The Painted Bird [Paperback]

Jerzy Kosinski (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 9, 1995

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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.

Review

“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

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 234 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press; 2nd edition (August 9, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 080213422X
• ISBN-13: 978-0802134226
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (119 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #38,932 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

82 of 95 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars the HEART of darkness, May 2, 2000

By 

Bruce Kendall "BEK" (Southern Pines, NC) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Painted Bird (Paperback)

My byline refers not only to the fact that both Conrad and Kosinski were Polish authors writing in English. There are also similarities in Marlowe's journey into the darkness of the Congo and Kosinski's young narrators' voyage through the surreal landscape of wartime Eastern Europe. Both investigate the darker regions of the human psyche. Both are the antithesis of a "picaresque" novel. Both are told from the point-of-view of a relatively innocent narrator, whose original naivete is transformed by the scenes he witnesses into an understanding of the "horror" and a comprehension of man's capacity for evil. I read The Painted Bird over 30 years ago and many of its images still remain vivid in my imagination. I will never forget the couple caught copulating (you'll have to read Kosinski's description yourself - I'm not going to go there) and the boy-narrator's harrowing account of being thrown into a pit of excrement. I'm a bit surprised, having taught high school English myself, that this would be recommended to a young reader, even though I read it when I was about sixteen. It definitely wasn't on my school's list of recommended reading. I don't agree with some reviewers here that the book is pornographic. Far from it. The sex depicted is hardly meant to arouse. Kosinski's later work might have fallen into that category (he did a lot of short-story writing for Playboy and Penthouse), but this is far too brutal a work to be anywhere near titillating. If you would like to take a harrowing walk into the heart of darkness, and are equipped to handle visions of one of the most depraved landscapes you are likely to encounter in literature, then this book's for you.

48 of 58 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hauntingly brilliant, but not for the weak of stomach!, February 22, 2005

By 

Monika "equestrienne_23" (Davis, California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Painted Bird (Paperback)

"The Painted Bird" offers a haunting, deeply disturbing look into the psychological impact of war, and how it can drive even the most civilized and the most innocent of people to do unspeakable things. The book opens in the fall of 1939. An unnamed, black-haired, dark-eyed 6-year-old boy is separated from his parents at the beginning of World War II. Wandering the countryside alone, the boy is mistaken for a Gypsy or a Jew by the fair-haired, blue-eyed rural villagers, and accordingly shunned. Even those who do shelter and feed him usually treat him with cruelty. But, even more disturbing, the boy's eyes are opened to the superstition-driven brutality with which these country folk treat their own neighbors, and even their own family members.

This is not an uplifting read. The cruelty the boy witnesses and experiences often defies the imagination. Kosinski makes no attempt to censor his gruesome descriptions, nor should he. To gloss over the atrocities of World War II would be an injustice to those who suffered through it. Though the book is not, as some would argue, autobiographical, events like those depicted here did indeed happen during the war. It is probably safe to assume that the story takes place in Poland, though Kosinski has deliberately left out place names in order to keep the narrative separate from his own life. As he says in the author's note at the beginning, he intended the book to stand alone.

The story actually spans the entire war, taking the boy from age six to age twelve. Over the course of the book, we witness his gradual loss of innocence. He tries repeatedly to make sense of a senseless world. For a while he throws himself fully into church, hoping that endless prayers will deliver him. When this fails, he decides that the only way to escape suffering is to make a pact with the devil. And when this, too, fails to relive his misery, he becomes entirely disillusioned with humanity. We see him begin, bit by bit, to embrace the very violence that has caused him so much pain. It is the only way to survive in the war-torn world around him.

"The Painted Bird" is tragically disillusioning, yet weaves a brilliant picture of the boy's psychological transformation. It will leave you feeling empty, but raises crucial issues to the reader's attention. Kosinski has deliberately used a very young, innocent child as the protagonist in order to emphasize the destructive, corrupting nature of war. At a time when war is a distant thing, taking place on other continents, it is easy to glorify it and to forget what a hell it is for those experiencing it first-hand. For this reason, books like "The Painted Bird" are especially necessary, forcing us to look at the physical and emotional havoc war can wreak on a person. Though I would highly recommend the book to anyone, it is not for the weak of stomach. Be prepared for a dark and disturbing journey.

29 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Beats You Senseless, December 13, 2009

By 

Bill Slocum (Norwalk, CT USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Painted Bird (Paperback)

Another village, another beating. The nameless child narrator of "The Painted Bird" is one unlucky person, and so are you while reading this inane exercise in page-turning masochism.

The thin, episodic storyline follows a young homeless boy, of possible Jewish or Gypsy extraction, who wanders across the swampy, war-blasted ruins of Eastern Europe during the early 1940s. One step ahead of the Nazis, who he knows will send him to an extermination camp, the boy must contend with the inhumanity of local villagers who seem to have become morally distended by the carnage around them.

That Jerzy Kosinski didn't really live the life of his character in this story shouldn't be held against him. Charles Dickens wasn't Oliver Twist, either, and no one calls him a fraud for that. Kosinski negatively portrays the people around the boy, by implication Poles though he doesn't say so directly in my edition, but no one in this book comes off well except the Soviets, oddly enough considering Kosinski was not a fan of theirs, either. Such a profusion of terrible things happen to the child that it beggars belief, but Kosinski may have written this, like his later novel I enjoyed, "Being There", as a pseudo-fable, so he gets a pass on that from me, too.

What annoyed and angered me about "The Painted Bird" was that it managed to be both cruel and dull. Cruel, in the way it continually assaulted you from chapter to chapter with assorted horrors inflicted on animals and people alike, all reasonless and unmotivated. Dull, in how it never manages to be about anything more than this awfulness, not offering a shred of sympathy, to the point where you just don't care.

The kid, to start with, is a cipher. Very early on, we see him play with a friendly squirrel. Then some mean children capture the squirrel and burn it. Later, the woman who has adopted the boy is also burned, though she was apparently dead already. That's all the back story we get before the boy goes on his journey, to be relentlessly abused and attacked everywhere he goes because his dark hair and features make him stick out. (Is this Poland or Sweden?) People die suddenly, violently, and rather spectacularly, so it's good Kosinski doesn't bother making you care about them.

Every chapter introduces a new group of awful people, with Kosinski apparently striving to outdo himself every time in terms of brutality. Eventually he introduces sex to the equation, featuring farm animals and an incestuous family. For me the most outlandish part had to be the man who ties the boy in a room with a killer dog nearly every day for a period of months, in hopes the boy will relax and be torn apart.

Here, and at other times, "The Painted Bird" crosses the line from tragic to comic until it becomes like Robert Stack in "Airplane!": "Have you ever been face down in the mud, kicked in the head with an iron boot? Of course you haven't! No one has! It's a dumb question! Skip it!"

People in Eastern Europe did suffer, and die, in ways like those experienced in "The Painted Bird". But it's unlikely any endured their horrors in the assembly-line fashion presented here. Tragedy can seem much less to an outsider who sees just the darkness and no light, to the point it's not clear what if anything is being lost.

Kosinski may have lived through the war in comfort, but "The Painted Bird" seems a product of authentic if misplaced feelings that could have been survivor's guilt. This might explain the novel's insane popularity after its 1965 publication - a lot of readers felt the same guilt. Also, Kosinski's book was a bracing challenge of societal norms and a celebration of the persecuted outsider - "the painted bird" of the title sent out by a cruel master (society? God? parents?) to be pecked to death by its own kind. Any other decade but the 1960s, and you would never have heard of it. Instead it was taught at my boarding school.

Great literature has the license to make you feel pain. But making you feel pain does not make a book great. "The Painted Bird" is an exercise in cruelty no one should have to endure.