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dzengota 's review for:
The Painted Bird
by Jerzy Kosiński
If this book were half as long I think I would truly love it. One of the most overtly grim things I have ever read, and never lets up save for the implicit quiet moments between chapters.
There are two moments which stand out to me as the most potent: When the main character and others are walking along train tracks that the Nazis use, they find the signed pictures, passports and personal effects of the Jews being taken away, thrown out in a last ditch effort to have some part of their lives and memory held onto by someone. He flips one of the pictures and finds the ink too sunbleached to be read.
The other is at the end of the book, when the war is over. For a split second the book is much kinder to the main character than any reader could have really expected. Both of his parents survived the war and have come and found him. But by the time that they find him, he has been so warped by his experience and by the comfort given to him by the Soviet army that he hopes against hope to not go back to them, to just be a Soviet soldier instead.
There are two moments which stand out to me as the most potent: When the main character and others are walking along train tracks that the Nazis use, they find the signed pictures, passports and personal effects of the Jews being taken away, thrown out in a last ditch effort to have some part of their lives and memory held onto by someone. He flips one of the pictures and finds the ink too sunbleached to be read.
The other is at the end of the book, when the war is over. For a split second the book is much kinder to the main character than any reader could have really expected. Both of his parents survived the war and have come and found him. But by the time that they find him, he has been so warped by his experience and by the comfort given to him by the Soviet army that he hopes against hope to not go back to them, to just be a Soviet soldier instead.