, this is a must read.
Book Review: A Tour de Torture
Summary: 5 Stars
I read Kosinski's masterpiece on the recommendation of someone who was reviewing Beah's "A Long Way Gone"--remarkable similarities between the two though one is fiction and the other memoir, one takes place in Europe WWII and the other a civil war in Sierra Leone. In this particular edition (1976), Kosinski added a fine afterward which is a must read. Though fiction, this work is fact-based. Also, though Kosinski never names the country of his setting, one can guess it must be Poland. Apparently, the Polish government recognized it also since they banned the book in that country, citing it as a serious insult to the humanity of the Polish peasant society. After reading the afterward and the story, I can only conclude if the shoe fits...
Still, there were a few things I thought to be unrealistic. Kosinski's ten-year-old protagonist is made to undergo some unspeakable tortures, tortures that would have reduced an ordinary kid to a psychological bowl of mush. Yet somehow this kid always pulls through, packing up his comet only at the last minute and heading into the Polish hinterland to rough it until he can hook up with his next tormentor. It got so bad that I began to look for parallels with Dante's Inferno. It seemed that each new torture was worse than the last, designed to atone for some imaginary sin that this innocent boy had committed. Dante borrowed from Greek mythology to formulate his keepers of hell--I wonder where Kosinski drafted his?
The damage to the boy only became apparent at war's end when he was placed in an orphanage. There he found himself in a community of similar victims his own age. The war was over, the peasants were safely locked outside the city, yet the cruelty went on, and on, and on. The gang-rape scene of the teacher was particularly poignant. Somehow the protagonist regained his humanity--at least I believe that was what Kosinski signaled his reader when the boy regained his faculty--though I never was sure how. Maybe his message was that immersed in evil a good child can be made to mimic evil--if for no other reason than survival--but when that need becomes obsolete, eventually his true nature will reemerge.
--Ejner Fulsang, author of "A Knavish Piece of Work" Aarhus Publishing 2006
Book Review: A fictional story with help from firsthand experiences
Summary: 4 Stars
Having read a few other Holocaust era novels, I was recommended "The Painted Bird" by a friend of mine. Like the other novels, it is gruesome and portrays a life most of us would like to imagine didn't exist. Ignorance and brutality are part of the main aspects of this novel, as it portrays a young boy experiencing the horrors of ignorance and resulting brutality against him. Yes, there are sexual situations depicted; however, there is a difference between a sexual situation shown for its base nature as a foreboding element within the story and a pornographic description. (I'd noticed a lot of the reviewers couldn't tell the difference and snubbed the book because it made them feel uncomfortable.)
Part of the point of this book is to make one think, and sometimes that requires making the audience uncomfortable. There are realities that we may not have experienced that exist despite our having not experienced it ourselves. Shying away from literature that shows the baser nature of individuals and a struggle of morals does not make for anything more than a sheltered view of the world. Take a risk and try the book. If it makes you uncomfortable, keep reading. A little thought about what makes us as humans uncomfortable isn't a bad thing.
Book Review: A journey into darkness
Summary: 4 Stars
I first read this book at the age of 15 and found it utterly depressing. Recently I revisited it and while I still feel it is one of the more gloomy stories I've read, I was suprised to find it so compelling. There are many gripping and intelligent moments. Still not a book I would recommend for anyone struggling with chronic depression. However, it is a well written story and a good introduction to Kosinski.Book Review: A masterpiece of Sociological fiction.
Summary: 5 Stars
When I first started reading this novel, I was trying to figure out what Kozinski was getting at by including so much violence. But then I saw that the boy's journey mirrors our own journey as we grow up, what sociologists call the process of socialization. As the boy moved from on character to another, he himself started to become a painted bird. We can see how we are only what society shapes us to be; whether we will be "good" or "bad" totally depends on the way we were socialized.