Customer Reviews

The Painted Bird

5 star:		(73)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(20)

 

 

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.

"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.

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.

OK, I admit, I should have been older than 14 years old when I first read this novel... it is more graphic than your average WWII book or movie. This novel is an unusual perspective on the holocaust. There are no factories full of jewish labor slaves, no ghettoes, no concentration camps. Instead, there is a small child, seperated from his parents in time of war, lost in the countryside of rural central Europe. In the course of the novel, we discover how the social chaos brought about by WWII plays itself out among common peasants in the countryside as they are reduced to the lowest behaviors imaginable in the absence of peace, stability, clear governance, and a socially agreed-upon sense of right and wrong. And the victim (or victims) is the child who witnesses (and lives with) this state of violence.

In response to the review title "More lies about Jerzy", I find it shallow and naive of the reviewer to call this book gratuitous violence invented for entertainment simply because the events depicted are not truly autobiographical. It is a novel. Last time I checked, novelists seem to make stories up on a regular basis. No need to discount the value of the narrative because of its condition as fictional. As for the suggestion that Jerzy did not write this book, I wouldn't be surprised if he had help smoothing his prose into readable English. Kozinski is not a native speaker of English. In fact, he learned the language as an adult. So he needed help with the language... who cares? The plot, characterization, and overall design of the book bear the creative mark that no proof reader or ghost writer could put on a narrative. I don't doubt that this is Jerzy Kozinski telling this story, and the spirit of the narrative, the pain the child feels (he is so traumatized by his experiences that he becomes mute and needs to undergo therapy as an adult to recover his ability to speak) is an expression of WWII as Kozinski experienced it. We don't need to know if Kozinski is the boy in the narrative. The knowledge that Kozinski could identify and describe this violence in a way that actually upsets you and makes you angry is enough for me. Kozinski has written an excellent novel about WWII and its aftermath, which, unlike Schindler's List, doesn't make you feel warm and cozy about how all the good people triumphed in the end... this novel will leave you with the lasting impression that there is no end-of-story resolution/redemption for those affected by war.

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.

Kosinski's harrowing, stupendous novel is definitely not for the weak. But anyone claiming that it isn't real is very ignorant of WWII history and the Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe. I would suggest doing some research on, for example, the Einsazgruppen, the German death squads that followed the German army into Soviet villages and cities and slaughtered - by hand - well over a million civilians (including women and children, and most of them Jews) before death camps were even established. In this the Nazis were always assisted by local villagers. So if the depravity of the villagers in "The Painted Birds" seems too sickening to be believed - the reality was much worse than anything Kosinski has written. Do some research on WWII atrocities. Kosinski manages to give us an important and powerful overview of these events. And if you think reading it on your couch is too hard - imagine what the victims of the real atrocities suffered.

As far as this book not being written by Kosinski - well, the truth is too muddled and confused for us to know who did what, when, and why. So until another writer manager to come up with the original manuscript in his own hand, I will continue to attribute "The Painted Bird" to Jerzy Kosinski.

`The Painted Bird' was first published by Jerzy Kosiñski in 1965, and revised in 1976. It is a fictional account of the personal experiences of a boy aged six who could be Jewish or might be a Gypsy taking refuge in Eastern Europe during World War II. It is a fictional account filled with hate for Polish peasantry and packed with excruciating, horrifying detail of rape, murder, bestiality and torture.

'The Painted Bird' depicts a journey through a very brutal and brutalising hell. There are no safe places, really, for this boy. He may have escaped with his life but he can never escape his experiences.

There are good reasons to not like this book: it is not, as has been thought, an autobiographical account of Kosiñski's own experiences. Additionally it relies on the proximity of the Holocaust to intensify its own horror; it demonises Polish peasantry as both cruel and backward; and it wallows in violence. But for all of that, it has its own haunting power.

I've first read this novel at least 20 years ago and recently revisited it. I do not like the graphic, seemingly unending violence. The point is made and reiterated: man's inhumanity to man takes many forms and vulnerability is often relative rather than absolute. Did Kosiñski really regard the world as being beyond redemption? Is that the question he was posing in this novel? Is that why he committed suicide in 1991? Did he write this novel to give voice to his own despair as a consequence of the events of World War II? For me this novel raises far more questions than it answers. And some of those questions about the author and his intent colour the way I read this novel. I cannot `hate' it: it is far too well written for that. I cannot `love' it: it is far too ugly and there are far too many questions unanswered. Instead, I `like' it in an uneasy sort of way because it makes me wonder about the world.

I won't need to read it again.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

Kosinski's ghostwriter portrays the story of a young wandering Jewish boy in hiding during World War II. He observes horrific scenes and events. Seeing the unimaginable events through the eyes of such a young person, who accepts it as the way life is, is almost shattering at times.

Jerzy Kosinski presented this book as autobiography. However, decades later it was proven that he had someone else write it for him. In fact, it's believed Kosinski didn't even know English well enough at the time of its publication to have written it. Basically, he took a type of story that was popular in early 20th century Eastern European literature and had someone translate it into English prose for him. 'Kariera Nikodema Dyzmy,' a 1932 Polish best seller, is what has been claimed he stole it from. The controversy surrounding him led to his suicide in the early '90's.

Still, whether it's his or not, it's a stirring, difficult read, because of the horrors it details, but a very fine work indeed.

I read the edited version back in the 70's.
This is the first and only book I could not finish.The brutality and evil the child in the novel(it's not clear if the child is Kosinski,or a compilation of experiences he or others witnessed) witnessed during the war was too much for me to take.I have attempted over the years to finish it,but have not been successful to date.
Mr.Kosinski wrote with deep,scarring emotion. And I couldn't finish his testimony to what depths the human soul can sink.
The off-handed,even nonchalant way in which these horrible acts,whether towards humans or animals,were carried out was too much for me to take. I am a coward.I admit it.There is only so much brutality the reader can take.Having said that,this book still stands as one of the most unforgettable books about the Holocaust,and one that should be read by someone who can stand it.I'm not that person,but I will tell you what:Even though I only read less than half the book,the behavior of the monsters was enough for me to make sure that I would not stand for cruelty,to humans or animals,and I stuck to it.
I can write no more of this book.I will only ask that you give it a chance.I'm still trying.

I guess I'm another deceived reader who thought The Painted Bird was autobiographical. It is true that if despicable events really, truly occurred, we are willing to deal with them as readers because we feel great sympathy for the victim and we know he or she is just recording graphically experienced atrocities. However, if we learn the same stuff is fiction we recoil, betrayed and angry at the author for dreaming up such totally sick and perverse scenarios.

I did think the author writes powerfully and tells his story dispassionately as would a boy paralyzed and shell-shocked by the evil that men do. But knowing this is not only fiction but racist propaganda against the Poles, suddenly Kosinski loses his appeal and becomes just another author seeking fame by whatever means necessary.