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3.66 AVERAGE
3.66 AVERAGE
What a weird book. You should read the Wikipedia page at the very least before cracking it open. The circumstances surrounding the writing and publishing of this book are even crazier than the book itself, which, taken as non-fiction, is quite a dark story.
*As always, spoilers flock ahead.*
I occasionally chart my progress though this reading list on Facebook and invite others to join me in reading the next book. Once I finished Herzog, I made a blanket invitation to read The Painted Bird with me. I noted that I had no idea what the book was about but that it was less than 250 pages in the version I had, so come play! There were no takers, but then there never are, so that’s not especially noteworthy. The thing that interested me was one of my friends’ responses: “Hooboy,” he wrote. I asked if he had read the book and what his comment meant. He responded, “ Yea. I have not read the Painted Bird, but it's often at the top of ‘I want to be really really depressed, what should I read?’ threads.” His comment made me both laugh and think.
The last time I had heard someone tell me that he didn’t want to read a book because he didn’t want to be depressed was in reference to Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. If someone summarized just the plot of Grapes of Wrath, I don’t think I’d want to read it either. Similarly, if before reading The Painted Bird, I knew that the story followed a child as he aged from 6 to 12 in the backwoods villages of a non-specific Eastern European country betting beaten, abused and molested while watching other get beaten, abused, and molested until the war ends and he is reunited with his parents only to discover that everyone is broken from the brutality of the war and no connection with anyone else can be made—if I knew that, I would not have dived energetically into the book.
But of course a novel is so much more than the outline of its plot. In fact, with the exception of plot-twist-filled mystery stories, the plot is usually the least interesting part of any novel. If you were to give a two page plot summary to 100 writers and asked them to tell that story, you would get 100 entirely different novels. A novel is created by language, by characters and characterizations, by descriptions and the lack of descriptions. It’s tone and perspective, sentence structure and attitude. A book is never “about” its plot, and to dismiss a book because of its plot is to deprive yourself of some incredible reading, especially if you are talking about Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird.
The story is riveting from the outset. Kosinski creates such a complete and absorbing world, that I wanted more and more, no matter how horrifying the events were to become. And even when they were at their worst, the neutral tone and simple structure of the sentences and observations, presented through the eyes of a child who is no longer innocent but still far from experienced, all work together to create a visceral and intellectual punch that provides an impact without dragging me emotionally down. There is, in short, nothing sentimental to gum up the works and bring the story down to an emotional morass.
The Painted Bird is a brilliant way to approach the horrors of World War II. The war roils all around the action and is a constant presence even though we never witness a single battle. The genocidal policies of the Nazis are given a grand context of hatred and meanness that is at the heart of the human condition, as Kosinski sees it. The peasants of the villages that the narrator wanders between are no romanticized or idyllic figures. The hatred of Jews, Gypsies, and other dark-haired peoples pre-existed Hitler’s rise, and the “science” of the Nazis that discussed brain sizes and attempted to prove the sub-human status of a large portion of the human race are predated by the superstitions of the villagers that can believe the narrator to be a vampire, that the very color of his eyes are proof that he can cast curses.
In a lot of ways, The Painted Bird is a re-telling of The Odyssey. Odysseus has become a child wandering through the world looking for his home, suffering greater trials than the Greek hero could imagine. The mist of mythology is replaced by figures of earth and clay. When the boy finally reaches home, he’s not sure that he belongs even there, as if Odysseus, upon reaching Penelope, decides he is too changed to live the life he once did. Like all the children in the orphanage, the narrator is scarred and broken. The children are identified by their unique brand of destruction and brutality, carrying names like Tank, Flamethrower, Torpedo, and Sniper. It’s an interesting indictment of war. The war is certainly responsible for tearing all these families apart, for crushing these children and ruining their spirits, but the narrator’s adventures show that the brutality of the world exists even before war comes to the land, and it exists completely separate from the war. War does not break humans; broken humans make war.
The question at the heart of the novel is this: why do some people have the power to make others suffer and why are others made to suffer? The narrator’s main quest is survival, and to survive he wants to discover the secret of how he can move from a sufferer to the other side of the equation. He turns to Christian prayers, and when he feels that fails, he embraces the powers of the Evil Ones. They too fail him, and he is left with Mitka’s philosophy of revenge: if you are made to suffer, make he who hurt you hurt equally. It is this philosophy that leads The Silent One to kill hundreds in an engineered train catastrophe in order to kill one man who hurt and embarrassed the narrator. The Silent One created his own holocaust and still failed to exact revenge on the one person he wanted to die. Clearly, this is no way to conduct our human affairs.
In recalling The Odyssey or one of the Brothers Grimm twisted tales, the narrative sometimes feels like a piece of folklore, and like folklore, it holds the seeds of truth about human motivations and nastiness. No matter how much you might love your fellow man, you cannot deny the accuracy of the ugliness in this portrayal. There is a ton to think about here. There are beautiful and disturbing passages to roll over in your mind. There is a lot to be upset about, a lot to want to change. But there is nothing to keep you from reading it.
I occasionally chart my progress though this reading list on Facebook and invite others to join me in reading the next book. Once I finished Herzog, I made a blanket invitation to read The Painted Bird with me. I noted that I had no idea what the book was about but that it was less than 250 pages in the version I had, so come play! There were no takers, but then there never are, so that’s not especially noteworthy. The thing that interested me was one of my friends’ responses: “Hooboy,” he wrote. I asked if he had read the book and what his comment meant. He responded, “ Yea. I have not read the Painted Bird, but it's often at the top of ‘I want to be really really depressed, what should I read?’ threads.” His comment made me both laugh and think.
The last time I had heard someone tell me that he didn’t want to read a book because he didn’t want to be depressed was in reference to Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. If someone summarized just the plot of Grapes of Wrath, I don’t think I’d want to read it either. Similarly, if before reading The Painted Bird, I knew that the story followed a child as he aged from 6 to 12 in the backwoods villages of a non-specific Eastern European country betting beaten, abused and molested while watching other get beaten, abused, and molested until the war ends and he is reunited with his parents only to discover that everyone is broken from the brutality of the war and no connection with anyone else can be made—if I knew that, I would not have dived energetically into the book.
But of course a novel is so much more than the outline of its plot. In fact, with the exception of plot-twist-filled mystery stories, the plot is usually the least interesting part of any novel. If you were to give a two page plot summary to 100 writers and asked them to tell that story, you would get 100 entirely different novels. A novel is created by language, by characters and characterizations, by descriptions and the lack of descriptions. It’s tone and perspective, sentence structure and attitude. A book is never “about” its plot, and to dismiss a book because of its plot is to deprive yourself of some incredible reading, especially if you are talking about Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird.
The story is riveting from the outset. Kosinski creates such a complete and absorbing world, that I wanted more and more, no matter how horrifying the events were to become. And even when they were at their worst, the neutral tone and simple structure of the sentences and observations, presented through the eyes of a child who is no longer innocent but still far from experienced, all work together to create a visceral and intellectual punch that provides an impact without dragging me emotionally down. There is, in short, nothing sentimental to gum up the works and bring the story down to an emotional morass.
The Painted Bird is a brilliant way to approach the horrors of World War II. The war roils all around the action and is a constant presence even though we never witness a single battle. The genocidal policies of the Nazis are given a grand context of hatred and meanness that is at the heart of the human condition, as Kosinski sees it. The peasants of the villages that the narrator wanders between are no romanticized or idyllic figures. The hatred of Jews, Gypsies, and other dark-haired peoples pre-existed Hitler’s rise, and the “science” of the Nazis that discussed brain sizes and attempted to prove the sub-human status of a large portion of the human race are predated by the superstitions of the villagers that can believe the narrator to be a vampire, that the very color of his eyes are proof that he can cast curses.
In a lot of ways, The Painted Bird is a re-telling of The Odyssey. Odysseus has become a child wandering through the world looking for his home, suffering greater trials than the Greek hero could imagine. The mist of mythology is replaced by figures of earth and clay. When the boy finally reaches home, he’s not sure that he belongs even there, as if Odysseus, upon reaching Penelope, decides he is too changed to live the life he once did. Like all the children in the orphanage, the narrator is scarred and broken. The children are identified by their unique brand of destruction and brutality, carrying names like Tank, Flamethrower, Torpedo, and Sniper. It’s an interesting indictment of war. The war is certainly responsible for tearing all these families apart, for crushing these children and ruining their spirits, but the narrator’s adventures show that the brutality of the world exists even before war comes to the land, and it exists completely separate from the war. War does not break humans; broken humans make war.
The question at the heart of the novel is this: why do some people have the power to make others suffer and why are others made to suffer? The narrator’s main quest is survival, and to survive he wants to discover the secret of how he can move from a sufferer to the other side of the equation. He turns to Christian prayers, and when he feels that fails, he embraces the powers of the Evil Ones. They too fail him, and he is left with Mitka’s philosophy of revenge: if you are made to suffer, make he who hurt you hurt equally. It is this philosophy that leads The Silent One to kill hundreds in an engineered train catastrophe in order to kill one man who hurt and embarrassed the narrator. The Silent One created his own holocaust and still failed to exact revenge on the one person he wanted to die. Clearly, this is no way to conduct our human affairs.
In recalling The Odyssey or one of the Brothers Grimm twisted tales, the narrative sometimes feels like a piece of folklore, and like folklore, it holds the seeds of truth about human motivations and nastiness. No matter how much you might love your fellow man, you cannot deny the accuracy of the ugliness in this portrayal. There is a ton to think about here. There are beautiful and disturbing passages to roll over in your mind. There is a lot to be upset about, a lot to want to change. But there is nothing to keep you from reading it.
Searing. This is a difficult book to read. It's layer upon layer of cruelty, leveled at the protagonist who is a young child seeking safety during WWII as well as cruelty hurled at others. Why are humans so nasty to one another?
I remember this as being relentless in extinguishing any possible flicker of hope for its protagonist. Not fun reading, by any means, but powerful both as a novel and a document of a previously untold story of Europe during the Holocaust.
dark
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
Content Warnings
Graphic: Ableism, Adult/minor relationship, Alcoholism, Animal cruelty, Animal death, Bullying, Child abuse, Child death, Death, Domestic abuse, Genocide, Hate crime, Incest, Mental illness, Misogyny, Pedophilia, Physical abuse, Racism, Rape, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Antisemitism, Murder, Injury/Injury detail
Gratuitous
Almost immediately Kozinski throws us into the thick of WW2 for his young Jewish protagonist. Amid a brutal landscape of raw cruelty, the worst of the human condition seeps through every character -- from rapes to murders to grotesque tortures, both inflicted on our main character and those around him -- to many to count from kicking and pulling out eyes (yes, two separate occasions) to hanging upon hours above a savage dog -- the protagonist undergoes a transformation that starts with purely survival instincts and morphs into an internal dialogue about religion. Without any real role models, the boy must carve his way threw this war-torn Europe, a man without a country, where the title painted bird comes in. The boy begins to recognize his distinct "Gypsy" identity, his "cursed" race, and his place in it, all while the contradiction of high society in the form of Nazis and their well-pressed uniforms make headway in his confused mind. Feeling lost in this maze, the boy finally finds his supposed freedom through Soviet Russia, who liberate him in a way. The cruelty that has been projected on him the whole book makes it into his own conscious and his condition is now unfixable. He's made it through the war, but at the other end of it is a changed man.
What a disappointment! Almost from page 1 Kosinsky gives a sample of large and small cruelties and atrocities, but in such a way that you begin to suspect that he had a sickly pleasure in thus impressing the reader. In the introduction from 1976 he is trying to sell his novel as a holocaust-testimony, but after 100 pages there is nothing to substantiate that. If Kosinsky had not been the author of Being There, then I would really doubt his mental faculties. And above all that, also from a literary point of view this book is poor. Quick flush.