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| View Larger Image | The Painted Bird (Kosinski, Jerzy)
by Jerzy Kosinski
| | List Price: | $13.00 | | Price: | $10.40 | | You Save: | $2.60 (20%) |  | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours | | | | | Sales Rank: | 17014 | | Studio: | Grove Press | | | Binding: | Paperback | | Number Of Pages: | 234 | | Publication Date: | August 09, 1995 | | Publisher: | Grove Press |
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
Originally published in 1965, The Painted Bird established Jerzy Kosinski as a major literary figure. Kosinski's story follows a dark-haired, olive-skinned boy, abandoned by his parents during World War II, as he wanders alone from one village to another, sometimes hounded and tortured, only rarely sheltered and cared for. Through the juxtaposition of adolescence and the most brutal of adult experiences, Kosinski sums up a Bosch-like world of harrowing excess where senseless violence and untempered hatred are the norm. Through sparse prose and vivid imagery, Kosinski's novel is a story of mythic proportion, even more relevant to today's society than it was upon its original publication. |
Amazon.com
Many writers have portrayed the cruelty people inflict upon each other in the name of war or ideology or garden-variety hate, but few books will surpass Kosinski's first novel, The Painted Bird, for the sheer creepiness in its savagery. The story follows an abandoned young boy who wanders alone through the frozen bogs and broken towns of Eastern Europe during and after World War II, trying to survive. His experiences and actions occur at and beyond the limits of what might be called humanity, but Kosinski never averts his eyes, nor allows us to. |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.0 based on 100 reviews)
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This is no bluebird on your shoulder... 
A powerful, brutally dark novel, *The Painted Bird* is a masterpiece of 20th century literature whatever the prevailing critical/personal opinions regarding Kosinski and the many controversies that surround him may be. I'm not exactly sure how it gets the reputation as a Holocaust novel because the adolescent main character is neither Jewish nor sent to a concentration camp. He is, however, suspected of being a Jew, or, just as "bad," a Gypsy, and under constant threat of being turned over to the Nazis as he roams, homeless, across a war-ravaged countryside populated by folks straight out of the Inferno.
One can't read *The Painted Bird* as a realistic chronicle--that so many bad things could possibly happen to one person, even the unluckiest, is absurd. But as a "mythic" morality tale, as a kind of picaresque "everyvictim's" experience of man's inhumanity to man as specifically manifested during the Nazi Occupation of Europe, it is a profound and uncompromising and perhaps unparalleled tale of the suffering of the outcast and persecuted individual wherever, whenever, and whoever he happens to be in history.
Kosinski spares us nothing as his young narrator passes from one horrendous scene of degradation to another. Perversion, superstition, ignorance, poverty, violence, disease, and death are everywhere among the peasantry through which Kosinski describes--and their counterbalance, ironically and appallingly, is in the godlike supremacy of the figure of the ultra "civilized" SS officer. This is a world in which Evil--both high and low--has the upper hand and the only safe place tobe is on the side that's strongest. It's a grim picture of life but one hard to argue against given the events of the 20th century and what we've seen modern man capable of doing. Those who like to point to the eventual triumph of good over evil at the end of WW2 are conveniently forgetting the horrors of Hiroshima and Stalin's Soviet dictatorship.
*The Painted Bird* has the timeless, parable-like simplicity of the great Nobel prize-winning novels of yesteryear--when the prize generally was awarded for literary merit rather than to recognize ethnic and sexual diversity or to reward political agendas. A spare, slender novel but as serious as a stiletto in the fist of an assassin and packing a wallop that will follow you for the remainder of your reading days, *The Painted Bird* truly is one of those books you'll never forget.
February 22, 2008 | |
A Sufferor's Tale of Suffering in Fable Fashion [T]
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.
December 08, 2007 | |
War Crimes 
The next edition the publisher prints could use the tag line: If you loved "The Road" you'll love "The Painted Bird!" It's much the same thing: a child wandering through a wasteland witnessing and experiencing violence and debauchery of every variety at every turn. In this case it's an unnamed boy wandering Eastern Europe (most likely Poland) after his parents send him away to protect him from the Nazis and his caretaker dies. For most of the novel the boy is being taken in by or captured by assorted farmers, who without fail proceed to abuse him in a variety of ways.
The content of this book is the stuff of nightmares: a boy getting his eyes gouged out, a man being devoured by a swarm of rats, women being violated in the most brutal fashion by men and sometimes animals. As an American growing up in the Cold War this is probably the first time when I've actually been cheering for the appearance of the Red Army--they at least only brutalize those who have it coming to them.
The title of the novel comes from one of the peasants who traps birds. For sport he paints one of the birds, paints it garish colors, and then releases it into a flock of its fellows. The other birds, not recognizing it as one of them, proceed to tear the poor creature to bits. Such is life for the boy as he wanders around this backward country that except for mentions of guns and bombs seems to be mired in the Middle Ages as almost everyone he meets fails to recognize him as human and tries to tear him apart.
An obvious question one has to ask is how different the peasants are in their treatment of this dark-haired/dark-skinned boy than the Nazis are in their treatment of Jews and other minorities. Really the only difference seems to be the scale. If there's one positive message to take from this it's that we should always look past the paint on one's feathers to recognize the bird beneath.
Nevertheless, I wouldn't recommend this book to most people. It is brutal and terrible. I thought books like "Blood Meridian" and "American Psycho" were about as dark and unpleasant as reading could get, but I was wrong. This is easily ten times more nasty and horrific than anything Stephen King could dream up. What makes it worse is to think that so much of it is probably true--unless you're one of those conspiracy theorists who doesn't believe in the Holocaust. I'm all for free speech and I see what the author's driving at but there's a difference between making a point and gratuitous violence and debauchery. The thought struck me as I was reading that maybe if the Marquis de Sade were writing a novel of World War II this is how he'd do it: savage, brutal, and perverse.
The only ones I would recommend this to are those dreaming up the wars and holocausts now and to come. Maybe it would shock some sense into them. That's probably what Kosinski had in mind.
That is all.
November 02, 2007 | |
Violence is real, and literature reflects life in this case. 
I have taken the time to read several reviews of this book. Some people seem to "get" it and others seem to think it's nothing more than some excuse to write "perversion" (how many classics were called perversions during the era in which they were written, I wonder? The answer; more than I care to count. )
Face it people. Life is violent. War is NOT pretty, nor are the effects of it. I do not much care if Kosinksi made up every scene in the book from his imagination and/or studies of the effects of war, or if he did live some of it. This sort of horror happens EVERY DAY in the real world to those caught in a country ravaged by violence. Don't believe me? Watch the world news. Go do some research. Even if he did "make this up" he didn't "make it up". I give the guy props (in his grave or not) for having the BALLS to write the gritty, nasty details of the horror that is war which many people are too cowardly to admit is -reality-. So much for the noblity of the struggles of war, eh? This is how it goes down for the little folks. This is what it does to people. These are the depths that humanity WILL and have lowered themselves to for survival's sake and for the base, cruel nature that lurks within humanity. It's not pretty. It's not nice. It's not "fun" to read but it should at least change your view on the world around you and how it is, has been, and probably always will be violence hidden under a golden, glittering surface created by the media and less gutsy authors into making you think everything is for a noble cause.
October 09, 2007 | |
Brutal and Brilliant.
I have just revisited this book, having read it first as a teenager and was astounded once again by its potency, both as a story, and as a terrifying inditement of human nature. In view of increasing world conflict in the post world war era, this book is more relevant than ever.
August 18, 2007 | |
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