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The Painted Bird Paperback – Notebook, August 9, 1995
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Jerzy Kosinski's mythic, master-work of a shattered post-War Europe.
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.
- Print length234 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherGrove Press
- Publication dateAugust 9, 1995
- Dimensions5.4 x 0.8 x 8.2 inches
- ISBN-10080213422X
- ISBN-13978-0802134226
- Lexile measure980L
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One of the best. . . . Written with deep sincerity and sensitivity.”Elie Wiesel, The New York Times Book Review
A powerful blow on the mind because it is so carefully kept within the margins of probability and fact.”Arthur Miller
Of all the remarkable fiction that emerged from World War II, nothing stands higher than Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird. A magnificent work of art, and a celebration of the individual will. No one who reads it will be unmoved by it. The Painted Bird enriches our literature and our lives.”Jonathan Yardley, The Miami Herald
Extraordinary . . . literally staggering . . . one of the most powerful books I have ever read.”Richard Kluger, Harper’s Magazine
Product details
- Publisher : Grove Press; 2nd edition (August 9, 1995)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 234 pages
- ISBN-10 : 080213422X
- ISBN-13 : 978-0802134226
- Lexile measure : 980L
- Item Weight : 10.4 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.4 x 0.8 x 8.2 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #85,646 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #300 in Classic American Literature
- #2,602 in Classic Literature & Fiction
- #6,231 in Literary Fiction (Books)
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While the book takes place in occupied Poland during WWII, this book is not about WWII. It is not a book about the Holocaust: indeed, "Jewishness" plays at best a trivial role in the book, and the camps but a minor role. Nor is this book an indictment of Nazi Germany: if it were it seems rather odd that an SS officer is one of the kinder people toward the boy (the unnamed, main character of the book). But then it is entirely false to the book itself to try to read it as an historical narrative.
_The Painted Bird_ is, rather, a mythic tale, in many ways told in the nature of a European fairy tale. It is the story of a mythic hero cast by circumstances outside his control into a symbolic "journey through hell": beginning in what to all purposes are medieval peasant villages, then moving loosely through time into the larger "village" that is the communism of the Russian liberators. (But not moving "historically" through time; in this strange world there is no past or present; just the mythic now.) The question here is not whether the boy will survive the journey or be killed: the question is whether he will emerge the mythic hero on the other side of the journey, or fail and become lost, permanently, in the dark otherworld. To that end, there are two, primary, greatly inter-related energies within the book. The first is that which goes to painting the Bosch-like (not my phrase, but a good one) vision of hell. The second lies in the philosophies of being that the boy encounters, that he learns directly or indirectly through those individuals he meets on his journey. It is through these philosophies of being that the boy seeks not only the means to endure the physical difficulties of his journey, but more importantly -- and here we get to the central conflict of the book -- the means to maintain his individuality against the cruelties of cultural groups that at its core cannot tolerate individuality. It is a book about painted birds, yes, birds that are destroyed by the flock because they are different. But it is also a book about how the birds get painted in the first place. Most importantly, it is a book about psychical individuality.
The book is wholly a literary work: well conceived and designed and very well crafted. Yes, the violence is to the extreme, but it is well used to the end of pulling the book out of an historical world and into a mythic world. (Even within the violence and sex one can find mythic, fairy tale, and old-world-religious thematics.) If you can enter this work removing it from the discourse of Holocaust literature that tried to claim the book as its own, you will discover quite an aesthetic, literary experience. _The Painted Bird_ is literature of a higher caliber, and it deserves to be preserved and praised as such.
To note: I use the idea of the mythic hero with the intention of the connection being made to such works as Jospeh Campbell's _The Hero with a Thousand Faces_. The more I think about _The Painted Bird_, the more resonance I find between the journey of Kosinki's boy and the mythic journey as described by Campbell. Those energies go all the more to the symbolic and literary value of the work.
Also to note, it is worth getting the second edition of the book (the current edition) so as to have the Afterward, written a decade after the original publication. In my edition the Afterward comes first in the text. I would recommend not reading it until after you have finished the book. In truth, the afterward is mostly about the reception of the book, not the book itself. As such, it may create false ideas that might be brought into the book. However, once you have read the book, the Afterward easily slips into its rightful context.
I have studied WWII extensively and the Holocaust in particular. I also consider myself to be a student of human behavior and belief systems; the myths, superstitions and religions that are part and parcel of human culture. “The Painted Bird” simply did not “ring true” to the understanding of these things that I have formed in my own mind. There was too much caricature, and too much extreme fantasy. The scene describing the rape that resulted in the “locked coupling” that can sometimes occur in canids, badly damaged the credibility of the book even as a fictional work as this situation is anatomically impossible for humans. As I read the book, my interpretation of it gradually changed from a composite, fictional account of a WWII experience to a work of horror fiction.
As a work of horror, “The Painted Bird” is quite good and I have already recommended the book to a friend of mine who is a horror buff on those grounds.
I find it disturbing that Jerzy Kosinski’s personal experience during the Second World War was so diametrically different from his writings in “The Painted Bird”. Jerzy, and his family were in fact, sheltered by a Catholic family (and the people of the village in which they lived), at mortal threat to their own life. Had the Germans discovered Jerzy’s family sheltering in the home of the Catholic family this family would have been shot and possibly there might have been deadly reprisals that would have extended to the rest of the whole village. It strikes me as very curious that in such selfless kindness and courage, Jerzy would find any inspiration for a book that unrelentingly details incredible cruelty and deranged behavior in people in their interactions with a young orphaned boy.
War does bring out the worst in people, no doubt about that. And I have read the accounts of the psychopathic murder, cannibalism and unbelievable cruelty that are well documented during WWII. I have also read about the historic, legacy anti-semitism harbored by many elements within the civilian populations in Europe. Never-the-less, I cannot readily accept “The Painted Bird” as having much credibility as a realistic historical account of the WWII experience for the affected civilian population. For me, “The Painted Bird” is a fictional work of horror crafted by a literary artist. Jerzy had been diagnosed as having suffered from “borderline personality disorder”, and he committed suicide in 1991. Apparently he was one more of a long line of artists who suffered a troubled life, but who was able to channel this, as well as his extraordinary imagination, to create works of art.