The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Painted Bird
Book Review: Amazing Book
Summary: 5 Stars
I read this book for my European history class, and I loved every moment of it. The Painted Bird examines the depths of human despair and prejudice. It also shows us how close these elements come to human kindness. It is my sincere hope that everyone at some point in his or her life will take the time to read this book.Book Review: An incredible story
Summary: 5 Stars
The first time I read this book was as a summer assignment for a High School honors class. It was either this or Agony and the Ecstasy that I wanted, and this was shorter, so I picked this one. No one else did out of the hundreds of other titles they could choose. I read The Painted Bird from start to finish, apalled yet enthralled by all this young boy went through. You are pulled into this morbid odyssey and share his travels with him. You experience the depravity and debauchery of humanity's darker side that cannot be ignored nor disproved. We all know it's there. This book does not allow us to hide from this theme, nor spares us from it by the tale's end. The aftermath is at an orphanage, a microcosm of children no longer innocent after witnessing the atrocities of adults, suddenly placed into an ordered society and expected to assume a happy-go-lucky niche again. It doesn't happen, it won't happen, and though by the tale's end, our protagonist seems to have a hopeful future, his past has been forever sullied with the smarmy truth that will always cast a dark shadow on all of his future, no matter how bright it may shine at times.Anybody who likes to read should pick up this book and experience this. It is seven years later, and I have since bought the book. It has inspired me in my own writing style. This is a true literary gem, a classic beauty despite the brutality it depicts.
Book Review: Another deceived reader
Summary: 2 Stars
I guess I'm another deceived reader who thought The Painted Bird was autobiographical. It is true that if despicable events really, truly occurred, we are willing to deal with them as readers because we feel great sympathy for the victim and we know he or she is just recording graphically experienced atrocities. However, if we learn the same stuff is fiction we recoil, betrayed and angry at the author for dreaming up such totally sick and perverse scenarios.
I did think the author writes powerfully and tells his story dispassionately as would a boy paralyzed and shell-shocked by the evil that men do. But knowing this is not only fiction but racist propaganda against the Poles, suddenly Kosinski loses his appeal and becomes just another author seeking fame by whatever means necessary.
Book Review: Beats You Senseless
Summary: 1 Stars
Another village, another beating. The nameless child narrator of "The Painted Bird" is one unlucky person, and so are you while reading this inane exercise in page-turning masochism.
The thin, episodic storyline follows a young homeless boy, of possible Jewish or Gypsy extraction, who wanders across the swampy, war-blasted ruins of Eastern Europe during the early 1940s. One step ahead of the Nazis, who he knows will send him to an extermination camp, the boy must contend with the inhumanity of local villagers who seem to have become morally distended by the carnage around them.
That Jerzy Kosinski didn't really live the life of his character in this story shouldn't be held against him. Charles Dickens wasn't Oliver Twist, either, and no one calls him a fraud for that. Kosinski negatively portrays the people around the boy, by implication Poles though he doesn't say so directly in my edition, but no one in this book comes off well except the Soviets, oddly enough considering Kosinski was not a fan of theirs, either. Such a profusion of terrible things happen to the child that it beggars belief, but Kosinski may have written this, like his later novel I enjoyed, "Being There", as a pseudo-fable, so he gets a pass on that from me, too.
What annoyed and angered me about "The Painted Bird" was that it managed to be both cruel and dull. Cruel, in the way it continually assaulted you from chapter to chapter with assorted horrors inflicted on animals and people alike, all reasonless and unmotivated. Dull, in how it never manages to be about anything more than this awfulness, not offering a shred of sympathy, to the point where you just don't care.
The kid, to start with, is a cipher. Very early on, we see him play with a friendly squirrel. Then some mean children capture the squirrel and burn it. Later, the woman who has adopted the boy is also burned, though she was apparently dead already. That's all the back story we get before the boy goes on his journey, to be relentlessly abused and attacked everywhere he goes because his dark hair and features make him stick out. (Is this Poland or Sweden?) People die suddenly, violently, and rather spectacularly, so it's good Kosinski doesn't bother making you care about them.
Every chapter introduces a new group of awful people, with Kosinski apparently striving to outdo himself every time in terms of brutality. Eventually he introduces sex to the equation, featuring farm animals and an incestuous family. For me the most outlandish part had to be the man who ties the boy in a room with a killer dog nearly every day for a period of months, in hopes the boy will relax and be torn apart.
Here, and at other times, "The Painted Bird" crosses the line from tragic to comic until it becomes like Robert Stack in "Airplane!": "Have you ever been face down in the mud, kicked in the head with an iron boot? Of course you haven't! No one has! It's a dumb question! Skip it!"
People in Eastern Europe did suffer, and die, in ways like those experienced in "The Painted Bird". But it's unlikely any endured their horrors in the assembly-line fashion presented here. Tragedy can seem much less to an outsider who sees just the darkness and no light, to the point it's not clear what if anything is being lost.
Kosinski may have lived through the war in comfort, but "The Painted Bird" seems a product of authentic if misplaced feelings that could have been survivor's guilt. This might explain the novel's insane popularity after its 1965 publication - a lot of readers felt the same guilt. Also, Kosinski's book was a bracing challenge of societal norms and a celebration of the persecuted outsider - "the painted bird" of the title sent out by a cruel master (society? God? parents?) to be pecked to death by its own kind. Any other decade but the 1960s, and you would never have heard of it. Instead it was taught at my boarding school.
Great literature has the license to make you feel pain. But making you feel pain does not make a book great. "The Painted Bird" is an exercise in cruelty no one should have to endure.
Book Review: Bizarre, Kafkaesque
Summary: 5 Stars
After I read Painted Bird, digested it and read it again I was awfully excited about Jerzy Kozinski. Painted Bird is about the human condition, set in a time and place where the human condition had the whole spectrum of opportunities to manifest itself. Kozinski's perceptions of humanity are poignant, surgical, honest and brutal. I love this book.After reading it I attempted other Kozinskis as they emerged and found that all fell completely flat for me. This one's in a class all its own, in my view.