Wrapped Up In Books

My musings on what I've read since January 2006.

Friday, October 27, 2006

The Painted Bird - Jerzy Kosinski

A man has his eyes gouged out with a spoon. A second man is eaten alive by rats. A woman is killed by a glass bottle being smashed inside her. There are numerous examples of savage domestic violence, child abuse, animal cruelty and plague.

This all happens in the first 60 pages; then the Holocaust starts and things begin to get really grim.

In order to get away with this pitiless stuff, the writer needs to reward the reader with some real intellectual or emotional brilliance, which sadly this novel fails to do. The imagery is overstated and the plot is simply a sequence of horrific events.

There is also a disconnection between the narrator’s childlike view of the world and his sophisticated language. When using a child as the main point of view, the writer has 3 sensible options:

1) 3rd person, e.g. Lord of the Flies
2) 1st person using childlike language, e.g. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
3) 1st person using a adult voice looking back, e.g. Spies

All the examples above are successful. The Painted Bird goes for a mix of 2 and 3 and it just doesn’t work.

3 Comments:

Blogger lisa_emily said...

Funny, I just started reading this book the other day and I decided to run a quick blog search- your points are very interesting. I will have to keep them in mind as I go through this work. Although, I think the main aspect of this book is the imagery and fairy tale like story line- I find it amazing that anyone (as I have read inother resources) would think that this was based on a true story....

1:30 PM  
Blogger Tom Goodfellow said...

You're right, it does have a fairy-tale air to it. Grim(m) events, children in peril, central Europe, witches etc.

1:57 PM  
Blogger lisa_emily said...

ok- I just finished reading it last night- I hope to write something approaching intelligent in my blog in the next few days. I have to re-adjust my brain. I may never look at rabbits the same.

I'll be referring to your post here.

Thanks!

2:43 PM  

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