Customer Reviews

Steps

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

The book is good, full of twisted scenes and strange dialogues.
What is terrible is the quality of the ebook conversion, probably made with OCR.
A lot of missing full stops, wrong words (i.e. "real" becomes "red"), and even asterisks when there shouldn't be.
You better buy the paperback version...

Kosinski, or the Kosinski committee or whatever it was (Paul Auster is one of many who claim to have been paid to 'fix up' his early drafts), wrote some psychologically fascinating and beautifully written stuff (The Painted Bird, Steps, and to a lesser extent, Cockpit and The Devil Tree) and some really bad stuff (Pinball, The Hermit of Whatever-it-was-th Street). This is probably the best of them all. Buy it.

This is a kind of love it or hate it type book, type of prose that some just can't get into. However, if you are into this style of writing, you will enjoy it. A good short read. It's very reminiscent of Kafka.

To keep things brief, this is not a novel for the average reader. This is a violent, darkly sexual, experimental novel split into a series of extremely short vignettes connected by story but more importantly by theme.
I loved this book.

This book is a masterpiece in the weighted sense of the word. Notice the two reviews on the main page which were negative:
"just a bit too much for me"
"Some imaginations are almost too much, even for me"

Maybe for you two it is too much. But I think that if this book is too much, then the world is too much, and reading serious books is not for the weary, for those for whom the world is too much. I'm including great but much more timid books--I don't think that you can grasp the greatness, the concept of, let's say, George Eliot, and then justly avoid fiction like this because 'it is too much.' Kosinski's understanding of the world reveals a side many people, especially those whose idea of "what the world is like" is as cushioned as it is for most of us in America, wish did not exist. The book is really about power. It is present literally everywhere, it cannot be ignored, and in each power equation there is someone on both sides. But no, I'm wrong to say that it cannot be ignored, and a great many modern lives are focused on doing just that. Nevertheless, this doesn't mean we should not understand it and see it in action.

These things happen everyday in the world. They happened to happen to this narrator. And this narrator happened to write his experience down into a solipsistic fragmentary masterpiece which portrays his battle with being a single human, a solipsistic human, in a world of other solipsists.

What I haven't mentioned so far is that this 149 page book is the most exciting and fun read I've had in a long, long time. It is pure fun. You won't be able to put it down. And its crowning prose achievement is the outrageously pregnant concision, like Kafka's work, but in a way that seems even less possible to replicate. I wish I knew how he did it.

Great read for a sophisticated adult. Similar to Charles Bukowski. Ignore rube reviews.

This unstructured novel filled with graphic violence and sex, for all its salacious material, does little to either titillate or instruct the reader with any moral or aesthetic lesson. Quite the opposite, Steps is wholly amoral. This would be fine, if the writing had some scintillating quality; if the characters were richly drawn; if the flow of the narrative was swift, effective, tense. But this novel has none of these things. It seems difficult to believe, based on Steps, the Kosinski was once the flavor of the month, and a National Book Award winner.

Steps is amazing, spellbinding, and entrancing. the narrator is distanced to such an eextent that the amorality permeates every word. There is a strong anti communist vibe which no longer feels relevant, instead summing up a time I didn't really live through. Everything in the books feels both distant and close

Although "Steps" defiantly lacks a narrative thread, it is a rich little book that provokes and amuses. Highly readable, it has a force and sharpness of focus to it that is undeniable. The terse, detached vignettes build what you might call a unifying vibe, if not an altogether cohesive story. This book is not for everyone, but it's an interesting study of the loose novel form and of writing in general.

Riveting, gripping, amazing. If art is, in part, the dance between artist and audience, then Steps is art in its highest form. I found myself dancing & reacting in ways I wish I hadn't; found myself physically aroused by portions of the text that I found intellectually / psychologically repugnant. That's a neat trick, Kosinski.

In spare prose, the author takes his breathless reader (think of how your oxygen intake changed while watching 'Panic Room') on a "depraved" journey into the mind / experiences of his protagonist. The scenes that are depicted would be described by a good buddy of mind as "filthy" -- and that they are. Bestiality, rape, exploitation, and beyond. What I found most intriguing about this text, from a historical / sociological / anthropological perspective is that it was written decades ago. Far from the busy streets of NYC where the tranny hos walk amongst us, far from the prevalent teenage-flesh-peddling of 2005. The fact that humans are humans are humans are animals, in all of our glorious base desires and yes, just plain filth, was the most satisfying revelation of all.

It is an excellent piece of art, and I can't believe I let it sit untouched on my bookshelf for six years after picking it up from a used bookstore in New Haven. This is one book I won't be selling used on Amazon.com; it's staying in my collection for at least four decades. WOW.