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I'm taking this book with me to a meetup in De Kluizenaar. If no one takes it at the meetup and it doesn't fit on the shelf anymore, it will be released at obcz-Lux.

The blurb on the back cover persuaded me to take this book. Added to books which want me to read them.

The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosiński

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


This book is like a vision of hell painted by Hieronymus Bosch. In fact, one version of the book has a rather tame detail of one of his paintings on the front cover. A more accurate depiction would be the dark painting with all the tormented souls writhing in agony; there is a great deal of agony and torment in The Painted Bird. This book is your worst nightmare. The only saving grace are the lovely descriptions of landscape and some interesting comments on dialects (the boy travels some distance through Poland and may actually cross into Ukraine or Lituania; the borders changed after the war). After the book was published, Kosinski was persona non grata in Poland, the book was banned and there is still an online campaign to discredit his name; he was part of a group of men including Roman Polanski who were accused of drug-fuelled excesses, but more damning were accusations of plagiarism or even using an uncredited ghostwriter and falsely representing himself as a victim of Nazism and Polish racism when he had in fact been protected and sheltered by Poles. Nevertheless, this is still studied as a good example of holocaust literature; it would not be my choice.

Almost unimaginably, a film was released in 2019 of this horrifically violent, sexually depraved novel, filmed in black and white - mercifully - with dialogue in Slavi Esperanto, a mixture of Czech, German and Polish. Apparently half the audience walked out and I don't blame them. I shall not be going to see it! Even though I often enjoy quirky books where relatively violent things happen - I am reminded of The Tin Drum - I do not appreciate descriptions of revolting things happening to eyeballs. And I realise this is ironic in the context of war, but still.

Finally, one bookish quotation that wasn't enough to make up for the horror:
"From their simple printed pages one could conjure up a world as real as that grasped by the senses. Furthermore, the world of books, like meat in cans, was somehow richer and more flavorful than the everyday reality. In ordinary life, for example, one saw many people without really knowing them, while in books one even knew what people were thinking and planning." (p.194)





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This book has been released as part of the following BookCrossing challenges:
- The Ultimate Challenge - read and release books, with extra points for a monthly theme
- Reduce Mount TBR (To Be Read) - read and release books on the TBR list since before the end of the previous year.
- 666 country reading challenge.