The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Painted Bird
Book Review: Fraud - fantasy passed off as history
Summary: 1 Stars
This book is mostly lies, and I don't mean the subtle kind common in such works - I mean flat out fabrications and inventions. It isn't worth a real review. For G-d's sake, if you must read it, check it out from a library or buy it used.If you don't believe me, check around, that's what Google is for.
This fraud, Kosinsky, defames all those who suffered in WWII with his shameless gold-digging.
Book Review: Fraud?
Summary: 1 Stars
Among my main subjects of interest, which dominate my reading, are the horrible European history of the 20th century, and the literature by and about emigrants.
One of the best known, but controversial authors of the small group of writers who moved to the US or UK as adults and then were successful writers in English, is the Jewish Pole who adopted the name Jerzy Kosinski.
He published this novel, The Painted Bird, in 1965, and produced some of the most heated controversies in literary history. I am not sure if it is at all clear by now whether he actually wrote the book himself and whether he really wrote it in English. The book was received as a semi-autobiographical narration of the wanderings of an abandoned 6 to 10 years old boy in the wilderness, actual and social, somewhere in an unnamed East Europe during WW2. We meet incredible superstition and brutality, not just war related.
The boy is dark haired and has dark eyes and speaks upper class Polish. For the people in the flat country, he is like a painted bird: the metaphor relates to the sadistic act of catching birds, painting their feathers, and releasing them to the rejection and aggression by their flocks.
In his foreword to the 1976 edition, Kosinski denies autobiographical content and declares his tale as fiction. In the meantime it had been established that his own real life experience had been much different, that Polish farmers had actually saved him and his parents by hiding them and giving them a fake Catholic identity. With this background, I must say I can understand the accusations that the book is anti-Polish. During Communist times, the book was banned in Poland and Kosinski was attacked as traitor and American influence agent. I am not sure if that hits the truth, but there is something very fishy here.
Let's put it in a nutshell: I expected something somewhere between Imre Kertesz and Primo Levy, but what I get is more like Tarantino or Rodriguez without the tongue in cheek.
The novel gives us one scene of sensationalist brutality after the other. It is a picaresque hell ride, and the puzzling aspect is: the violence is not war related. It is practiced by the rural population on a peace time basis: sadism, rape, mutilation, lynching, blinding, whipping, you name it. I am disgusted.
Kosinski's 76 foreword refers to accusations of uncalled for violence, and he justifies it by saying that all war witnesses say that the reality was even worse. Maybe that is so, but the real problem is the violence level in the scenes which are not war related.
Another aspect that condemns the book is this: the narration is supposed to be that of a little boy of 6 and later. Kosinski failed completely to give the story a plausible childlike voice. On the other hand, the events have too much immediacy to be taken for the recollection of an adult who remembers his childhood. This is all very wrong.
I really wanted to like this book, but I can't.
Book Review: Graphic Excellence
Summary: 5 Stars
I found this book to be the most in-touch treatment of WWII Europe I've ever read from a fictional standpoint. I'm quite well schooled on the era, and this book speaks to the history in a way that is both detahced, but also frighteningly real. It tells another side of the story...a side that is not simply "Jews vs. Germans." I, for one, appreciated hearing another spin on the war...horrifying as it may have been at times.
In the war, there were horrible crimes of hatred and cruelty performed. Kosinski's novel discusses some of them in graphic detail (including some that had nothing at all to do with the war itself, but were just low-lifes being horrible to one another). It is not for the weak stomached. However, if one has heard the TRUE tales of what happened to millions of people in the time of the war, the stories in this book are almost tame--especially if you've seen actual pictures of the human-abuse that took place in real life.
Kosinski captures a different form of Europe during World War II. It is not the Europe we have all come to accept as having been in place. It is a Europe shaped by a child's perspective. The horror and brutality seems almost bearable seen through the eyes of the child telling the story--a child trying to sort out right from wrong in a time where wrong was all that seemed to prevail. The choices the child makes--though not always the most agreeable to rational thinking adults--seem almost logical, and his own numbness to the suffering he sees makes the reader uncomfortable, but able to cope with what is happening--what REALLY happened in Europe.
Read this book. You will be streached far beyond your comfort zone, but you will likely benefit. But, please, do not read this if you are easily haunted by the images that WWII has to offer. You may see them for many nights in your dreams. I'd say you need to be over 18...maybe 21...maybe 50... It is hard to deal with in places...but it is absolute brilliance.
As for the claim that Kosinski may not have written this or other of his works...hogwash. I've only heard this theory from one lone internet-would-be-critic who seems to have a vindetta against Kosinski, yet can't seem to stop reading his work. Perhaps Kosinski's mind is not the only "twisted" one out there.
Book Review: Harbrace This - Painted Bird A Masterpiece
Summary: 5 Stars
...This is the story of a child who is abandoned by his parents in the midst of World War II. He grows up on the streets and learns about life firsthand and sees how terrible it can be. Kozinski, using brilliant prose, also instructs the reader on exactly how awful life is for some people. This book does contain images that may shock or offend people, but for the person who can put all the brutal violence and sex aside, there is a story that is powerful because of the truth it contains. Kozinski obviously thought a lot about how he would teach the readers about the cruel reality that they live in, and he found it appropriate to choose scenes that not all readers will enjoy. Kozinski discovered that the only way to give the reader a sense of how harsh life is, he had to write an "in your face" provocative novel with many scenes which test the limits of censorship. As the main character grows older, he experiences more. Since he has no parents to teach him any values, he takes in
what he sees and creates his own set of values. The boy discovers that the most important asset in life is power. He believes that power is the key to surviving in the world. He makes many attempts to gain power, but multiple times must bear witness to his own powerlessness. A culmination of all this results in the loss of a source of inumerable power, his words. Kozinski portrays very well and very accurately the struggle between the boy and the rest of the world and the hardships he must deal with. He has no parents to turn to, most other adults he meets beat him, and children of his own age cruelly killed the boy's best friend in front of his eyes. With nobody to turn to, he learns to live by himself and for himself.
Overall the Painted Bird is an amazing book. Kozinski is a brilliant author who does not "sugar coat" any of the aspects of life he describes. There will definitely be people who can not handle this book or do not want to handle it. This book is recommended to any avid reader. This easily ranks among the best books ever written and is one that the reader will never forget.
I apologize for not properly using italics for the title of the book as demonstrated in the Harbrace College Handbook.
Book Review: Haunting Look At WW II From A Child's View
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a spellbinding, yet agonizing portrayal of survival by a child in Nazi-occupied Poland. The unnamed protagonist is separated from his parents at the onset of the war, raised briefly by a sympathetic caretaker in the countryside. Somehow the child endures the hostility and brutal treatment meted out to him by superstitious peasants. He witnesses countless episodes of beatings, murder and sex. Eventually he finds salvation in the form of Soviet Russian troops displaying the humanity that seems absent in most of the peasants encountered by the child. Told in poetic, often lyrical, prose, "The Painted Bird" is regarded by many as Jerzy Kosinski's finest novel, and among the best to recount the horrors of World War II. This was a very painful book to read anew, yet one I couldn't put down, and compelled to read as quickly as possible to a surprising, yet satisfying, conclusion.