Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird (Kosinski, Jerzy)
The Painted Bird, set during World War II, tells the story of a young boy whose ethnicity is unclear but whose swarthy color and dark hair makes him a potential target for the Nazis. His parents send him to live with a sort of foster mother, but the woman dies and the boy flees, moving from village to village and from one violent situation to another. He is beaten, nearly killed several times, turned over to the Germans twice, witnesses several murders and rapes, and becomes a sort of sponge who absorbs – or just accepts – whatever he’s told about life, or the way the world works. He is almost dispassionate about his suffering; the language of the novel occasionally shows fear when he’s near death, but is otherwise an almost stylistic monotone, reciting the horrors he sees in the way Melville described whales in Moby Dick.
The book reminded me, more than anything else, of The Road (Oprah’s Book Club)
The primary difference, of course, is in tone. I had a hard time getting to the father-son love story at the heart of The Road because the setting is so bleak. Now, looking back on McCarthy’s book after reading Kosinski’s, it’s much clearer, because Kosinski’s book is completely devoid of love, or much of any feeling at all, other than occasional dread. McCarthy’s book is telling a story; Kosinski’s book feels more like a protest – he wants you to be outraged – but also as a catharsis for the author, whether the experiences were his or just those of people he knew.
I make that last point because there’s apparently a controversy about Kosinski’s work, including whether his work is original and whether he lied about his experiences during World War II. The edition I have is old, from 1976, and predates the plagiarism claims, but he does make it pretty clear that he is not claiming that the work is autobiographical and is dismayed by critics who wish to turn the novel into a work of autobiographical fiction. Neither controversy is mentioned in his entry in Encyclopedia Britannica (although it does claim the novel is a fictionalized account of his experiences during the war) or in TIME‘s capsule on the book from the TIME 100 posting.
Bottom line: I don’t think The Painted Bird is a bad book, but I would in no way recommend it. But after reading it, I appreciate The Road, despite its oppressively bleak setting, a good bit more.
Next up: Alice Walker’s The Color Purple