The Painted Bird
by Jerzy Kosinski

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Book Reviews of The Painted Bird

Book Review: Morally irresponsible to candycoat
Summary: 5 Stars

Some people dismiss books about WWII and the Holocaust because there are so many of them and they feel that after awhile, it's just repeating the same story over and over again, only with different names and locations. But this book is rather unique in the genre, in that there isn't one single scene in a death train, death march, ghetto, camp, not even the front lines. It's told by an unnamed young boy, only six years old when the Nazis invade his native Poland, who is shuttled from caretaker to caretaker. We don't even know if he's Jewish, a Gypsy, or neither. From hostile village to hostile village he goes, usually because he's been chased out by either the villagers themselves or the often cruel people he's been staying with. He learns early on to survive by his wits, in a superstitious world gone even madder with war. As an innocent, he cannot understand what is truly going on all around him, so there is none of the inner emotional and psychological turmoil we often see in other books about this time period. He finally comes to discover that being nice, staying out of the way, even constantly praying, didn't help him one iota. When he witnesses the scene between Ewka, Makar, Quail, and the goat in the barn, he realises what it means to be in league with the Devil and what evil is. The boy now knows that being nice didn't get him anywhere, and the only people he's been around who got things accomplished were evil, so he decides he must become evil too, become like one of his oppressors in order to succeed. It's understandable, given that he can barely remember anything but evil and suffering. And already he's become so traumatised by all he's gone through that he has just shut down and become a mute, though of course he's far too young to realise the reasons why that happened to him. And when the war finally ends, he has become so used to being evil and on the run that he doesn't know how to adjust to a normal life again, one of the great tragedies of any war.

I don't know enough about the man to know whether or not Jerzy Kosinski was indeed guilty of plagiarism or lying about his life history, and if so, how much or how little, but that doesn't change the fact that this is a work of fiction, perhaps loosely based on his experiences as a young boy during the war. I'd see where critics get off had this been billed as a memoir, or a work of fiction said to be strongly based on his own life, but it remains a novel. If this is a fraud, then every fictional account of a historical event that really happened is a fraud too, as well as novels loosely based on something that may have happened in the author's own life. It's a powerful, moving, unforgettable book, whether it be fiction or partial autobiography.

Summary of The Painted Bird

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