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: Dare to be Different, but not for the weak stomach
Summary: 5 Stars
What makes this book even more creepy is the foward which indicates that some of the graphic fiction in the book is based on the author's real life. Kosinski experienced some of these savage torments as a boy following WWII. The book is broad enough to not just capture the ugliness of war and hatred, but the true meaning of being different, being discriminated against and being alienated in the worst way because of the color of your skin (hair, and eyes). The happy moments experienced in the book are basic and essential pieces of everyday life that we all take for granted. Historically, based on Jerzy Kosinsky's own life, the events of his own childhood couldn't be overcome--dying with his own demons banging on the door.Book Review: Distorted and Twisted
Summary: 1 Stars
Before you pick up this "novel", please read a biography of Jerzy Kosinski's life by author James Park Sloan --Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography. In 1982, Kosinski was completely discredited by the Village Voice for fabricating his auto-biographical, The Painted Bird, and for plagarism found in his most of his other books. He slandered an entire nation (Poland) in The Painted Bird even though he was actually saved by Polish Catholics and lived in safety during the duration of the war. Instead of writing what was a true war experience he decided that shock and brutality would give him more notariety. He became rich and won countless awards and accolades for his damaging lies.
Before he committed suicide in 1991 he tried to make amends for the damage he caused to the Poles but it was too late. The Painted Bird has been deemed a "truth" and has been included on the reading lists of many Holocaust Study Courses. I feel sorry for the Poles -- that this work produced by a sick, deviant and demented pathalogical liar could be taken as a true experience --it's like spitting on the graves of all those, Jews and Poles alike,that died in the hands of the Nazis during WWII. It is a terrible injustice.
Book Review: Feel the love
Summary: 5 Stars
Kosinski was exposed as a fraud and probable plagiarist shortly before he committed suicide by slitting his wrists while lying in a bath full of warm water one evening.
At the time, I read that he did it because he was despondent over not being able to ski anymore due to a medical condition. The public personna his "work" had established seemed almost to elevate that explanation from ridiculously trivial to something perfectly consonant with the sensibility of someone who had lived a horrifying experience as a child during World War II (experience he claimed formed the basis for this book), and later felt the oppression of totalitarian communism so keenly that he was willing to engineer a complex and risky plot to successfully escape it.
A man who valued his freedom so much that when denied it's expression in downhill skiing, he could make a choice that others would never embrace, and kill himself.
In all probability, though, that's nothing but romantic crap that he somehow managed to circulate posthumously.
Because since his death it's emerged that Jerzy Kosinski was essentially a fraud. He waited out the war in relative comfort, raised by loving parents, posing as Gentiles.
So the portrayal of the orphan in The Painted BirdKosinski, who suffers so much abuse and torture at the hands of others while he wanders through the German countryside that he loses the faculty of speech, is not all autobiographical, as Kosinski claimed. In fact, as with several of Kosinski's books, another author has come forward to claim that the book is substantially his work.
Still, it was a good con while he ran it, and whoever wrote it The Painted Bird
is a powerful and realistic memoir of the horror suffered by a child during the war. Prospective readers should understand that the book achieves it's effect with the use of imagery and themes that may offend some
However, I'd argue that the human savagery and hopelessness the book portrays are precisely what recommend it. The experience of the war, like the experience of the Great Depression that preceded it, have receded to such a distance in the public memory that they are only dimly perceived now in photographs and black and white film clips of people who live in a world so different from ours that their experience could never become our experience.
It looks now as though we ignored Santayana's warning at our peril; we do seem doomed to repeat parts of that history. Perhaps it's wishful thinking, but maybe reminders of the real terror in our past will awaken those who would suffer most if the more aggressive elements in our political leadership continue to follow what looks disturbingly like the script from that era.
Book Review: Fiction straight up
Summary: 4 Stars
This is a work of fiction. Apparently many people easily lose sight of this fact when joining in the controversy of whether or not it is based on Mr. Kosinski's life or not. All this is beside the point as any work of fiction stands on its own and should be judged on its own merits. That said, this is a disturbing book and shows quite graphically the cruelty, violence and sexual depravity of the people the young boy runs into on his quest for survival. Most of his suffering comes at the hand of his countrymen which is telling. Six million people died in Poland during WWII, three million of them were Jews murdered in the death camps. Undoubtedly part of the Poles early rejection of this book was their refusal to accept complicity in this crime. One of the few Nazis the boy meets up with actually lets him escape, whereas villagers torture and try to kill him repeatedly. Kosinski describes the rampant superstitions and brutality of Polish peasants at the time, which seems rather incredulous to the modern reader. Anyone who does not believe that events like those described in this book such as mass rapes did not happen during WWII or during other conflicts should examine history before discounting the novel. These atrocities happen ALL the time. And will continue to do so. Anyone who has not lived through war has no right to cast doubt on such events. If anyone in his or her coddled existence lacks the imagination to deem such acts possible I'd urge him to wake up and look around. Man's cruelty to man and other animals is infinite and continues to this day with Islamic fundamentalists beheading westerners, Americans torturing potentially innocent people in prisons, mass slaughter of wildlife and so on. This novel is one boy's testimony to the dark side of human nature. I can only imagine what Jerzy Kosinski's life must have been like leading up to his suicide, as I think it likely that some of the experiences depicted in the book parallel his own. His despair as with others who survive traumatic circumstances like the Holocaust, must have overwhelmed him. But in the novel, the boy survives against all odds. And that is called hope. That is one fiction I'd like to believe in.Book Review: For Shame
Summary: 1 Stars
It's extremely unethical and irresponsible for Amazon to be passing this book off even as "semi-autobiographical" in order to sell it.
I myself was taken in by this story when I read it, believing, as Kosinski wanted everyone to do, that it was based on his own experiences.
As it turns out, the only authentic elements in this book are names of people who in fact cooperated in protecting his entire family. The plot and incidents described are possibly borrowed, but most likely invented out of whole cloth. See "Steps" for a taste of Kosinski's interests and imagination, or see Sloan's biography -- which also corrects the record regarding Kosinski's war-time experience.