Actually a 5-star review
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....
Another deceived reader
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.
Utterly without redeeming social value
Do not read this book unless you do not like yourself and want to do yourself harm.
Those so-called teachers who force their students to read this pornography are vile.
Beats You Senseless
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.
Painted Bird, disturbing look at the real side of war
No book can come close showing the horrors of war and the evil actions and impulses of people that exist everywhere as does 'The Painted Bird.' I read it as a teenager for a required English project for a very progressive English teacher's class. I was very impressed with the truth of the book, the horror that people endure at the hands of their fellow man in every civilization. It spoke to me, as a child of a very dysfunctional family who had witnessed violence in my own home. My father was a WWII veteran and I believe that this experience ruined his psyche and did not allow him to maintain a decent, loving relationship throughout his life. It is not for the weak of mind, those easily impressed, or for someone seeking thrills. For them, stick to the horror movies and the monsters under the bed. This book is for those who want to face the truth of the horror that exists under the thin veneer of civilization in our society.
(109 reviews)
