Review of Jerzy Kosinski's "The Painted Bird"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

Writing about tragedy is a tricky business. Even when a literary voice does come across as authentic, the writing sometimes seems more interested in using its characters as allegorical, historical foils instead of respecting their individuality of experience. This always strikes me as untrue to the spirit of writing about history in the first place (even if it is in the form of fiction), and especially something as historically close and horrifying as the Holocaust. That’s the major problem that I had with “The Painted Bird,” and I think Kosinski might be the most egregious offender in the small selection of Holocaust literature with which I’m familiar. 

The content is very difficult, with its relentless violence, and not infrequent incidents of rape, bestiality, and physical abuse of a very young child (the narrator). Soon after being separated from his parents, he is shuttled from village to village and peasant to peasant to be looked after, nearly all of them suspicious of his “Gypsy” dark features. He is the disenfranchised bastard of History. Almost all of these would-be caretakers are physically brutal, superstitious, and backward. To read this, and to know that there were children who lived through experienced that very much paralleled the narrator’s, one might think that it was impossible to live through this without deep, permanent psychological scars.

The unyielding violence, however, doesn’t allow for a single moment of reflection. You always have to be on your feet, anticipating the next rape or beating. And while the violence never became anaesthetizing as it has in similar novels, I couldn’t help but feeling that the narrator was simply a cipher for Kosinki’s philosophy of history: we are thrust into this cruel word, helpless and naked, only to be teased and kicked and humiliated, and then you die. He has no problem with letting you know that God won’t be there to help you, and that political parties are just as cruel and manipulative as history itself. Considering the course of twentieth century history, there are many good reasons for coming to such conclusions. In a piece of fiction, though, a reader needs room to breathe and space in which the characters can have thoughtful self-reflection. The narrator is denied all of that here – simply because he’s trying to make it to the next day.

There is the occasional book that fails not because of its message, but because of the way in which the writer tries to communicate it. There are important ideas about human nature and how inhumane it can so often be, but using a character as both a figurative and literal whipping boy for history can never succeed as a novel. It just doesn’t ring true.