Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird (1965) – A Book Review

‘and only God,

               omnipotent indeed,

knew they were mammals

                                of a different breed.’

-Vladimir Mayakovsky

‘One day when I was alone in my Manhattan apartment, the bell rang. Assuming it was a delivery I expected, I immediately opened the door. Two burly men in heavy raincoats pushed me into the room…..I asked the men what they wanted from me. One of them replied that they had come to punish Kosinski for The Painted Bird, a book that vilified their country and ridiculed their people’.

Vilifying an entire country is just one of the controversies that surrounded Polish-Jewish writer Jerzy Kosinski after the publication of his 1965 novel, The Painted Bird.

Amongst others were accusations concerning his authorship of the narrative as well as allegations of its historical falsehood. Kosinski was happy to confirm the second claim, given the novel’s status as fiction, and was later forced to write a measured, yet antagonistic prologue to remind the reader of this fact. This came after years of objections from the author, as well as the vandalism of several book shops that had stocked the work.

Oddly enough it was attacks such as the one mentioned above by Kosinski that most suggest the historical specificity of the novel, rather than the author’s own intentions. Some detractors pointed to the fact that Kosinski’s references ‘to folklore and native customs’ were so ‘brazenly detailed’ that they recalled the aggressors’ own home provinces. Maybe peaceful protest might have better served their point.

A first person recounting of the life of an orphaned Jewish or Traveller child, the story is a viscerally violent representation of mid-twentieth century Poland. Acting as a rudder for the narrative, his journey from village to village, besieged and persecuted by peasants and soldiers alike, can be read as a tale of trauma and irreconcilability. At the same time, the boy’s state is representative of a people, a country, or even Europe as a whole. His innocent fluctuations from pagan rituals and catholic indoctrination to Nazi admiration and finally Stalinist brainwashing, demonstrate a severe take by the author on human susceptibility to ideology. His powerlessness and simultaneous fascination with a power (the horse-backed Nazi soldier’s midnight uniform entrances him particularly) is marred by his genealogical non-conformity, giving what Kosinski might argue is a tired empathetic reaction to Second World War atrocity in Eastern Europe, a painful revitalisation.

The boy’s age, and petit-bourgeois background caters to the incomprehensibility of this context as he is tossed around by the machinations of senseless violence that he can neither decipher nor control. By the time he reaches an age in which he could understand, he is mute from suffering and unable to even utter the word ‘comrade’. Kosinski’s unsympathetic style seems to issue this barbarity as a direct challenge to the reader: to comprehend without turning away.

One of the most striking things about The Painted Bird is the depiction of rural peasant customs which (as Kosinski would argue is made clear in the form of the book’s backlash) are as evidently brutal as they might be spiritual. To the non-acquainted reader, they serve as a depressingly novel tonic to the Nazi and Soviet influences whose intricacies are already better known. Kosinski does not shy away from the grotesque in these depictions, and his intense pictorial descriptions of rituals both betray the child-like outlook of the narrator as well as exposing the reader to a viscerally a-moral world, an uncomfortable combination.

In conclusion, the value of the novel is probably best described by its most violent critics. Something so disturbing as to prompt arson and assault must contain at least a painful realisation, if not a difficult reality. A more reserved critic (one who sits at desks with a runny nose, rather than throwing fire-bombs) might point to the unexceptional style of the piece whose fast-paced tempo, without attenuation or crescendo, starts electrically but ultimately trails off, becoming almost tiresome (think running with no headphones). In any case, it is worth reading to at least find out what all the fuss was about, if not to take on Kosinski’s challenge.

Leon Friedman