Customer Reviews

In Love with Jerzy Kosinski: A Novel

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a read that you will not be able to put down until you have travelled (emotionally and physically) with Anna to her destination (emotionally and physically). The reader will perhaps recognize certain characteristics in Anna's abusive husband Stanley who so denigrates her she almost loses her way.(I think we all have known a Stanley or two).
Anna will introduce the reader to her childhood memories in Latvia and a predominately Latvian neighborhood in Indianapolis.The author creates scenes with her writing that takes us there and has us seeing, tasting, dancing and feeling what the characters life is actually like. I had a hard time putting the novel down as I felt I needed to be right next to Anna to see that she arrives safely where she needed to be.

Whatever the form of abuse, wounds take a long time to heal, if ever they do, and the scars remain forever. The work of novelist Agate Nesaule often handles the theme of abuse and its long-term repercussions. In her acclaimed first book, Woman in Amber, Nesaule examines her own experiences of living through World War II and losing her home, Latvia, then becoming an immigrant--a stranger in a new land (the United States), coping with exile.

All wars are the epitome of abuse, but for women, this abuse extends to deeper levels yet, as women historically have been viewed as a kind of "prize" in war--too often, even by their own countrymen. War in all its chaos unleashes the predator in Man, no holds barred, and women as war bounty up for grabs. And so, long after the war has ended, it continues in its aftereffects, leaving women as the walking wounded, susceptible to other forms of abuse--domestic, for instance.

If Woman in Amber revealed to the reader the emotional and psychological devastation of war and exile for a woman, then Nesaule's new novel, In Love with Jerzy Kosinski, delves deeper into the psychology of a woman in her life after war.

Stanley, Anna's husband, is portrayed as the typical abusive husband. He is no wife-beater; his abuse comes in more subtle forms--hints of humiliation (she won't leave if he keeps her feeling unworthy), control over car keys (he maintains control over her ability to move freely), schedules (his needs always come first), friends the couple keeps (his), patronizing insults that eat away at Anna's self-esteem (his control depends on her submission). It is precisely this type of emotional abuse that can be most poisonous, because outsiders see only a polite and caring, even charming, if somewhat overbearing Stanley. Her friends tell her how lucky she is.

Anna lives in a world of lies, and because she comes from an abusive past, not only the war, but also a father (the original role model for all men) whom she could never please, she allows the degradation to continue while going out of her way to preserve and protect the public image of Stanley as a "great guy." Anna is the classic enabler. She has connected her own self identity to his. If people knew how Stanley really treated her, in her mind, it was not his shame, not his failure, but hers.

Dignity is so important to a man, Anna reminds herself. She does all that she can to suppress her own dignity while protecting the dignity of her man. She sweeps away his copies of Playboy, ignores the evidence of an escalating problem, even as she finds her husband is posting single ads and personals (he waves this away as mere flirtation and tells her she is being "too sensitive"). When for all her efforts, he cheats on her anyway, more than once, she blames herself. She is "not enough." Even so, her plans to leave Stanley begin to take shape, tugging her away, then back again, tossed about by doubt and guilt.

"How could she go back like that to certain humiliation? ...Did she fear or love the man who tormented her, or did guilt and pity keep her chained to him? Why did she not pull herself together and start taking care of herself?"(p. 61)

Ironically, it takes the attention of another man to help Anna ultimately break free from her abusive husband. While being around Stanley had always made her feel "not enough," even ugly, being around the attractive Andrejs wakes Anna up to the lies she's been told, the lies she had accepted as truth. The way he looks at her, the way he treats her, the way he romances her, all work a small miracle on the beaten psyche of the battered woman, until she too sees: she is an attractive woman with much to offer.

Alas, as is so often the case with the emotionally battered woman, she loses the ability to detect truth from lies. No one charms like the man who wishes to seduce and control. Andrejs turns out to be just another version of Stanley, and Anna finds herself in yet another cycle of abusive behavior. Anna swears to herself, she will not "lie with her words or her body again," and when at last she recognizes that her new lover is a narcissist, initially attentive, but then increasingly cruel, she struggles yet again to loose herself. He plays mind games with her, telling her one thing one day, the opposite the next day, until she cannot tell what is real and what is imagined. In a poignant scene in a public women's bathroom stall, she overhears two women talking and recognizes herself in their exchange. "He's a liar," one woman says in frustration to the other. Bipolar, dysfunctional childhood, addicted to his vices, a jerk, a bum ... but the other woman in meek voice responds only that her man needs more time. Time, patience, love, these will be her cures for what ails him. Listening, Anna has an epiphany of the part she has played in this all too common scenario of domestic violence.

No one can save us from ourselves, but ourselves. Anna has looked for answers and healing in other women, but she finds the man-bashers repugnant, her own ethnic community too stuck in their own denial and bitterness, the feminists too disinterested in getting along with men at all, her women friends to be mostly guilty partners in enabling society's mistreatment of women.

What does this all have to do with Polish writer Jerzy Kosinski? one might ask. Kosinski, a literary hero of Anna Duja's, is the thread that weaves through this story as a kind of mascot for the damaged soul of those spit out by war. Neither dead nor fully alive, living lives of quiet agony, sometimes producing great art, imperfect and battling various vices to escape their isolation and pain--these are the children of war. The framework for Anna's own story, Kosinski is rumored to be an abusive man if brilliant writer, and Anna remains doggedly devoted to his image as it is constructed in her mind. Deep inside her are words. She, too, wishes to write. And while much of her life she has looked to Kosinski to write the story of those damaged by war, having survived time and again her own personal war as an emotionally battered woman, she now realizes ... she must tell her own story. When news reports come to light that her literary hero has committed suicide, beaten by his own demons, she suddenly realizes that she is free.

"She would have done anything for him ... But even as she formed the words, she knew they were not true. She was finally beyond doing everything he or another man might demand. She would not lie for Jerzy. She would not collude with him ... to uphold a false version of his childhood. She would not write his books. She would not give him her story. She would write it herself." (pg. 199)

Anna will write that book herself. No one can tell her story but Anna herself. She hears rumors of her ex-lover Andrejs telling other women she was "no raving beauty" but an intelligent companion to him, eventually a disappointment. When friends ask her if she misses him, she says, honestly, no. She does on occasion miss the companionship of a man in her life. A man as he should have been, might have been. But she has now chosen her "final solitude." Within this solitude, she plans to write her book.

"But maybe stories can help. Maybe those who have suffered more will listen to those only on the margins of the great horrors. Maybe all will be able to rest in the compassion of others. Maybe instead of clashing and competing, all the stories will weave together into a great tapestry, each thread part of an intricate, somber pattern. Maybe tenderness will prevail." (pg. 210)

One after another, Anna has been disappointed in the men in her life--her father, her husband, her lover, and finally, even her literary idol. She will always be the child of war. She will always be a survivor.

Nesaule's book is a heartbreaking story of women everywhere, fighting their own silent wars. Whether combat on the battlefield, or combat behind the closed doors of many homes, women suffer the wounds, and men with them, of a lack of dignity and compassion for the human condition. Her stories may seem simple enough, but they accomplish what Anna dreams about: a linking of people, both genders, in a better understanding of what we all need--forgiveness.

See The Smoking Poet Spring 2009 issue for unabridged review and an interview with Agate Nesaule: www.thesmokingpoet.net

After what Agate Nesaule describes as a "forty-year writer's block", she wrote WOMAN IN AMBER, a memoir with a powerful impact. It received an American Book Award in 1996 and has been translated into seven languages.

Now Nesaule has written a novel that also can inspire people burdened by the past who want to change. IN LOVE WITH JERZY KOSINSKI lingers in readers' consciousness with its many challenging layers.

The narrative layer traces the evolution of Latvian professor Anna as she struggles with childhood scars from World War II to create a new life. There is a delicate balance in the novel between this focus on after-war lives of exile Anna and her Jewish friend and on universal experiences such as: leaving unhealthy relationships; fear of aloneness; hardships from monetary insecurity; disparities between public and private lives; degrees of suffering; friendships; compassion and forgiveness.

We can also read this as a self-reflexive novel about writing. The title signals real-life writer Jerzy Kosinski, whom Anna loves. She regards him as a soul mate because of his courage to live on after the Holocaust. When learning of his lying in a novel about experiences he claimed were autobiographical, his plagiarizing, and then his suicide, Anna feels tenderness for his compulsion to lie. She knows that people can be dismissive of war stories, and survivors can be competitive about suffering. However, she chooses not to be Kosinski's twin. She frees herself to write her own story and a Holocaust story that an older Jewish friend asks her to write. Like Nesaule, Anna believes writing stories can help.

Intriguing also in this novel is the blurring of fact and fiction. In a recent interview Nesaule said this about fiction and nonfiction elements in it:

"...the complex interplay of ...memoir and fiction, truth and lies...led me to write IN LOVE. I had experiences, emotions, and dreams that I did not want to include in a memoir; I wanted to play with them and change them...I wanted to imagine what was plausible but would never happen. I also wanted to preserve the authenticity of feeling that I was able to bring to Woman in Amber. In short, I wanted to write a novel."

Like Jerzy Kosinski, for whom Nesaule herself admits a "lifelong obsession", she sows factual details into the novel--some that tease readers. The setting is life in Madison, Wisconsin in the l980's and 90s. Some of Anna's life experiences parallel Nesaule's. Interspersed are historical facts about Latvian deportations to Siberia.

Nesaule has been asked if this novel is a retelling of her memoir WOMAN IN AMBER. Toni Morrison, when critiqued for writing the same story of slavery in her acclaimed novels, has an answer:" there is nothing in.... catastrophic events of human life that is exhaustible at all."

Unlike Jerzy Kosinski, Nesaule consciously and creatively blends fact and fiction, combines truth and imagination, meshes her own stories, those others have told her with those she has read. The purpose-- to share a broad cautionary tale about war and its aftermath; to assist survivors in understanding one another; to model tenderness for self and others; to remind everyone about possibility for change; and at times, to play and make us smile.

George Bernard Shaw said that jokes and fiction are really truth-tales. By choosing to write a novel, Agate Nesaule flies with unclipped wings. My sense is that with the "miraculous grace she received as a survivor", she feels obligated to write truths that may be uncomfortable and possibly shocking to some. At this stage in her writing, she has freedom with few costs to tell it like it was, is, and could be.

Since the publication of "Woman in Amber," Agate Nesaule has been one of my favorite authors. After "In Love with Jerzy Kosinski," she continues to occupy a place of honor. The story Agate tells is one we all need to hear.

I am married to a man who was born in a displaced persons camp in Germany after WWII and raised in an Eastern European immigrant community in Indiana. From the first time I met my husband's family, I was struck by the way that people in that community, and in other post-WWII immigrant communities in the U.S. and Canada, kept their stories to themselves. As a result, the suffering, the seemingly arcane political complications, and the social and psychological fallout that affected so many people, in so many different ways, remains almost unknown.

In both of her books, Agate Nesaule has done a masterful job of bringing a part of this story, as she lived it, to light. I particularly appreciate the new and different depths she is able to plumb with the novel. "In Love with Jerzy Kosinski" doesn't compete with "Woman in Amber,"it completes it. Thank you Agate for brilliantly confronting some truths.

After reading Agate Nesaule's memoir "A Woman in Amber," I'd looked forward to reading whatever she wrote next. Unfortunately, this book doesn't begin to measure up to her previous nonfiction account of her life as an immigrant girl who ends up marrying a dominating man unworthy of her.

This novel, perhaps, picks up where "Amber" left off, with the heroine's leaving her husband Stanley and recreating a life for herself on her own. Unfortunately, her new young lover is never as real as Stanley and the plotting is a bit ponderous and perfunctory. When Anna confronts her boyfriend's "other" lover, it strains credulity to the point that the reader no longer believes in Anna as a character.

Better are the author's renderings of women's consciousness groups, Anna's realization that her husband is as stupid as her friends thought, and interactions that the protagonist has with her students. Still, the most interesting character remains Stanley, and he disappears early on in the story. The author may be done with her husband, but the reader longs to know more about this grandiose and deluded character who seems, perversely, to love his wife.

Nesaule's skills as a writer and story-teller are solid. However, her endless excuses for the chronically stuck, self-pitying Anna, heroine of this story, become cloying and frustrating. There are serious questions which must be asked: how long after a traumatic event in childhood may it be used as an all-purpose excuse for the adult not to do the work, hard thought or decision-making she plainly needs to do? Why would Anna, who's described as intelligent and highly sensitive, stay with brutish Stanley for twenty five years? She's childless, so could not use the common excuse of "keeping the family together." And moreover, the excuse she gives herself for childlessness is a damaging cliche: she "wouldn't think of" bringing a child into "this terrible world." Her friend Sara, another war survivor, offers the same excuse although their present-day world is actually quite safe and comfortable. One suspects these two women don't want children because, if they had them, they would have to focus on providing a healthy future for them--and could no longer focus exclusively on themselves.

Another question might be, Why does Anna constantly mention her disturbed late father, and lavish his character with sympathy in her mind, but give her own mother such short shrift? The mother is mentioned only briefly and dismissively. The reader wonders what happened to her, especially since her war experiences were evidently far more horrifying than Anna's. (In Nesaule's first book, an autobiography, she implies that her mother was sexually assaulted by Russian soldiers as well as undergoing other life-threatening experiences.) This strange, cold lack of empathy--in a character who is constantly congratulating herself on her "sensitivity"--is very odd.

For most of the book Anna seems comfortable with lies: her own, her lover's, and those of the titular Jerzy Kosinski. Even after the lover is caught robbing her blind, and even after Jerzy Kosinski is exposed as a fraud for his pretensions of severe hardship during World War II, Anna's fierce determination to keep her delusions intact has her making excuses for them. Is this really supposed to show emotional progress? It is only when the liars' exploitations become too outrageous to ignore, that Anna (grudgingly and reluctantly) wakes up...sort of.

In the very last scene, Anna is enjoying an outing at the American Players Theater. A very handsome, middle-aged man sitting behind her makes himself known to her, but she decides to ignore him. After all, she tells herself, she has no guarantee that he has her depth and intelligence. That's right, of course; but she also has no guarantee that he lacks these qualities. A normally alert person doesn't make damaging assumptions about other people. She finds out.

In the end, Anna is a depressing companion. There's an Italian saying that kept occurring to me as I read: "With great effort she broke through an open door." Anna never seems to fully understand that the door is open, and goes on fruitlessly (and boringly) pounding on it long after the patient reader has lost interest.

This is a tale about old issues and grudges.
The plot and the characters seemed superficial and not fully developed to their potential.
I was looking for insights on these peoples inner lives and motivations.
The rich Eastern European immigrant experience deserves a story with depth.