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The Painted Bird (Turtleback School & Library Binding Edition) Review

I'm surprised by any negative reviews of this WWII, quasi-Holocaust tale of a young Jewish boy wandering on his own during the war.

The story is indeed rather "creepy". It's not a "feel good" read. It's also well told and beautifully written. The sexual, brutal, and homicidal aspects were, I thought, handled rather delicately yet without losing the intended hard-punch impact. Certainly some tough topics, but nothing gratuitous here.

It's very thinly veiled that this is (tragically) an autobiographical novel. An important work in this genre', and again, very well written. Probably not for the extremely timid, but if you can handle frank truth, don't let the hand-wringers scare you away from reading this one.

The Painted Bird (Turtleback School & Library Binding Edition) Overview

FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY.

The Painted Bird (Turtleback School & Library Binding Edition) Specifications

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.

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Customer Reviews

SICK SICK SICK - Dostoyevsky - Muswell Hill
I can only say that this man must have been very sick in his mind to write this and suicide did us all a favour. He has made the Poles out to be as sick as himself and its all lies. How dare this book be taken seriously? If it is fiction then his detailed descriptions are something in his mind which are really perverse and dangerous. The Poles suffered as much as anyone and for them to be portrayed in this way is insulting and I am ashamed to see the well known and up til now respected so called intellectuals' praise of this work. i wanted to burn the book but its from the library. A health warning should be put on the front. If those sort of things did go on I would assume they were rarities rather than the norm as he makes out to be. The more scary thing for me would be that I was the only one who detested this book but I am not alone. Arthur Millar and his ilk have gone down in my estimation.






Fraud? - H. Schneider - window seat
Among my main subjects of interest, which dominate my reading, are the horrible European history of the 20th century, and the literature by and about emigrants.
One of the best known, but controversial authors of the small group of writers who moved to the US or UK as adults and then were successful writers in English, is the Jewish Pole who adopted the name Jerzy Kosinski.

He published this novel, The Painted Bird, in 1965, and produced some of the most heated controversies in literary history. I am not sure if it is at all clear by now whether he actually wrote the book himself and whether he really wrote it in English. The book was received as a semi-autobiographical narration of the wanderings of an abandoned 6 to 10 years old boy in the wilderness, actual and social, somewhere in an unnamed East Europe during WW2. We meet incredible superstition and brutality, not just war related.

The boy is dark haired and has dark eyes and speaks upper class Polish. For the people in the flat country, he is like a painted bird: the metaphor relates to the sadistic act of catching birds, painting their feathers, and releasing them to the rejection and aggression by their flocks.

In his foreword to the 1976 edition, Kosinski denies autobiographical content and declares his tale as fiction. In the meantime it had been established that his own real life experience had been much different, that Polish farmers had actually saved him and his parents by hiding them and giving them a fake Catholic identity. With this background, I must say I can understand the accusations that the book is anti-Polish. During Communist times, the book was banned in Poland and Kosinski was attacked as traitor and American influence agent. I am not sure if that hits the truth, but there is something very fishy here.

Let's put it in a nutshell: I expected something somewhere between Imre Kertesz and Primo Levy, but what I get is more like Tarantino or Rodriguez without the tongue in cheek.
The novel gives us one scene of sensationalist brutality after the other. It is a picaresque hell ride, and the puzzling aspect is: the violence is not war related. It is practiced by the rural population on a peace time basis: sadism, rape, mutilation, lynching, blinding, whipping, you name it. I am disgusted.
Kosinski's 76 foreword refers to accusations of uncalled for violence, and he justifies it by saying that all war witnesses say that the reality was even worse. Maybe that is so, but the real problem is the violence level in the scenes which are not war related.

Another aspect that condemns the book is this: the narration is supposed to be that of a little boy of 6 and later. Kosinski failed completely to give the story a plausible childlike voice. On the other hand, the events have too much immediacy to be taken for the recollection of an adult who remembers his childhood. This is all very wrong.
I really wanted to like this book, but I can't.




Actually a 5-star review - M. C. Dalen - Albuquerque, NM USA
But who in their right mind would give five stars to a story about: bestiality, torture, incest, rape, murder, butchery, rape ... (I know I said 'rape' twice - it could be a dozen times). Have I left anything out? Probably. You get the picture. Read this book at your peril. You will never be able to forget it....

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