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rebeccagee 's review for:
The Painted Bird
by Jerzy Kosiński
This dark, scathing story of an unnamed country at the start of the Second World War (presumed to be the author's native Poland) is terrifyingly graphic, yet the horror the child protagonist endures is not directly from the Nazis but the superstitious peasant villagers he encounters as he wonders alone through the countryside. Covering everything from incest to bestiality, it is perhaps unsurprising that it was banned in Poland for many years and that Kosinski lived out the rest of his troubled life in the United States. Regardless of the murky history of the book and its author, I found it an insightful angle from which to cover the lives of ordinary people during a period of unrest and dramatic political and social change. A recommended read - if you have a strong stomach.