Jerzy Kosinski

Average customer rating:

Wonderful, light read
quick short read
Being Here
Being there
If by Chance...

Being There
Jerzy Kosinski
Manufacturer: Grove Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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The Painted Bird (Kosinski, Jerzy)
Being There
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Channels of Desire: Mass Images and the Shaping of American Consciousness

ASIN: 0802136346

Book Description

A modern classic now available from Grove Press, Being There is one of the most popular and significant works from a writer of international stature. It is the story of Chauncey Gardiner - Chance, an enigmatic but distinguished man who emerges from nowhere to become an heir to the throne of a Wall Street tycoon, a presidential policy adviser, and a media icon. Truly "a man without qualities," Chance's straightforward responses to popular concerns are heralded as visionary. But though everyone is quoting him, no one is sure what he's really saying. And filling in the blanks in his background proves impossible. Being There is a brilliantly satiric look at the unreality of American media culture that is, if anything, more trenchant now than ever.

Customer Reviews:

Wonderful, light read.......2007-01-16

Simply a wonderful book b/c it brings you into the mind of a simple, friendly person who brings happiness to all around him. Don't watch the movie.

quick short read.......2006-07-14

Our book discussion group read this book and we all felt that it a pretty good story. The ending was disappointing but after discussing further, was appropriate. This is a quick read book and can be read in about 4-5 hours.

Being Here.......2006-05-06

After watching the film several times over the years -- but before reading the book -- I concluded that Being There was a prime candidate for one of the rare instances in which the cinematic version of a story was superior to the literature it was based on. The story is so simple and so much of it is communicated by expressions, gestures, and tone of voice that it seemed unlikely that the written word would be up to the task.

Instead, finally reading this thin but ambitious effort showed me again that good writing trumps good cinema almost every time.

To be sure, the film is good cinema. And the talented duo of Peter Sellers and Shirley McLean are so convincing in their silver screen roles that it is hard to imagine the characters they portray looking and sounding any different than the way they were played in the film (my effort to disassociate them from the story wasn't helped by the fact that my edition of the book has Mr. Sellers larger than life on its cover).

Yet the book takes the story to another level. Chance, the main character, is still a fortunate simpleton, But in the book author Jerzy Kosinski can reveal what is happening in his head, the swirling and disconcerting mystery that even the most obvious events seem to someone like him. These passages add an unexpected depth and darkness to the story, which is without most of the comic relief so prominent in the film.

The end result is a book that isn't the wry comedy with precision timing I expected after knowing the film so well but rather a biting and trenchant satire about the culture of modern media, politics, and business, and of the gullible nature of a people far too eager to follow anyone they think may be willing to lead.

Being there.......2005-12-31

In keeping with a postmodern perspective, I am willing to entertain multiple interpretations of this story. But I cannot help but think that despite the many potential understandings about this work, there is a most important lesson to be learned.

How did a simple-minded gardener--"dumb as a jackass" according to his maid Louise--become Chauncey Gardiner? The heir to a billionaire's fortune. A media guru. An advisor to the president of the United States. A potential presidential candidate himself. Maybe even a prophet. Was there something innately great about Chauncey? Maybe. But probably not. Being there begs the question, "Being where?"

Being there is about three things: location, location--and location! Chauncey Gardiner, upon getting hit by the Rand's car, was in the right place at the right time. But the lesson goes beyond a mere bump on the leg by a billionaire's fender. Chauncey Gardiner's greatness lied not in the man but, rather, in the relationships of people who chose to define him as great. Simply put, Chauncey Gardiner was a socially constructed reality.

If by Chance..........2005-11-13

Jerzy Kosinski has written a delightful modern parable. Each actor in this allegorical tale sees Chance as a wise and insightful sage. But Chance, dubbed Chauncey Gardiner, is an illiterate gardener whose only contact with the outside world before being caught up in high finance, politics, and diplomacy was his garden and his television watching habit. He doesn't try to hide his past as he adapts as best he can to his new environment. His aphorisms taken from his experiences in the garden are interpreted by his listeners as great sooth. Because he has no discoverable past he is believed to be an operative some powerful organization in the eyes of the beholders.
This is a story to enjoy and give some thought to.

Average customer rating:

A Hoax, but does that matter?
A Tour de Torture
Most Stunning Novel
Perverted
The ignorance of people in times of war

The Painted Bird (Kosinski, Jerzy)
Jerzy Kosinski
Manufacturer: Grove Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Similar Items:

Being There
Blind Date (Kosinski, Jerzy)
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Cockpit (Kosinski, Jerzy)

ASIN: 080213422X

Amazon.com

Many writers have portrayed the cruelty people inflict upon each other in the name of war or ideology or garden-variety hate, but few books will surpass Kosinski's first novel, The Painted Bird, for the sheer creepiness in its savagery. The story follows an abandoned young boy who wanders alone through the frozen bogs and broken towns of Eastern Europe during and after World War II, trying to survive. His experiences and actions occur at and beyond the limits of what might be called humanity, but Kosinski never averts his eyes, nor allows us to.

Customer Reviews:

A Hoax, but does that matter?.......2007-04-30

From the "cut-rate Elie Wiesel", Kosinski's own description of himself. Does it matter that this is a hoax manufactured from whole cloth? Apparently not. Feeds existing prejudices and so is welcomed as a revelation. Here's to Mr. Holocaust, Jr., the Sr. title having been appropriated by that lachrymose pseudo-saint Mr. Weisel.

History is replete with examples of man's inhumanity to man. Claims of this book being "semi-autobiographical" have been shown to be entirely false. Kosinski is just another of the feeders-at-the-trough of the Holocaust Industry.

The truth is quite horrible enough. Why then the hoaxes like the book at hand and "Fragments"?

See The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, New Edition for a critical and honest evaluation of the duplicity embodied by this and similar books seeking to exploit for personal financial and political advantage. Those who think this book is within the bounds of decency may wish to seek out that now out-of-print other hoax "Fragments".

A Tour de Torture.......2007-03-29

I read Kosinski's masterpiece on the recommendation of someone who was reviewing Beah's "A Long Way Gone"--remarkable similarities between the two though one is fiction and the other memoir, one takes place in Europe WWII and the other a civil war in Sierra Leone. In this particular edition (1976), Kosinski added a fine afterward which is a must read. Though fiction, this work is fact-based. Also, though Kosinski never names the country of his setting, one can guess it must be Poland. Apparently, the Polish government recognized it also since they banned the book in that country, citing it as a serious insult to the humanity of the Polish peasant society. After reading the afterward and the story, I can only conclude if the shoe fits...

Still, there were a few things I thought to be unrealistic. Kosinski's ten-year-old protagonist is made to undergo some unspeakable tortures, tortures that would have reduced an ordinary kid to a psychological bowl of mush. Yet somehow this kid always pulls through, packing up his comet only at the last minute and heading into the Polish hinterland to rough it until he can hook up with his next tormentor. It got so bad that I began to look for parallels with Dante's Inferno. It seemed that each new torture was worse than the last, designed to atone for some imaginary sin that this innocent boy had committed. Dante borrowed from Greek mythology to formulate his keepers of hell--I wonder where Kosinski drafted his?

The damage to the boy only became apparent at war's end when he was placed in an orphanage. There he found himself in a community of similar victims his own age. The war was over, the peasants were safely locked outside the city, yet the cruelty went on, and on, and on. The gang-rape scene of the teacher was particularly poignant. Somehow the protagonist regained his humanity--at least I believe that was what Kosinski signaled his reader when the boy regained his faculty--though I never was sure how. Maybe his message was that immersed in evil a good child can be made to mimic evil--if for no other reason than survival--but when that need becomes obsolete, eventually his true nature will reemerge.

--Ejner Fulsang, author of "A Knavish Piece of Work" Aarhus Publishing 2006

Most Stunning Novel.......2007-03-16

This is the most stunning novel I have read in recent memory.

Perverted.......2006-12-29

I'm sorry I wasted the money. I can see by the reviews you either love it or hate it. I'm not squeamish by nature, but this book is one continuous torture fest which not only targets human victims, but animals as well. Three quarter's way through, when I realized this indeed was the premise from beginning to end, I started skipping these parts (which got me to the last page quite quickly). I was bored and disgusted with the author. I believe he had a sick fetish and lived them out through these pages. In the end my eyeballs got six-pack abs from rollng around so much. This book is going on my "Do Not Lend" shelf as I value my friends and wouldn't consider them subjecting them to such gory nonsense.

The ignorance of people in times of war.......2006-12-28

This book has an extremely high cringe factor especially when you remember how old the protagonist is when he's experiencing all these awful things.It's mind-boggling how evil humans can be to each other and to children just because they look different.The ignorance is just staggering.It's amazing how these people's lives are governed by their superstitions and their beliefs in black magic.You really have to give the kid credit for his craftiness in getting out of certain situations like when he uses the teeth counting and hopes that it will kill the man who beats him relentlessly and tries killing him with his dog.Physically, not many people could withstand the constant traveling, lack of sleep, labor, and the mental anguish. It's also unbelievable that he put up with so many beatings just to have a warm place to sleep and whatever food they threw his way.This book made me think of Cold Mountain because there are so many similarities.Like all the fear, rape, substance abuse, lack of food, and anarchy that goes on in times of war. It really makes you appreciate life in the U.S.Most of us will never experience even a portion of what this boy went through. And he is introduced to sex by a woman who lives with her brother and father who the townsfolk think are strange and mixed up in some questionable antics with their goats.His worst nightmares come true when he see's the woman he's been intimate with engaged in bestiality.Conveniently,though, there's always a crack in the wall or floor where he's sees everything horrible that goes on around him.There is just so much random killing and violence.The only ones these townsfolk are afraid of are the rebel soldiers who converge on their small villages and proceed to rape,kill,pillage and take whatever food and supplies they want.You almost hope the Soviet soldier that the boy bonds with and goes on a revenge mission will kill the dog because of how cruel the dog was made to be to him.At the end the boy loses any conscience he started out with and his innocence which was viciously taken from him. And all because he had dark hair and eyes.

Average customer rating:

a dull recitation
Admit it: you're filthy, too
Steps to disappointment
Excellent
A review from the author of YEARS OF RAGE

Steps (Kosinski, Jerzy)
Jerzy Kosinski
Manufacturer: Grove Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Literary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

The Painted Bird (Kosinski, Jerzy)
Blind Date (Kosinski, Jerzy)
Cockpit (Kosinski, Jerzy)
The Devil Tree
Being There

ASIN: 0802135269

Book Description

A portrayal of men and women both aroused and desensitized by an environment that disdains the individual and seeks control over the imagination.

Customer Reviews:

a dull recitation .......2007-05-03

This unstructured novel filled with graphic violence and sex, for all its salacious material, does little to either titillate or instruct the reader with any moral or aesthetic lesson. Quite the opposite, Steps is wholly amoral. This would be fine, if the writing had some scintillating quality; if the characters were richly drawn; if the flow of the narrative was swift, effective, tense. But this novel has none of these things. It seems difficult to believe, based on Steps, the Kosinski was once the flavor of the month, and a National Book Award winner.

Admit it: you're filthy, too.......2005-11-25

Riveting, gripping, amazing. If art is, in part, the dance between artist and audience, then Steps is art in its highest form. I found myself dancing & reacting in ways I wish I hadn't; found myself physically aroused by portions of the text that I found intellectually / psychologically repugnant. That's a neat trick, Kosinski.

In spare prose, the author takes his breathless reader (think of how your oxygen intake changed while watching 'Panic Room') on a "depraved" journey into the mind / experiences of his protagonist. The scenes that are depicted would be described by a good buddy of mind as "filthy" -- and that they are. Bestiality, rape, exploitation, and beyond. What I found most intriguing about this text, from a historical / sociological / anthropological perspective is that it was written decades ago. Far from the busy streets of NYC where the tranny hos walk amongst us, far from the prevalent teenage-flesh-peddling of 2005. The fact that humans are humans are humans are animals, in all of our glorious base desires and yes, just plain filth, was the most satisfying revelation of all.

It is an excellent piece of art, and I can't believe I let it sit untouched on my bookshelf for six years after picking it up from a used bookstore in New Haven. This is one book I won't be selling used on Amazon.com; it's staying in my collection for at least four decades. WOW.

Steps to disappointment.......2005-09-06

A very adolescent work. Definitely not worth reading, despite the fact that Kosinsky had won an award for this book.

Excellent.......2005-08-13

Although "Steps" defiantly lacks a narrative thread, it is a rich little book that provokes and amuses. Highly readable, it has a force and sharpness of focus to it that is undeniable. The terse, detached vignettes build what you might call a unifying vibe, if not an altogether cohesive story. This book is not for everyone, but it's an interesting study of the loose novel form and of writing in general.

A review from the author of YEARS OF RAGE.......2005-03-31

Jerzy Kosinski did not write his books alone. His authorship has long since been discredited as fraudulent; all of the writings to which he gave his signature have been dismissed as the trickery of a con artist. Indeed, this very signature preempts any of "Kosinski's books" from being taken seriously. What Kosinski once fobbed off as his own creation is now surrounded by an embarrassed silence. One smirks bemusedly at these works as the artifacts of an interesting life.
What is one to make of the fact, then, that Steps, a novel that bears Kosinski's name and yet was not composed in his own language, is one of the most intensely powerful novels of the twentieth century?

The subject of Steps undergoes a continual metamorphosis throughout its pages. At the beginning of each of the forty-six episodes into which the book is divided, an "older" self is negated (not cancelled out entirely, but preserved in the memory of the work) and a "new" one forms and takes its place. Each self belongs to a "present" instant that is disconnected from the series of instants that precede it, each of which is itself displaced from history. If a unified authorial consciousness embraces each transformation, holding together the death and reformation of the subject in each instance, this can only be discerned in the articulation of the individual episodes. And if a link binds the episodes together (the "steps" of the title), it is the guiding thread of submission and domination, the only two forms of relationship of which the subject is capable. The author, Jerzy Kosinski was surely mistaken (or was otherwise disingenuous and willfully misleading) when he claimed in an interview that the book progresses from "the formed mind of the protagonist (in the beginning of the novel) when he sees himself as a unique manipulator of others, to the stage (at the novel's end) when he realizes that he is nothing but a composite of various steps of culture." To speak of a "progression" in any strict sense would be inaccurate. It is the case that the narrator manipulates a young girl who is dazzled by the narrator's credit cards at the very beginning, but there are no traces of a gradual progression from the mind of a sovereign subject who deploys a dominant culture for his own purposes to one who recognizes his subjection to that culture. On many occasions throughout the work long before its denouement, he is a plaything given over to powers that infinitely surpass his own, exposed to the whims of the uncontrollable, without a barrier to shield him from the forces that invade him.

The seductiveness of Steps resides in its power to lead the reader astray, away from the world to which s/he has grown accustomed and into a fictional space from which there is no easy escape. However oppressive its horror becomes, it is difficult to tear one's eyes from this book. Literary analysis may engage with the book's meaning, but will necessarily fail to adequate the spell that it casts over the reader. Each "step" is macabre and unsettling in its violence. In one episode, the subject is a farm hand at the mercy of peasants who spit on him for their amusement [II, 2]. He seeks revenge by inserting discarded fishhooks into morsels of bread, which he feeds to the children of those who torture him. The only way to invert the existing hierarchy, he seems to feel, is to become an oppressor oneself: oppression generates oppression in the way that fire generates fire. A group of peasants, in another "step," gapes at a performance in which a young girl is violated by an animal [I, 4]. It is uncertain, the narrator tells us dryly, whether her screams indicate that she is actually suffering or whether she is merely playing to the audience. The extent to which the girl is a victim or a manipulator remains undetermined. In another episode, a nurse passively endures the amorous advances of the narrator, now a photographer, who longs for sexual contact with her in order to distinguish himself as much as possible from the seemingly non-human inmates of a senior citizen's home whom he has been photographing [III, 1]. When the narrator enters uninvited into the nurse's apartment, he finds her coupling with a simian creature who, ambiguously, is later described as "human." The narrator, in another episode, is an office worker whose lover is unaware that she is his lover [V, 5]. The narrator plots with a friend to take possession of her. The woman submits entirely to the friend's will and agrees to allow herself to be possessed by a stranger while blindfolded. Now the narrator can dispose of her sightless body as he wishes: a relationship that is emblematic of all of the relationships portrayed in Steps. Despite her complete availability, his desire remains frustrated. Nothing about her is concealed, but her nudity is itself a form of concealment. At another moment, narrator is on a jury [V 3]. The defendant explains his deed in the most ordinary terms without ever attempting to justify his behavior. A fictive identification is afforded between the members of the jury and the "executioner": they visualize themselves in the act of killing, but cannot project themselves into the mind of the victim who is in the act of being killed. The agony of the victim is lost to vision altogether. The narrator, in another episode, becomes the powerless spectator of his girlfriend's rape [III, 3]. Afterward, their relationship changes. He can now only represent her to himself as one who has been violated and who is worthy of violation: her rape comes to define her. He visualizes her as a kind of crustacean or mollusk emerging from her shell. The conclusion of the episode follows an implacable logic: under false pretenses, the narrator offers his girlfriend to the rowdy guests at a party, who proceed to have their way with her. Her pearl necklace, a gift from the narrator, scatters to the floor like so many iridescent seeds (a somberly beautiful passage that gives the lie to Kosinski's own self-interpretive remark that Steps eschews figurative language). The architect of an orchestrated violation, the narrator departs without witnessing the inescapable result of his designs. Such a summary can only imperfectly approximate the grotesque horror of this book.

One may wonder whether there is a point to such an uninterrupted current of phantasmagoric images. The reader may be invited to take delight in the extremity of its descriptions: such would nurture one's suspicion that Steps is a purely nihilistic work. What we find in each instance is a relationship between one who terrorizes and oppresses or who sympathizes with terror and oppression (this is often, but not always, the narrator) and one who surrenders, voluntarily or otherwise, to the will of the oppressor. By describing such scenes of exploitation and persecution in a neutral manner, the book seems to offer no moral transcendence. Such an interpretation, however, would ignore the book's moral center.

The book's ethical dimension first becomes apparent in an italicized transitional episode in which the protagonist tells his lover of an architect who designed plans for a concentration camp, the main purpose of which, the narrator explains, was "hygiene" [IV, 1]. Genocide was for those responsible indistinguishable from the extermination of vermin: "Rats have to be removed. We exterminate them, but this has nothing to do with our attitudes toward cats, dogs, or any other animal. Rats aren't murdered-we get rid of them; or, to use a better word, they are eliminated; this act of elimination is empty of all meaning." This passage in particular casts light on the "theme" of dehumanization that runs pervasively throughout the book. In Steps, the other person is reduced to the status of a thing. To make of the other human being a thing: such is sadism. Only by representing those to be murdered as vermin (as things to be exterminated) is mass murder possible. It is no accident, from this perspective, that the narrator imagines himself felling trees when he obeys an order to slit his victim's throat toward the end of the book: it is the only way that he can suppress the nausea that wells up within him [VIII, 3]. Each human being is irreplaceable, and the death of a person is, therefore, an irrecoverable loss. By forgetting this, by turning the other human being into a mere object, one is able to dutifully "obey orders" to kill without the intrusion of moral consciousness. Steps aims at disgusting the reader by showing him/her the obscene consequences of objectification. From this perspective, Steps is a profoundly moral book.

The center of Steps may serve as a counter-balance to the parade of scenes of horror and degradation that constitute it. However, this center does not govern the totality of its operations. A tonality of evil informs these poisonous pages; in terms of its sheer cruelty, the work could only be compared to the writings of Lautréamont and Sade. Although one can point to its moral character from the passages cited above, the book could also be determined as a willfully perverse affirmation of simulation, falsehood, and metamorphosis that suspends the dimension of the ethical altogether. The subject ceaselessly yearns to exteriorize himself, to become part of an exterior space in which he would become entirely other-than-himself. It is a space in which he would be unencumbered by all forms of ethical responsibility: "If I could become one of them, if I could only part with my language, my manner, my belongings" [VII, 1].

Joseph Suglia, the author of YEARS OF RAGE, the novel inspired by the Columbine High Massacre.

Average customer rating:

Dangerous beautiful, descraceful and Darling.
Kosinski attacks America...again.
Beautiful-Ugly
Kosinski reveals Blind Dates with our destiny
"Blind Date" J. Kosinski

Blind Date (Kosinski, Jerzy)
Jerzy Kosinski
Manufacturer: Grove Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

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Similar Items:

The Painted Bird (Kosinski, Jerzy)
Steps (Kosinski, Jerzy)
Cockpit (Kosinski, Jerzy)
Passion Play (Kosinski, Jerzy)
The Devil Tree

ASIN: 0802135544

Customer Reviews:

Dangerous beautiful, descraceful and Darling........2003-06-28

Read Blind Date by Jerzy N. Kosinski
The only the real life of Kosinski is as strange as his fiction.
And his fiction is strange yet utterly plausible in the mind of the reader.

I liked it, the main character is capable of quite morally good things as well as dark dangerous things. Some is very true the two most unlikely stories in the book actually. Kosinski writes about his main character missing the plane to LA and all his friends were killed in a mass murder, Kosinski was supposed to go to Roman Polanski's house but lost his luggage and was delayed a day just causing him to miss arriving the night of the Charles Mansion Helter Skelter murders. The second story is about his main character marring a rich heiress for love only to see her die. This actual happened to the Kosinski. His mixture of pure fiction with the Autobiographical is mesmerizing. Leventur his main character is a Russian émigré who has many international adventures. He is a womanizer, a killer, a hero victim, avernger and villian. The plot bounces around the world from the opressed world of the Soviet Union to the extra
grandure and freedom of america. I also loved Being There.

Kosinski attacks America...again........2000-12-17

"Blind Date," by Jerzy Kosinski, is coca-cola for the mind. You sip a little at a time and ponder the after-taste. All in all, the book serves its purpose, which is to involve the reader with quick flashes of whit and brutal irony. But my personal opinion is that the chapters repeat themselves in their psydo-philosophical/psychological "victim"/"avenger" theme. Thus, "Blind Date" quickly grows predictable, even a litte lame, and fails as a collective-whole. This is a book that is quickly read and quickly forgotten, but it's fun, if you don't take it too seriously, which you shouldn't.

Beautiful-Ugly.......2000-05-19

Sex, terrorism, incest, mass murder, betrayal, rape, prostitution. Somehow, Kosinski is able to show us the worst aspects of humanity and get us to completely accept them, even embrace them. The story is episodic. Through those episodes, Kosinski shows us something very like real life. It's more exciting than many people's lives, but there's no grand plan, no overreaching narrative arc. To paraphrase the Simpsons, it's just a bunch of stuff that happened, but it certainly was a very interesting read.

Kosinski reveals Blind Dates with our destiny.......2000-04-07

Depicted in non-linear time frames, Kosinski dramatically succeeds in presenting the tumultuous life of one man, George Leventer. Associating with the powerful, beautiful, and lonely people around the world, Kosinski's character captures that elusive state of accepting the paradox of being powerful but lonely, requiring love but displaying violence, and growing old but questioning fate. His narrative is sharp and cinematic in structure and tone. Erotica is insightfully tamed and given in precise portions. I became entralled in dissecting the characters intentions as much as their decisions and actions. A superb study in pychological drama and state of consciousness. Please read it and THINK about what it has to say.

"Blind Date" J. Kosinski.......2000-04-06

I have just started to read this book, but it looks very interesting and spicy. I really enjoy it and I would recommended to everyone who likes Kosinski's books.

Average customer rating:

A Delightful Read
a fragmented look at a rich, spoiled, and wasted young man..
YOU PROBABLY HAVE TO BE A FAN
PATHWAY TO ANARCHY
Nothing is Perfect

The Devil Tree
Jerzy Kosinski
Manufacturer: Grove Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Classics | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Literary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Blind Date (Kosinski, Jerzy)
Pinball (Kosinski, Jerzy)
The Painted Bird (Kosinski, Jerzy)
Steps (Kosinski, Jerzy)
Cockpit (Kosinski, Jerzy)

ASIN: 0802139655

Book Description

A searing novel from a writer of international stature, The Devil Tree is a tale that combines the existential emptiness of Camus's The Stranger with the universe of international playboys, violence, and murder of Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley. Jonathan Whalen's life has been determined from the start by the immense fortune of his father, a steel tycoon. Whalen's childlike delight in power and status mask a greater need, a desire to feel life intensely, through drugs, violence, sex, and attempts at meaningful connection with other people -- whether lovers or the memory of his dead parents. But the physical is all that feels real to him, and as he embarks on a journey to Africa with his godparents, Whalen's embrace of amoral thrill accelerates toward ultimate fulfillment.

Customer Reviews:

A Delightful Read.......2006-08-08

The format is unusual having no chapters but rather a series of short vignetts in first and third person voices with no set sequence as to their inclusion into the framework of the story. At first I found this style to be somewhat off putting but long before the end of the work I warmed to this method of story telling. Altogether Kosinski shows us his ability to engage the reader in what turns out to be a delightful read.

a fragmented look at a rich, spoiled, and wasted young man.........2004-11-10

'The Devil Tree' is a disappointing, messy read about a young man in the early 1970s trying to piece together his life after the deaths of his mega-wealthy industrialist parents. He wanders through the drug stage, the meaningless sex stage, and forever has bouts of "soul searching". But unfortunately this reader found him to be so unappealing that I gradually became disinterested in him altogether. The rather choppy literary style of Kosinski, an unfortunate departure from his terrific 'Being There', only made matters worse.

Bottom line: a rather burdensome and unenjoyable read.

YOU PROBABLY HAVE TO BE A FAN.......2004-09-17

This is pretty classic Kosinski, not his best, but still all Kosinski. I first read this one in 1978. I thought at the time that this was a bit of literary experimentation, and still feel as such. I enjoyed it, but then I am a fan of this particular author. I am not sure if younger folks, i.e. those who did not live the 60s and 70s could get the proper feel of this work, but perhaps I a wrong here. Anyway, if for no other reason, it should be read. It is a good bit of literature and we could all probably learn something from it.

PATHWAY TO ANARCHY.......2004-08-25

In Kosinski's DEVIL TREE the reader follows the life of Jonathan Whalen, looking for a clue to where this tale is headed. But this character study leads nowhere. It is the study of an anarchistic mind.

The tale has no chapters, no parts, no order, which is fine except that it also lacks any direction. The tale consisted of snippets possessing no rhyme nor reason. Bits of dreams were interlaced with grim anecdotes that the reader could only hope to be fictional. Jonathan was a terribly over-cerebral man, not unlike Kosinski himself. Jonathan was on a search to understand the substance of his past. He sought total control of his emotions but remained forever detached from these emotions. He even tried to control his periods of depression and sickness. Attending an encounter group was useless to him for all he could see , by himself & others, was role playing and dishonesty.

Jonathan could suck no nourishment from life. His slant on life was, 'most people are simply searching for an activity to label their existence.' Reared under the shadow of his fabulously rich father, who he only sought to appease, this same motive colored any relationship he tried with a woman. Never able to settle for being one person, he became an "in-between-man." He could stay neither hostile nor sympathetic toward anyone. Jonathan declared, "...living is an arbitrary matter and I have every right to renounce it." Happily, there was only one Kosinski!

Nothing is Perfect.......2000-12-23

It seemed to me at the time I read it, that is was a journey into something, maybe depravity? And then I loaned it to someone else and while they had it I realized what that journey was in reference to me. ( all things obviously being subject to personal view based on experience and genetics ) It was about growing backwards, upside down, the definition of the tree itself. In the beginning, Whalen had the answers, he started as a complete person, and degenerated, grew backwards, almost as if he had been born a man and moved backwards into childhood confusion. He was continually losing himself, trying to lose himself. So perhaps it says that man is meant to be lost? to stay forever in childhood? he is meant to know only those things he is born with? Simplicity.

Average customer rating:

Being There
Jerzy Kosinski
Manufacturer: Bantam
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Mass Market Paperback

Average customer rating:

The Painted Bird
Jerzy Kosinski
Manufacturer: Pocket Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Product Description

PB No. 77176. Approx. 4 1/8" x 7".

Average customer rating:

Pulp Fiction...is actually much much better.
Poor
PINBALLED!
A Truly Complex Novel of Cultural Conflict
No thanks.

Pinball (Kosinski, Jerzy)
Jerzy Kosinski
Manufacturer: Grove Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Literary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

The Devil Tree
Blind Date (Kosinski, Jerzy)
Cockpit (Kosinski, Jerzy)
The Painted Bird (Kosinski, Jerzy)
Passion Play (Kosinski, Jerzy)

ASIN: 0802134823

Customer Reviews:

Pulp Fiction...is actually much much better........2005-12-21

This book demontrates what many people claim to be true, that the polish socialite had the most famous of his books, the painted bird, ghost written for him, kinda of easy when you are married to the number one steel heiress in the u.s. Of course it was later proven for a fact, and the polish socialite admitted to it, that he never witnessed almost anything of what the painted bird was about...Classy.

But this is a review about this, "trashy" as another reviewer pointed out, book which i had the displeasure of reading, but fortunately got it off for fifty cents in a used book store. I wasn't so much irritated but Kosinski being completely off when it comes to the rock scene, but with his technique in writting which is, what can i say, juvenille, no subtlety, no plot development (seems he's making up the plot as he goes along), the characters crudely "speak" the background action...jesus, what a mess...ok, he, mostly, does not write, but doesn't he read?

Makes bells read like dostoyevsky.

Poor.......2005-08-13

A cartoonish and predictable novel that will especially disappoint fans of Kosinski's purer, more original efforts.

PINBALLED!.......2004-09-06

Several reviewers, showing no reverence, appear not to have heard that Jerzy took his own life some years ago. PINBALL may have been Jerzy's best effort. He inserts layer after layer of the pinball metaphor, a ball bounced hither and fro, mostly by chance. He compares the unexpected motion of a pinball to the music of his hero, Domostroy. These elements of chance plague all his characters. The unexpected, unforeseen, unpredictable falling of the pinball is a metaphor for the sudden cessation of life.

The shadow of death permeates this story. The character Goddard is panicked by the sudden death of a girl he picked up by chance. To him it was as if a phonograph had suddenly been unplugged. The music, ever a metaphor for life, just stopped. What meaning can there be in a life so casually turned off? This anticipation of death was much worse than death itself. Kosinski saw the grim reaper as the ultimate controller of all life.

The rise and fall of Domostroy's career in music was another layer of the pinball metaphor. The search for the composer's inspiration always led to female embedded sex. All love was unrequited. In fact, music itself was presented as the joining of male and female notes. The characters were all presented as puppets whose strings were being pulled by the puppeteer called Music.

Kosinski used the two characters, Domostroy and Goddard, to show the toll that celebrity had inflicted on his own life. The question is, can an artist separate himself from his works once he chooses to exhibit them? Goddard had hoped to avoid the fate of John Lennon by constructing a dream world where he remained anonymous. While Domostroy chose to live in a cell of his own making to avoid the consequences of his own failed music and his own pinballed life.

A Truly Complex Novel of Cultural Conflict.......2003-08-29

It is really too bad that some reviewers missed so much of what was going on in this novel. It is NOT about rock and roll. It
IS about the conflict between the disposable pop culture which
is America's primary export to the world and the "high" culture
of the old world which is aimed primarily at the intellectual elite. It is also about the areas in which these two cultures
cross, as well as clash.
Cultural conflict abounds everywhere in this novel. Consider
that Domostroy, the classical composer who is one main character here was the name of a marriage manual formerly given to brides
in the Russian Orthodox Church. The "Domostroy" described a
wife's duties to her husband, and the punishments she could expect from him if she failed in her wifely duties. Consider that Andrea, Domostroy's lover, is the very model of an '80's
American feminist, and you begin to understand some of what is going on here symbolicly. The mysterious Godard character can
be seen as an analog for God, film-maker Jean-Luc Godard, as well as former Columbia Records executive Godard Lieberson, also
a classical composer. The introduction of the Claudia character,
a young piano virtuoso whose specialty is Chopin, brings suggestions of the sado-masochistic aspects of the love affair of Chopin with George Sand to bear on the relationship between
Domostroy and Andrea.
Obviously, most Americans DO NOT talk like the characters in this novel. They lack the education. This is not so much a story, as a novel of ideas, and those ideas are as bold and
fascinating as their interplay is complex and bewildering.
Is the entire novel an exercise in cultural snobbism? Read it
and decide for yourself.

No thanks........2002-12-28

Pinball starts off promising enough but quickly descends into a boring, two-dimensional mess. Kosinski does little to make his characters seem sympathetic or interesting, it isn't long before you stop caring what happens to this pack of stiffs. The dialog is improbable, Kosinski seems to have a habit of delivering exposition through his characters' mouths, making them speak in bizarre, overly academic patterns and delivering background knowledge to the reader with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. The story only gets resolved through impossible coincidences and characters making the wildest, strangest jumps to conclusions which conveniently happen to be correct. Also helping to shatter Kosinski's illusion is his lack of understanding of rock music and the dynamics of the personalities around it. (A performer in the beauty- and personality-based rock culture manages to dominate the charts and even have dance clubs dedicated to his music without ever playing live, showing his face in public or even identifying himself to his record label? A punk rock star who becomes reviled by his former fans for his escapades with sex and drugs? Has Kosinski ever heard of Sid Vicious, Iggy Pop or Lou Reed?) In short, I've read better stories on the back of breakfast cereal boxes. The imaginary world of Pinball is shallow and unconvincing and is best skipped.

Average customer rating:

The Painted Bird
Jerzy Kosinski
Manufacturer: Pocket Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Mass Market Paperback

Average customer rating:

interesting little stories, in the long going nowhere
Masterful Use of First Person Unsympathetic Narrator
What was the point?
OK
GROTESQUE SALAD

Cockpit (Kosinski, Jerzy)
Jerzy Kosinski
Manufacturer: Grove Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

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Pinball (Kosinski, Jerzy)
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ASIN: 0802135684

Customer Reviews:

interesting little stories, in the long going nowhere.......2007-05-19

Each little scene is often interesting but if you're waiting and hoping that the whole thing comes together and makes some kind of sense, you'll be waiting a long time. For Kosinski, there are better choices...

Masterful Use of First Person Unsympathetic Narrator.......2006-09-03

I've used the opening of this darkly prophetic novel--told from the POV of a social terrorist interested only in exploring the depths of human evil like Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment--in countless workshops and seminars to illustrate that your protagonist's "sympathetic" nature doesn't mean we LIKE him. 'Sympathetic' in its Greek root suggests that we can "relate to," or "suffer with," a character and from the haunting opening lines that's exactly what causes us to turn the pages--a mixture of horror and our own voyeuristic tendencies.

What was the point?.......2006-02-04

As I read the book I kept hoping that at some point there would be a moment of enlightenment. That there would be a place where things fell together and started to make sense. Where I'd feel like all these snippets of a guy continuously bragging about his life would have greater purpose that would make me forgive the author's pure drive to shock the reader. Unfortunately this never occurred and at the end I found myself convinced that my time would have been better spent doing or reading just about anything.

OK.......2005-07-10

Place a razor blade in your mouth and hold it there for a few hours. Shift it around carefully, mindful of its cool threat to your tender flesh. This is the experience of reading "Cockpit," which tempts and seduces, but ultimately mangles your sense of peace. Much like his earlier "Steps," the book turns on what the desperate (or the simply sick) resort to when there is little to lose. Although I became sick to my stomach at some of the violence portrayed here, the book is worthwhile - even quite interesting - at times. Not for the faint of heart.

GROTESQUE SALAD.......2004-08-30

In COCKPIT, Kosinski presents the reader with a caricature of a hero. This anti-hero intensified his sadistic, bad seed behavior as the pages were turned. The reader must be hungry for a grotesque salad. Why not scrape off some raw flesh from the reader's bones? This is sure to wet their appetite. Throw in some good old fashioned animal torture. Toss in scenes where this caricature hero pays derelicts to gang rape a woman, bound and gagged. Let him loose in a supermarket to squirt syringes full of poison into packages. Give the hero inexhaustible wealth and let him play a dozen nasty, repulsive games with his money hungry, vegie-victims.

Here is a hero character who was obsessed with manipulating and controlling even casual acquaintances. Why? Because he had no children, no family, no relatives, obvious justifications. Life to this hero became a game to satisfy his blooming impotence. He used himself as bait in traps that only he knew were being placed. This anarchist, naturally, had to make up the rules of the game as he went along.

The reader may have at least hoped for some finality to this charade of realistic cruelty. In the final pages the hero became trapped in a broken elevator that would forever run up and down, up and down. This would have offered a hellish, no exit ending, but alas, this was not allowed to occur.

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