“Weekly” Book Review #2: The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski
Alright, alright, so the “weekly” aspect of these things isn’t quite working out like I’d hoped… I admit it. In my defense, though, this isn’t necessarily due to falling behind on my “reading a book a week” pledge; it’s more that I’m just takin so darned long with my reviews! I’ve been reading about a book a week pretty solid, but I’m finding that most of the books I’m reading are really requiring a couple days’ thought to decide what I think about them, and I’m falling a bit behind skedge. (Incidentally, I love it when a book has that effect, so we’ll just have to see whether or not I pick up the pace… You may just have to bear with me.)
Anyway, such was very much the case with last week’s book, Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird – a deep, dark book about a young boy’s trials and tribulations while growing up throughout Eastern Europe during Word War II. This book was a lot of things - shocking, depressing, insightful, interesting,disturbed, beautiful - all in a very small package, and honestly, upon writing this review, I frankly still don’t know how I ultimately feel about it.
The story, which follows the dark-haired, brown-eyed boy for six years as he travels from village to village, is full from start to finish with every kind of horrifying abuse and brutality imaginable, and reading it, one can’t help but feel the unbelievable pain the boy endures. In this, Kosinski’s first novel, there’s no shortage of his trademark imagery and poetic description, but unlike his other books (take Being There for example, one of the most beautiful and inspiring books I’ve ever read), his artistry in The Painted Bird serves to paint one of the more deeply disturbing pictures I’ve ever read about. And frankly, I’ve read some pretty effed up stuff.
The novel, which is a pretty fast 230 pages, follows the basic formula of “boy enters village, boy finds one ally, boy gets devastatingly abused, boy gets run out of town”, and makes for a horrifying first-person account of one of the darkest times in the history of humanity. Called “one of the most important books in so-called ‘Holocaust Literature’” (and by Arthur Miller no less!), what I think sets Painted Bird so far apart is that unlike most WWII books, which focused so heavily on the horrible brutality of the Nazis, Kosinski’s book focused almost solely on the widespread effect the Nazis’ terror and hatred had on the people themselves.
Throughout the adventure, our narrator is witness to endless acts of all sorts of evils (including but nowhere near limited to: rape, murder, cannibalism, castration, beastiality, and horrible daily physical/emotional abuse), but it’s almost always his fellow villagers that’re behind it — never for a second relenting the severe hatred that existed for people of his “kind” (the boy’s actual heritage is never clearly established, though he is constantly regarded as a “Jew” or a “Gypsy devil”.)
Over the course of his travels, the boy tries a myriad of ways to escape his suffering - superstition, Christianity, mysticism, agnosticism - only to find that none of them will relieve him of his torture. Ironically enough, the boy’s only supposed ’salvation’ comes at the end of the book when his village is “saved” by the Soviet army, with whom the boy quickly grows to place his complete and total trust in. Even this is shed in a depressing light, though, as we bear witness to our twelve year-old protagonist’s near brain-washing at the hands of the Communists, as he abandons almost all else he’s learned in life for his worship of Joseph Stalin. (In the orphanage after his stay with the army, he utterly refuses to take his special-made Soviet uniform off, even to wash it!)
What really bothered me about the book though, was just how unrelenting Kosinski was with all the awful stuff. Now, I’m no stranger to dark literature, and have frankly always believed that you can’t have real good without some solid evil - nor light without darkness, yin without yang, bliss without sorrow, and so on - but I believe the the converse is definitely true as well, and here Kosinski falls far short. The Painted Bird, with all its incredible insight and power, is one unspeakable horror after another and the resulting lack of balance seems to have a more numbing effect on the reader than anything else. I suppose that the author might have intended to have this impact on his audience - perhaps as a way of mirroring the emotionally hardening effect that the story had on our hero - but in my mind, the end result is ultimately counter-productive. The Painted Bird is a remarkably-written book that, unfortunately, I feel I can only truly recommend to those certain biblio-masochists with the stomachs to endure it.
