The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski (1995-08-09)

The sheer savagery and good-storytelling of this tale makes it hard to put down, as long as you operate under the notion that it is real and autobiographical. What an outrage to learn that it is not true at all but pure sick fantasy -- he actually spent the war under the protection of a kind Catholic family, and allegedly even had a servant. What a hideous soul he must have, to conjure up such slanders against the Catholic country folk of Poland, the very people who saved his life. Bestiality, child rape, child torture, gouging people's eyes out, whipping and hanging children, torturing and killing animals, child on child murder, and a plethora of savage rapes of women. The unrelenting nihilism doesn't ring true, even while reading it. It's just over the top. So why then? I think the answer lies at the finish, when the little boy becomes a good communist, rejects his parents, praises Joseph Stalin, and justifies genocide against non-believers as necessary to the progress of humanity. I conclude the book was written only as anti-Christian, anti-family propaganda. And one definitely feels throughout that Kosinski sexually enjoyed all his sick violence and especially the brutal rapes. He must be the sickest of the sick, equal to a Tarantino, projecting out his massive inner disturbance. Since he didn't have command of English at the time he "wrote" this, he's obviously on the payroll.

Brothers Grimm meet Soviet novelist. This tale of a childhood adventure has dainty fable-like highlights intermingled with horrific accounts of the savagery of war.

Like Grimm, this tale is not light on death. People are killed the old fashioned way: axes, knives and bludgeoning. Throughout this book, you occasionally have to wince as Kosinski describes such events with incredible detail.

And, the senselessness of many of the deaths grow wider as the book proceeds. Single murders in the early chapter evolve to mass murders in the last chapters. Some of the later murderous events include: bandit raids of villages before the Soviet Reds take over, train wrecks for revenge of a beating and the war's blowing away of villages.

This story revolves around the orphaned protagonist (from ages 6 to 12) who wanders during the horrors of World War II. He witnesses a grotesque overdose of human indecency arising within the Russian citizenry. Just after entering one town, the boy is forced to move to another. Each foster home is a worse nightmare than the prior. One foster parent has children commit incest upon one another. Another has the child hang on hooks all day. Another conceives different ways to beat the child.

By the end, the 12-year old child is a young man with little concern of others' emotions or feelings. Like Cormac McCarthy's protagonist in "Blood Meridian" - he is child transformed into the devil incarnate. Adults tarnish a child's innocence in life. No one but the adults can be held accountable for the child's demise.

But, unlike McCarthy, Kosinski is optimistic. Maybe his personal survival and revival from Holocaust events lead the author to allow the young man to survive his purgatory called childhood. That is good news.

Written in a choppy fashion, similar to a journal kept by a scientist, the reading is stilted and constrained. But, after acclimating to this unique style of writing, it moves well and such writing style accomplishes giving the book a fictional feel to events which probably are oh-too-nonfictional. I believe the horrors are derived more from memories than from literary license.

To those with a weak stomach, stay away from this book. For those who like Grimm, or would like Grimm on steroids, this is your book. And, for those interested in Russian literature or history, this is a must read.

The Painted Bird offers a frightening picture of Eastern European culture, especially during the war years. However, its structure, very similar to that of pornography, and its tendency toward the cinemascopically maudlin, makes me doubt its mimetic veracity, at least to some degree. Like pornography, wherein man walks into a room and then has a series of increasingly unusual adventures, adventures that somehow become less titillating as they break more and more taboos, Kozinski's main character's experiences grow both less interesting and less convincing as they become more horrifying and inhuman. Also, akin to pornography, the 'hero' is rescued at last, deus ex machina, by a ringing phone, a beeper, a car in the driveway. Man exits room. The end. It's not really a plot, and the character is not really a character.
Kosinski has some striking lines, and the book is educational in a perverse way, but it is too transparent structurally to be called good literature.
When I read it had been banned for many years in the Soviet Union, I was indignant, but now I've read the book itself, I think by banning it they gave it far more attention than it deserves.

Not for the faint of heart or stomach. Kozinski's tale of a young boy's wanderings through backwater Eastern Europe during WWII is a painstakingly beautiful foray into the intricacies of horror. And I mean real horror. I thank the Gods above that no one has made a movie of this one. If it were, and I went, which I might not, I would probably have my eyes closed for half of it. The book is really about how low the human race can sink. And folks, it's pretty damn low. There are no heroes and no excuses here. The technique of having the whole thing told, quite believably, from the point of view of a child reinforces the growing sense throughout the book of the futility, the self-perpetualting void, of violence. I would touch on scenes of note, but I had egg salad for lunch, and I'm feeling a little queasy just thinking about it. Actually, more than making me feel queasy, reading it and thinking about The Painted Bird make me want to weep. I dunno, I can't think of anyone I would reccommend this book to, but I'm glad it exists.

`The Painted Bird' was first published by Jerzy Kosiñski in 1965, and revised in 1976. It is a fictional account of the personal experiences of a boy aged six who could be Jewish or might be a Gypsy taking refuge in Eastern Europe during World War II. It is a fictional account filled with hate for Polish peasantry and packed with excruciating, horrifying detail of rape, murder, bestiality and torture.

'The Painted Bird' depicts a journey through a very brutal and brutalising hell. There are no safe places, really, for this boy. He may have escaped with his life but he can never escape his experiences.

There are good reasons to not like this book: it is not, as has been thought, an autobiographical account of Kosiñski's own experiences. Additionally it relies on the proximity of the Holocaust to intensify its own horror; it demonises Polish peasantry as both cruel and backward; and it wallows in violence. But for all of that, it has its own haunting power.

I've first read this novel at least 20 years ago and recently revisited it. I do not like the graphic, seemingly unending violence. The point is made and reiterated: man's inhumanity to man takes many forms and vulnerability is often relative rather than absolute. Did Kosiñski really regard the world as being beyond redemption? Is that the question he was posing in this novel? Is that why he committed suicide in 1991? Did he write this novel to give voice to his own despair as a consequence of the events of World War II? For me this novel raises far more questions than it answers. And some of those questions about the author and his intent colour the way I read this novel. I cannot `hate' it: it is far too well written for that. I cannot `love' it: it is far too ugly and there are far too many questions unanswered. Instead, I `like' it in an uneasy sort of way because it makes me wonder about the world.

I won't need to read it again.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

There are few books that have changed my worldview and indelibly inscribed my mind with images that will last as long as I do. Jerzy Kosinki's The Painted Bird is one of the few. Until I read The Painted Bird I was convinced that Cormac McCarthy, especially in his novel Blood Meridian, was far better than any other writer of fiction at showing us that human experience could always become more painful, terrifying, and brutally ugly than anything that had gone before. McCarthy did this, moreover, with a prose style that was a product of a mastery of English so complete and innovative that it read like a distinctively superior form of language. The Painted Bird, however, surpasses Blood Meridian with regard to both its intensely horrific metaphors and the simple but richly detailed elegance of its prose style.

I can't be sure that Jerzy Kosinski wanted to show us that life on earth, as he had known it, was inexpressibly hellish and could always become more painful and terrifying, but that is what he did. Much of his account of everyday events is embedded in deeply disturbing images, gross corruptions of commonplace practices that are almost too alarming to read. Once read, moreover, they are never forgotten. In Kosinski's rendering, the good, kind, peaceful, and warmly communal are routinely and sickeningly crowded out by mundane cruelty and indifference, suspicion and brutality, xenophobia and superstition, insularity and vengeance ,,, the list of sources of suffering might as well be endless.

With crushing irony, moreover, it's evident throughout The Painted Bird that the world is not inherently brutal and brutalizing or inherently anything else. Even when the physical conditions of existence are impoverished and harsh, human beings, unselfconsciously and guided by cultural norms and values, filtered and refined from their fore-bearers, create the circumstances of life as we live it.

Cruelty and socially engendered suffering have many proximate causes. They include misguided religious rules and practices, born and developed over centuries in a miserably failed effort to make sense of a senseless world. Elaborate patterns of superstition aimed at warding off the innumerable forces of evil and rooted in the same forlorn search for meaning and security as their established religious analogues. Rules governing economic relationships that serve the interests of the few in the guise of practices meant to meet the needs of the community and all its members. Political, ethnic, racial, linguistic, national, and other inherently inconsequential traits, as contrived and pointless as the color of one's hair and eyes, are invoked to tell us what it all means. As such, these institutions and innocuous markers are the social tools used to distinguish members from aliens in fundamentally arbitrary terms that circumscribe the boundaries of innumerable, endlessly lethal conflicts.

At the most fundamental level, Kosinski's novel bespeaks an effort across millennia to find a solid basis for answering the most basic questions: Who are we? Where do we belong? How can we find timeless meaning in life? Differences among us are troubling because they are social sources of doubt, rendering uncertain our best answers to these questions. So we seek, by whatever means, to eliminate any and all things that intimate alternatives to what we have settled on.

The character Stupid Ludmilla wasn't always stupid and psychotic. Nor was she always slatternly, indifferent to others' interpretations of her failure to suitably cover her still voluptuous body. She became Stupid Ludmilla with her socially proscribed lack of awareness only after she was gang-raped by men from her village.

The women of her village, chronically uncertain of their husband's fidelity, later conveniently blamed ill-clad Stupid Ludmilla for their anxiety and killed her by forcing a homemade grenade into her vagina and exploding it. At last, everyone could relax knowing that husbands were faithful, provocative sexual manifestations had been eliminated, families were whole, villages were orderly and secure, and the harvest would not be tainted by God's collective punishment for carnal sin.

The Painted Bird itself was just a bird of a specific species that had been captured, painted garish colors, and set free to join a passing flock. None of The Painted Bird's other species-specific traits could persuade the members of the flock that it was one of them. The paint was functionally inconsequential, but The Painted Bird was rejected and attacked by the other birds, and it fell to its death. This cruel trick was something that rural folk played regularly. In the presence of an intimation of difference, the birds behaved like men, and the converse was also true, as we have seen.

It bears testimony to Kozinski's mastery of language and the novel form the he was able to tell his brilliant but pain-filled story using a pre-adolescent boy, a social casualty of World War II, as its protagonist and sole narrator. The displaced boy's survival from ages seven to twelve in the most isolated, insular, and brutishly difficult confines of Eastern Europe does, indeed, seem unlikely, though Kosinski's masterfully detailed account makes it seem almost plausible. The boy's youthful naivete' and outsider's openness enabled him to experience conventional sources of meaning and belonging, one after the other, until it became clear that each was fiction.

The boy's reverence for Stalin, however, was not remedied by experience. Perhaps because those who taught him about the Soviet Union and its heroes treated the boy well, as one of them, with his own uniform, and they trusted him with secrets worth keeping. It wasn't Stalin he revered, but the members of the Red Army who made him one of them and gave him purpose.

Oddly, the novel ends very abruptly, with a two-page last chapter. Whether or not the outcome is satisfying depends on the readers' interpretation and worldview. For me, the ending is sadly under-developed, an ambiguous afterthought, and inconsistent with the rest of the novel as I understand it. In spite of this disappointment, however, I'm convinced The Painted Bird is a masterpiece of prose fiction, a brilliant book that will leave those who read it with a better-informed, more sober and insightful outlook.

As an addendum, in the early 1980's Jerzy Kosinski became caught up in a heated controversy involving charges of plagiarism, holocaust profiteering, and misrepresentation of life in Poland during World War II. In failing health and wounded by his critics, Kosinski committed suicide at age fifty-eight. I do not know if the charges against Kosinski have merit; if they do, he was despicable. But whatever the judgment on Kosinski, The Painted Bird is a great book.

This book shows the human race at its absolute worst, and what better time and place to do that than WWII. It follows an "innocent" (7 yr old boy) through the world of "adults". The boy travels (or escapes) from one peasant village to another seeking shelter, food, help. Needless to say, he doesn't get much of any of it. Everyone is basically wicked, depraved and violent. The writing is blunt and unflinching in its depiction of horrible things. If you read The Road, you have a good idea of what this is. Bird came first by 30 yrs or so.

Cruelty and brutality follow a Jewish child hiding out with Polish peasants during the Second World War. Overworked, beaten, the boy often runs away only to find his next home is basically identical to the one he just escaped. Author Jerzy Kosinski, who survived German savagery in Eastern Europe, made his tale fictional because it "forces the reader to contribute: he does not simply compare [as in autobiography]; he actually enters a fictional role, expanding it in terms of his own experience, his own creative and imaginative powers."

That said, the story was indeed relentless in its violent depictions, highlighted by a ruthless German attack on a village and the stomach-turning barbarities inflicted on a helpless populace. But after a time, you're almost numbed to the horrors because they're always there. In the aftermath of the war, we see Warsaw become Lord of the Flies at night as parentless children, used to living on their wits, run in gangs, taking what they will.

A raw look at a slice of the Second World War unknown to most Western readers. And while well-written, with a note of hope at the end, it batters you with humanities' dark side.

In The Painted Bird, Jerzy Kosinski tells of the wanderings of a young boy during World War II. The boy, six years old, becomes the object of brutality and prejudice, all of which stems from a combination of peasant superstition and Nazi hatred. The peasants have no limit to their heartlessness: they beat the boy, molest him, and they nearly succeed in killing him-all for the color of his skin (just like Lekh's painted bird). In their minds the boy is nothing more than an ethnic curse to their village, one who could potentially incite the Germans to slaughter everyone within earshot. Just when the boy senses that the peasants will destroy him, he flees to the next village, and the whole process starts anew. In his wanderings he learns judgment and the ability to discern crescendos of violence.
The book is replete with gruesome images: bunkers filled with hungry rats that devour a living body with the efficiency of a school of piranhas; broken Jewish bodies moaning beside the train tracks; a dead woman melting under the heat of her burning shack. Death. The book is replete with it. In the midst of such desolation, the boy longs for stability and friendship and the confidence of trust. But he is disillusioned and betrayed each step of his journey, and the lessons of evil change him in ways he does not know.
The Painted Bird has torn me away from my cozy world and has shown me another sphere where people treat human life as though it is not human. The book is certainly gripping and a little disturbing; it has left in me an uncomfortable feeling that I cannot shake. I guess one hallmark of the successful book is its ability to do this.

Kosinski was exposed as a fraud and probable plagiarist shortly before he committed suicide by slitting his wrists while lying in a bath full of warm water one evening.

At the time, I read that he did it because he was despondent over not being able to ski anymore due to a medical condition. The public personna his "work" had established seemed almost to elevate that explanation from ridiculously trivial to something perfectly consonant with the sensibility of someone who had lived a horrifying experience as a child during World War II (experience he claimed formed the basis for this book), and later felt the oppression of totalitarian communism so keenly that he was willing to engineer a complex and risky plot to successfully escape it.

A man who valued his freedom so much that when denied it's expression in downhill skiing, he could make a choice that others would never embrace, and kill himself.

In all probability, though, that's nothing but romantic crap that he somehow managed to circulate posthumously.

Because since his death it's emerged that Jerzy Kosinski was essentially a fraud. He waited out the war in relative comfort, raised by loving parents, posing as Gentiles.

So the portrayal of the orphan in The Painted BirdKosinski, who suffers so much abuse and torture at the hands of others while he wanders through the German countryside that he loses the faculty of speech, is not all autobiographical, as Kosinski claimed. In fact, as with several of Kosinski's books, another author has come forward to claim that the book is substantially his work.

Still, it was a good con while he ran it, and whoever wrote it The Painted Bird
is a powerful and realistic memoir of the horror suffered by a child during the war. Prospective readers should understand that the book achieves it's effect with the use of imagery and themes that may offend some

However, I'd argue that the human savagery and hopelessness the book portrays are precisely what recommend it. The experience of the war, like the experience of the Great Depression that preceded it, have receded to such a distance in the public memory that they are only dimly perceived now in photographs and black and white film clips of people who live in a world so different from ours that their experience could never become our experience.

It looks now as though we ignored Santayana's warning at our peril; we do seem doomed to repeat parts of that history. Perhaps it's wishful thinking, but maybe reminders of the real terror in our past will awaken those who would suffer most if the more aggressive elements in our political leadership continue to follow what looks disturbingly like the script from that era.

This is certainly not a pleasant book to read. Nothing very good happens to our 6 year old narrator as he goes from gypsy village to gypsy village and witnesses one thing more horrible than the next. There are some absolutely horrifyingly graphic, disgusting shows of man's brutality but you almost becomed numbed by reading it. By the time you hit the seen with the invaders at the end who rape and torture the women, it doesn't even seem as bad as half of the other stuff. More importantly, you can see how the boy cannot go back to living with his family now that his childhood is lost. An important book although don't expect any fun here.
For my taste, I prefer the gut renching agony of Primo Levi's Holocaust memoirs and novels. At times you forget you are reading about humans since the behavior borders on primate like. I'm not sure mankind has improved that much in the intervening time between the close of WW II and the present. This is kind of like reading a Lord of the Flies with eastern European gypsies and villagers.

If ever you thought there wre limits to human cruelty and depravity, all you need do is read this book. It is the closest thing to a tour of hell that the 20C could provide.
The story centers around a sensitive and intelligent child, who was left in the hands of a caretaker in the countryside during WWII. When the caretaker dies suddenly, the child is left to fend for himself in the Polish countryside, where the population is superstitious and poverty stricken. He lived through a succession of horrors, including beatings, exposure to sex, and threats to his life. He survives, of course, and makes extremely interesting observations with the clarity - and peculiar warp - of a child. He also becomes as cruel as his tormentors, but still reachable and able to grow. It is a glimpse of what that war was like.
This makes Painted Bird a brilliant novel, undoubtedly Kozinski's best though also his first. It is a tradegy that Kosinski lied about his past, perhaps to market the book and also to create a myth about himself, saying that this was autobiographical when in fact he had spent the war in relative comfort with his parents. When the truth became known, he committed suicide. But that does not diminish the magnitude of his acheivement here.

I was in hospital recovering from a back operation when I shuffled off to the library to see what I could find. There was only one decent book in it - The Painted Bird. It really put the world in perspective for me; I read it many times over during the next few weeks, and I have kept it close at hand in the 12 years since.
It explains human nature and society with a clarity that no other book can achieve; only Gulliver's Travels and Macbeth come close. As pretygrrl said, the images "are absolutely unforgettable" "and yet, this book is impossible to put down". It is a pity that some readers think the book is defamatory to the human race, or to Polish peasants; quit fooling yourself...this is what human beings are like!
The title image derives fro a bird-catcher and -seller who in a moment of drunkenness takes one of his birds, paints his feathers in strange, gaudy colours, then releases him. The bird flies back to his flock...which tears him to pieces as an unrecognizable outsider. This is almost what happens to the young boy on the run in wartime Poland, as his skin-colour is slightly darker, and the peasants torture and beat him.
I have lived in different parts of the world and I feel like a stranger everywhere I go. But I regard Kosinski as a fellow spirit, along with Kafka and Genet, so my country is the"Republic of Letters.
This book is written in simple language that small children can understand; I would like to know what elementary school students think of this book.

This is an allegedly semi-autobiographical novel of a young Jewish boy, abandoned, at age six, by his mother and father to fend for himself in the villages and country sides of German occupied eastern Europe just before and during the second world war. The novel stresses that the boy has dark hair and black eyes, the complete opposite of the villagers and country people described in the book. It was the time of Hitler's reign of terror, where the only people considered safe were those with blond hair, light skin, and blue eyes. The boy was left to wander in this environment amidst Christians who, if they took the boy in or attempted to hide him, would face grave, incalculable dangers.

Many believed the boy to be a Gypsy. To the boy, who became mute early during his abandonment, he seemingly had no background at all. The boy found work as a laborer for a farmer, Garbos, who for several years, continually punished him by physically abusing the youngster in horrible and unimaginable ways. The boy necessarily becomes steeped in Christianity, and constantly recites certain prayers to himself that will enable to hoard indulgences that will eventually earn him a place in heaven when the time came. In six years, the boy grew up learning superstitions that would enable him to survive. The boy also learns a lot about vengence against his enemies.

One of the turning points in the book, is when the boy meets Gavrila, a kindly soldier in a Soviet army regiment. Gavrila imbues the boy with a sense of caring and self-respect, and promises to raise the boy if, at the end of the war, his parents do not or cannot return to reunite with him.

This is a powerful and highly disturbing novel, obviously not for every one, especially those who frighten easily. I would certainly recommend the book to young people who might identify with the main character.

This is an allegedly semi-autobiographical novel of a young Jewish boy, abandoned, at age six, by his mother and father to fend for himself in the villages and country sides of German occupied eastern Europe just before and during the second world war. The novel stresses that the boy has dark hair and black eyes, the complete opposite of the villagers and country people described in the book. It was the time of Hitler's reign of terror, where the only people considered safe were those with blond hair, light skin, and blue eyes. The boy was left to wander in this environment amidst Christians who, if they took the boy in or attempted to hide him, would face grave, incalculable dangers.

Many believed the boy to be a Gypsy. To the boy, who became mute early during his abandonment, he seemingly had no background at all. The boy found work as a laborer for a farmer, Garbos, who for several years, continually punished him by physically abusing the youngster in horrible and unimaginable ways. The boy necessarily becomes steeped in Christianity, and constantly recites certain prayers to himself that will enable to hoard indulgences that will eventually earn him a place in heaven when the time came. In six years, the boy grew up learning superstitions that would enable him to survive. The boy also learns a lot about vengence against his enemies.

One of the turning points in the book, is when the boy meets Gavrila, a kindly soldier in a Soviet army regiment. Gavrila imbues the boy with a sense of caring and self-respect, and promises to raise the boy if, at the end of the war, his parents do not or cannot return to reunite with him.

This is a powerful and highly disturbing novel, obviously not for every one, especially those who frighten easily. I would certainly recommend the book to young people who might identify with the main character.

I've read over 2000 Holocaust memoirs, and generally don't read fiction. This book was recommended to me, but it was awful. Totally unbelievable, and the huge amount of sexual perversion and porn was nauseating. I skipped to the end - and this 6-year-old prodigy who makes it to the end of the war looking like a "Jew or a gypsy" when clever, Aryan-looking children didn't, turns from his family and becomes a Communist? Bah. Don't waste your time, or cheapen the experiences of actual survivors.

If you are the sick perverted type who likes torure and the loss of self respect, this is the book for you. This book has great meaning it but is to graphic and has not only caused me nightmares, but many of my companions as well. The onlt reason I have read this book is because of myu teacher who thinks that it is showing human rights. Take my advice, and don't read this booik unless you are forced to do so, have nothing better to do with your life, or find humor in serious matters that should be discussed but to a certain extent. This book goes beyond what it should and, me being 15, would not be recomended until out of high scool.

It's always irritated me when people talk about the Nazis and the period of the Second World War in general as though they were some kind of abberation, an inhuman evil which is rarely witnessed. As Kosinski shows us, cruelty is intrinsic, and any moral or lesson drawn by historians pales when compared with the incomprehensible reality of an event. The Polish villagers misreat the protagonist viciously while a Nazi soldier actually takes pity on him; rather than finding relief on his return to society, he is disgusted and coddled by it. The only largely good characters in the novel, the Russians, constantly harp on the goodness of Stalin (and we know the truth). World War Two may be more complex than anyone can ever show, but Kosinski admits that complexity as not many people have attempted to. I was surprised, also, by the sympathy that Kosinski develops for the protagonist. The kid is _tough_, simply, and there's something very endearing about it; also, the way he constantly tries to figure out the world, throwing in his lot with God, and then with the Devil, and then with the communists, is extremely relatable; it's the sort of conflict any child goes through. Viewed from a certain angle, it's just an incredibly twisted coming-of-age story.

Kosinski's harrowing, stupendous novel is definitely not for the weak. But anyone claiming that it isn't real is very ignorant of WWII history and the Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe. I would suggest doing some research on, for example, the Einsazgruppen, the German death squads that followed the German army into Soviet villages and cities and slaughtered - by hand - well over a million civilians (including women and children, and most of them Jews) before death camps were even established. In this the Nazis were always assisted by local villagers. So if the depravity of the villagers in "The Painted Birds" seems too sickening to be believed - the reality was much worse than anything Kosinski has written. Do some research on WWII atrocities. Kosinski manages to give us an important and powerful overview of these events. And if you think reading it on your couch is too hard - imagine what the victims of the real atrocities suffered.

As far as this book not being written by Kosinski - well, the truth is too muddled and confused for us to know who did what, when, and why. So until another writer manager to come up with the original manuscript in his own hand, I will continue to attribute "The Painted Bird" to Jerzy Kosinski.

A powerful, brutally dark novel, *The Painted Bird* is a masterpiece of 20th century literature whatever the prevailing critical/personal opinions regarding Kosinski and the many controversies that surround him may be. I'm not exactly sure how it gets the reputation as a Holocaust novel because the adolescent main character is neither Jewish nor sent to a concentration camp. He is, however, suspected of being a Jew, or, just as "bad," a Gypsy, and under constant threat of being turned over to the Nazis as he roams, homeless, across a war-ravaged countryside populated by folks straight out of the Inferno.

One can't read *The Painted Bird* as a realistic chronicle--that so many bad things could possibly happen to one person, even the unluckiest, is absurd. But as a "mythic" morality tale, as a kind of picaresque "everyvictim's" experience of man's inhumanity to man as specifically manifested during the Nazi Occupation of Europe, it is a profound and uncompromising and perhaps unparalleled tale of the suffering of the outcast and persecuted individual wherever, whenever, and whoever he happens to be in history.

Kosinski spares us nothing as his young narrator passes from one horrendous scene of degradation to another. Perversion, superstition, ignorance, poverty, violence, disease, and death are everywhere among the peasantry through which Kosinski describes--and their counterbalance, ironically and appallingly, is in the godlike supremacy of the figure of the ultra "civilized" SS officer. This is a world in which Evil--both high and low--has the upper hand and the only safe place tobe is on the side that's strongest. It's a grim picture of life but one hard to argue against given the events of the 20th century and what we've seen modern man capable of doing. Those who like to point to the eventual triumph of good over evil at the end of WW2 are conveniently forgetting the horrors of Hiroshima and Stalin's Soviet dictatorship.

*The Painted Bird* has the timeless, parable-like simplicity of the great Nobel prize-winning novels of yesteryear--when the prize generally was awarded for literary merit rather than to recognize ethnic and sexual diversity or to reward political agendas. A spare, slender novel but as serious as a stiletto in the fist of an assassin and packing a wallop that will follow you for the remainder of your reading days, *The Painted Bird* truly is one of those books you'll never forget.

In 1975, my new next door neighbor, Benjamin Kalicka, gave me this book. My worldview was forever changed by Kosinski's story. I was 12, Ben was 76.

Before his immigration to the US, he endured government-sponsored attacks, called "pogroms", on his farm and Jewish family in an area called The Pale in western Russia. Ben related stories of his father killing Cossacks and hanging their bodies in the corn crib. The children, Ben and his siblings, had to hide under the corn crib and watch dead and dying men bleed out onto the hidden kids. Ben noticed my growing interest in Nazi Germany as a war machine and figured I needed some context; I was glorifying war in the abstract. Then, he asked me to read "The Painted Bird" as well as an essay by Elie Wiesel.

Perhaps, "The Painted Bird" like no other book forced me to realize the intimate, horrifying impact of war on people, especially children. Beyond that, it put me in touch with adults who, as a rule, thought nothing of inflicting horrendous predatory assaults on a child simply because he was an ethnic Other. EVERY young teen who's lived an insulated life in Suburbia, USA, should read this book, and read it with purpose. It will allow emotional growth and a new awareness of the vagaries of war and racism and ethnocentricism.

Jerzy Kozinski's Painted Bird is a stunning & frank portrayal of the odyssey of a young boy, mistaken for gypsy or Jew, learning to survive on his own wits in Eastern Europe in WWII.
It is often shocking & frequently raw, but above all of that, there is a shining glory because it aims to get the reader to examine their moral compass. You can't do that with a candied over book when you're talking about holocaust. This book will change you for the better if you let it & ignore criticisms from people who think that morality is only about painting a rosy picture. Kozinski wants to get a rise out of you with this tale, but for righteous anger, not titillation.
This book and its author are frequently maligned for the most idiotic reasons. Whether it's the alleged "historical inaccuracy" charges, or the brainless snipes about it being sensationalistic exhibitionism and violence, none of the charges seem to get to the heart of Painted Bird, Kozinski's masterpiece.
First off, the atrocities in the book that happen to the little boy are voyeuristicly described because Kosinski wants to place you up front as if a real war is going on, and you have to make moral choices. It's naked and it's brutal. Most people are expecting The Diary Of Anne Frank when they read this, and they want to be coddled & sheltered in an attic like that book, awaiting the atrocities in the company of family not knowing what's going on outside*. Kozinski doesn't do that. He puts you in a frame of reference of being in the war with immediate threat to life & dignity, all shown through the psyche of a little boy who represents the future of the world & what will happen to it from the conflict.
Secondly, charges have been levelled against this book for it portraying the WWII peasants too cruelly. This misses the point of the book, of course. The author was trying to encapsulate the essence of ALL purges, ALL "ethnic cleansing", therefore it is about ALL holocausts from world history from the mongol hordes to Stalin to Bosnia & Hussein. People who nitpick over the book's "historical correctness" miss its MORAL correctness.
The joy in reading this book has nothing to do with any of the lurid situations, but in seeing the boy learn to fight for his innocence & survive. Of course he doesn't come out unscathed and I think many people are angry with the author for not having a tidy finish. They shouldn't be; this isn't a whitewash job done as a lullaby Hollywood script, but an opinion about inhumanity. The holocaust wasn't a damn amusement park history recreation that we should observe from the safety of our cars. It was and IS possible. In this book, Kozinski is trying to make you highly aware of the ease with which it could happen to you, and he wants to shred your denial & complacency away. Some people don't like that because they've held on to their security blanket of ego too hard.
For those of you unfamiliar with this book, read it. Yes, it may shock your conscience, but that is a GOOD thing. It may inspire you to bring some more humanity & compassion into the world for your fellow human beings. This book is NOT about despair & corruption & the wickedness of mankind, but about the fact that we can cope with almost ANYTHING if we try.
And that's beautiful.

Kosinski is a smart writer that can be really vicious sometimes and let's his imagination go into unforeseen territories. This doesn't make him a "pervert" or a liar by any means. I personally disagree with the reviewers that perceive him like this because of two reasons: (a) his viciousness reveals a side of the human being that exists and it's ok to write about it and (b) "Painted Bird" is not or was never intended to be a true story. This is a Kosinski novel in which events unfold in an imaginative crude way: the way of Kosinski's imagination.

The reader is submerged and swollen into a way of life that is hell to the reader's eye. However, this life is the only thing that this little kid has. This kid was practically born in hell but when you are so young you don't know better; you don't know the alternatives so hell becomes normal and its unusual events become intriguing but not disturbing.

The kid doesn't live in total agony. He is surprised by the world as he admires and appreciates natural medicine, birds, trees, fire, and summers. He is also surprised by people as he constantly attempts to interpret what is behind the extreme and sometimes appalling behavior of the human being.

Konsisky aims at the reader becoming the kid. He wants the reader to familiarize with the perversity of the human being. This is not a story about degradation, racism, or war; it is a story about living in an atrocious but natural world where you are the observer mostly (a rejected observer) and not the participant. And as the rejected observer, you make your own realizations about things, people, and circumstances using your imagination... and a child's imagination can be extremely creative.

I'm not sure at exactly which point Jerzy Kosinski started losing me in his first novel, The Painted Bird (1965), but by the point I stopped reading (at the episode describing the Kalmuck vigilantes attacking the village) I knew I had had more than enough. Maybe it was the peasant digging out the eyes of his wife's young admirer with a spoon. Maybe it was the brutal murder of a local crazy woman by the village wives for enticing their husbands (who only get a scolding…after all, you know how men are…), which included such additional touches as shoving a bottle filled with manure up her vagina and then shattering it.

I knew I was already mentally done with this book after doggedly slogging through the extended chapter where the unnamed central character, a young boy who ages from 6 to around 11 during the course of the book, is repeatedly forced to hang by his arms from the ceiling in a locked room with the hope he will get tired and fall into the clutches of a vicious dog. Then it was on to the incestous/beastestous family and their midnight romps with the family goat, followed by the Kalmuck gang rapes. Oh, before that, there was the kid getting tossed into a pit of manure by a gang of villagers for dropping the missal during mass. So many enormities to keep in mind…

Horrors devoid of context quickly lose their bite. By themselves, the many episodes of cruelty and savagery Kosinski retails in The Painted Bird would be very effective, especially as they are written in a fine, terse, visceral style (which may not have all been Kosinski's doing, some allege). However, by essentially lining them up one after another in a kind of batting order of inhumanity, they become first dulled, then annoying and finally laughable. As you keep reading you start to ponder, okay, so how does he top the goat? Oh yeah, the manure...

I can't believe anyone ever thought this book was autobiographical except in the most superficial sense. Clearly, what Kosinski did was cherry pick the most outrageous folk horror tales he had come across, adapt them to his narrative and add some of his scattered knowledge of the culture of Eastern Europe (the "comet" for example) and paste them together into what is in effect sado-masochistic pornography.

The Painted Bird follows the travels and adventures of the little boy who at the start of the Second World War is sent away by his Jewish parents to live with an old Polish woman in a remote village to keep him safe from the Nazis. The woman rather addled but basically harmless. Unfortunately, she eventually dies, and that sets the boy on his picaresque adventures through the boonies of Eastern Poland over the next six years. Along the way he mostly encounters backwoods villagers who make the hillbillies in Deliverance look like the Roosevelts. They are cruel, superstitious and utterly intolerant of anyone who smacks of being an outsider.

This is strike one against Kosinski's claim to realism. Given that the German occupiers have no trouble reaching these supposedly remote outposts (in other words, there are roads), it's pretty unrealistic to believe they haven't been touched by outside civilization as Kosinski's narrative implies. We are, after all, talking about the 1940s, not the 1840s.

There is also his central character's age. Kosinski was stuck making him six at the start of his ordeal in order to preserve the (unstated but strongly implied and not exactly discouraged) impression that this was an autobiographical narrative, but my BS meter was ringing off the hook. I challenge anyone to show how a six year old could survive what this kid survives.

Finally, the book implies that the boy's dark hair and skin coloring gives him away as a gypsy or Jew. In Eastern Europe after its centuries of Mongol, Tartar, Hun, etc., invasions? Gimme a break!

For some reason, there are readers who like this book, thinking it as a meditation on man's inhumanity to man (and animals, as with the title allusion). I ended up looking at it as an exploitation of a horrible historical period to retail cheap thrills while gilding it with pretensions of profundity.

The cover of the Mass Market Paperback edition from the 1970s of The Painted Bird features a small section of Heironomous Bosch hell-landscape -- dressed in sickly green and wearing a white hood, a creature with a man's body and head of a long-beaked bird walks on crutches carrying a large wicker basket on its back, and in the basket a small black devil with spiky fingers touches the shoulder of a wary young boy as he whispers into the boy's ear. This is an apt cover for Jerzy Kosinski's fictionalized autobiographical novel set in Poland during the reign of Nazi terror in World War 11.

I first read this harrowing tale 35 years ago. I have read many dark, disturbing novels filled with brutality of every stripe, including such works as Malamud's The Fixer, Dostoyevsky's House of the Dead, and Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, but, in my view, perhaps because the narrator is a 10 year old boy, no novel has its main character live through a more painful hell than in The Painted Bird. Several months after reading this novel, the author himself made a visit to a large bookstore in Philadelphia for a book-signing, so I had an opportunity to actually meet him -- a small man with a thin, high pitched voice and sharp, chiseled fine features, a man who struck me as being both sensitive and friendly. He appreciated my words of thanks and told me, when asked, that he was heading to New Orleans and expected to have some exciting times.

Anyway, that was then. Several days ago I saw my local library had a copy of The Painted Bird audiobook and immediately checked it out. I started also rereading the printed book as I listened to the CDs. The reader, Fred Berman, did his homework -- his accent and inflection and manner of speaking is spot-on Jerzy Kosinski. If you are unfamiliar, this story is of an orphan boy with black eyes and sharp nose, labeled gypsy-Jew, forced to wander from village to village, subjected physically to beatings, rape, tortures, as well as murder attempts, while subjected psychologically to being treated as a messenger of the devil and an evil spirit who casts spells with a glance from his black eyes. The boy is so traumatized from unrelenting abuse, he completely losses his capacity to speak for many months. The abuse reaches such a pitch, at one point he reflects on the nature of evil: "I tried to visualize the manner in which the evil spirits operated. The minds and souls of people were as open to these forces as a plowed field, and it was on this field that the Evil Ones incessantly scattered their malignant seed. If their seed sprouted to life, if they felt welcomed, they offered all the help which might be needed, on the condition that it would be used for selfish purposes and only to the detriment of others. From the moment of signing a pact with the Devil, the more harm, misery, injury, and bitterness a man could inflict on those around him, the more help he could expect." Quite the musings from a 10 year old! Just goes to show how extreme was his direct experience of the forces of evil.

If you are up for an unforgettable experience of terror expressed in the clear, vivid literary language of a fine writer, then you are ready for Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird.

Everything the blurbs on the cover said. It is heartbreaking, amazing, powerful. At times you want to turn away, but you don't; then, you realize that life is not always nice.

The protagonist changes many times throughout the book. He changes in order to survive, he changes because he sees something that he believes is better, or he changes because his eyes are opened and he sees how life really is.

Kosinski was accused of betraying his country, he was also accused of not going far enough in showing the horrors of war as the boy experienced them. Maybe it's autobiographical, maybe it's not. What is important is that it is a true picture of what happened to many during the years of the Second World War.

The author pulls no punches, so be prepared to read about depravity, hatred, racism, violence and even death when you pick up this book.

And prepare to be changed. I was.

This book is necessary reading for anyone who is literate. An exploration into the very depths of human depravity and an apt dissection of how war sheds all masks. Haunting, revolting, and most definitely life changing this tale of a prepubescent boy abandoned by war will strip the scales from any reader's eyes.
Kosinski takes a bleak situation and denies hope at every turn dragging his young protagonist again and again through the razor studded halls of hell. The sorrow and horror are tangible as bullets, leaving the reader intellectually shellshocked. Atrocities abound, all too recognizably human.
After reading The Painted Bird it immediately went on my list of top 20 books. For any who read this the outcome will always be the same: YOU WILL HATE WAR! Even more than you should now.
"I knew that the ghost might never leave me, that it might follow me, haunt me at night, seep sickness into my veins and madness into my brain."

This truly a brilliant book, no other author that I've ever read was able to capture the art of description like Kosinski. Though it will make you sick to your stomach and callenge you to question man's treatment of man, the things you will gain from the expierence will stay with you for a lifetime. I recomend all teenagers who have every question who they are or why they are here to read this book. Any adults who wander why the world is the way it is or who have never wander before should this book, because after reading it you'll never stop wandering. This book answers many question about the human soul and is a great experiment with the human phsyche. But for as many question it may answer, twice as many will be asked of the reader. It is a piece art the requires input as well as output. You become that little boy, you experienec horror, saddness, pain, loss of faith in God and in you own family. But it will also bring you to turns with mortality and let appreciate the good fortune you most likely expierence. I suggest you read this book and share it with you friends.

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.

This book is definitely not for the faint of heart in its portrayal of the brutality of a world at war. The disturbing images paint a dark portrait of humanity as an unnamed boy drifts from village to village in Eastern Europe. From backwater superstitions to the persecution of anyone different, this boy witnesses some of the most horrible atrocities, which transform him body and soul. It is an incredible portrayal of life in the remote villages of Eastern Europe while the war wages in the distance. While I wouldn't recommend it to many people due to its graphicness, I would insist that it be treated as a classic piece of literature and a poignant study of (in)humanity.

I guess I'm another deceived reader who thought The Painted Bird was autobiographical. It is true that if despicable events really, truly occurred, we are willing to deal with them as readers because we feel great sympathy for the victim and we know he or she is just recording graphically experienced atrocities. However, if we learn the same stuff is fiction we recoil, betrayed and angry at the author for dreaming up such totally sick and perverse scenarios.

I did think the author writes powerfully and tells his story dispassionately as would a boy paralyzed and shell-shocked by the evil that men do. But knowing this is not only fiction but racist propaganda against the Poles, suddenly Kosinski loses his appeal and becomes just another author seeking fame by whatever means necessary.

This 1976 version is an updated version of the 1965 original. It includes an enlighting Afterward by Kosinski.

In a series of harrowing misadventures the six-year-old protagonist of this shocking story of survival in WWII Poland endures on wits and luck alone. The scenes are lamentable as indeed they must be to illustrate the horrors associated with war. This story is not meant for the timid as it contains rape, incest, beastiality, and cruelty. The unnamed boy of this account is like the painted bird of Polish folklore and his experiences have so changed him that he is initially reluctant to be reunited with his father and mother at the end of the war.

The most interesting thing about this terrible, almost-laughable book is that so many "literary heavyweights" called it "The most important literature to come from WWII." If nothing else, it makes one realize awards and praise are little more than politics and popularity contests.
Ironically, when I pulled it off the shelf before my trip around Eastern Europe through the very peasant villages Kosinski wrote about, my husband said, 'it's a classic.'" He never mentioned that he never read it. Now I'm mad at him too.
I suffered through every page, waiting for it not to be a WWII version of the "Saw" movies or Pier Paolo Pasolini's movie, "Salo." It is a sick mind on paper, and while Kosinski's writing is to my liking for its directness and efficiency, even as fiction the story is unbelievable. Kosinski's protagonist is the strongest, smartest 6-year-old in history, hanging by his arms from ceiling hooks for days and days, making his own boots that he turned into ice skates, and telling readers at the start of a paragraph that he does not understand the peasant dialect, but explaining intricacies of their complex superstitions by the end of the paragraph, when apparently, he is somehow rendered completely fluent in the tongue.
Even its ridiculousness is not Kosinski's real crime. The real crime is that Kosinski depends on nothing more than sex and violence to encapsulate the entirety of WWII. For ANYONE to say THAT is the best depiction of WWII in literature is absolutely absurd. I was especially offended by Kosinski's repeated, graphic violence against animals, and I knew a few chapters in that I could count on the story eventually incorporating child rape, sodomy, gang rape, bestiality, and someone eating human feces. I was right.
Don't waste your time with this. Better read Kosinski's own lurid biography - not only is it a better read, it explains the sick mind that produced this crap. His marriage to an American heiress/socialite nearly twice his age might also explain how this ever made it into print and garnered the praise it did.
The book is an insult to the real circumstances of WWII.

The violence starts from the first pages and only gets worse as the narrative progresses. At first, it gives the impression that it is violence for violence's sake; however, it does culminate into a very deep insight into human nature. Society, under normal circumstances, limits the acceptable level of interpersonal violence. When the normal order is altered, anything becomes possible and the inner demons come out. The brutal acts described in the book seem fantastical, but really are not much different than anything seen on the evening news.

As someone who has never "fit in" and has always been an outsider, I related to the unnamed narrator on a personal level.

As to the question of whether the book is autobiographical, I do not think there is much of a question about it. I think it is obvious that some of it is inspired by the author's real life experiences, and some from other survivors' stories that he had heard, but the story is clearly fiction.

The painted bird is probably one my favourite books ever, as it plunges the reader in the worst of human behaviour but manages to captivate at the same time.
The novel follows a young boy in his roamings through the Balkans during the second world war after he has been separated from his parents during a razzia. His dark skin complexion immediately stigmatizes him as a gypsy and this biases his journey that takes him to the lowest of human behaviour, which Kosinsky describes with great detail, but also with an intruiging air as if all of this is all very normal. The reader is continuously fighting against the urge to throw the book aside in disgust and the desire to know how the unfateful journey of the main character unfolds.
After reading this book, even the most liberated of spirits must acknowledge that 'anything goes' should be accompanied by rules of human decency and social conduct, as the justifications of human evil that Kosinsky describes resonates in debates today

"The Painted Bird" offers a haunting, deeply disturbing look into the psychological impact of war, and how it can drive even the most civilized and the most innocent of people to do unspeakable things. The book opens in the fall of 1939. An unnamed, black-haired, dark-eyed 6-year-old boy is separated from his parents at the beginning of World War II. Wandering the countryside alone, the boy is mistaken for a Gypsy or a Jew by the fair-haired, blue-eyed rural villagers, and accordingly shunned. Even those who do shelter and feed him usually treat him with cruelty. But, even more disturbing, the boy's eyes are opened to the superstition-driven brutality with which these country folk treat their own neighbors, and even their own family members.

This is not an uplifting read. The cruelty the boy witnesses and experiences often defies the imagination. Kosinski makes no attempt to censor his gruesome descriptions, nor should he. To gloss over the atrocities of World War II would be an injustice to those who suffered through it. Though the book is not, as some would argue, autobiographical, events like those depicted here did indeed happen during the war. It is probably safe to assume that the story takes place in Poland, though Kosinski has deliberately left out place names in order to keep the narrative separate from his own life. As he says in the author's note at the beginning, he intended the book to stand alone.

The story actually spans the entire war, taking the boy from age six to age twelve. Over the course of the book, we witness his gradual loss of innocence. He tries repeatedly to make sense of a senseless world. For a while he throws himself fully into church, hoping that endless prayers will deliver him. When this fails, he decides that the only way to escape suffering is to make a pact with the devil. And when this, too, fails to relive his misery, he becomes entirely disillusioned with humanity. We see him begin, bit by bit, to embrace the very violence that has caused him so much pain. It is the only way to survive in the war-torn world around him.

"The Painted Bird" is tragically disillusioning, yet weaves a brilliant picture of the boy's psychological transformation. It will leave you feeling empty, but raises crucial issues to the reader's attention. Kosinski has deliberately used a very young, innocent child as the protagonist in order to emphasize the destructive, corrupting nature of war. At a time when war is a distant thing, taking place on other continents, it is easy to glorify it and to forget what a hell it is for those experiencing it first-hand. For this reason, books like "The Painted Bird" are especially necessary, forcing us to look at the physical and emotional havoc war can wreak on a person. Though I would highly recommend the book to anyone, it is not for the weak of stomach. Be prepared for a dark and disturbing journey.

The violence of "The Painted Bird" would be shrieking and possibly unbearable were it not fixed in Kosinski's detached, ice-cold prose. The narrator - a simple, bewildered child - tells of his misadventures as he is kicked around between Eastern European villages during World War II. He sees and is subject to much cruelty and although he lacks the complicated sensibilities to intellectually process his surroundings, this nameless Gypsy clearly is becoming more and more damaged through his difficult travels. A startlingly dark tale.

This book might not be for you. Jerzy paints some wondrous pictures. Some people will say they're gross, offensive. Probably; but in my opinion The Painted Bird is probably the greatest single journey made by an unlikely hero (next to Cozzen's Castaway, and Greene's Power and the Glory). Sometimes artwork isn't the easiest thing to swallow, but mouthfuls like this are definetly nutritious.

Kosinksi's book is about a time and place somewhat removed from us today, but the process he so elegantly describes is alive and well. Anytime one group seeks to destroy another group, they "paint" them in such a way that their disposal is mandatory. So they are no longer part of "us" - they are "them" and we know what to do with "them". This is the essence of Kosinski's message, and it is a universal message for all peoples at all times.

It's been several years since reading this novel,but what I can say is that for the most part it was the title that helped define the book for me.Yes,it's a story about a young parentless Jewish boy that roams Eastern Europe during the second World War and does contain graphic depictions of somewhat gory scenes,but all to a purpose.The young boy is speechless and all throughout the story is encountering a variety of situations that is incomprehensible for someone his age,but still he struggles to define what surrounds him.The title in itself is very important for it is represented in the story.The youth encounters a bird catcher that uses the ploy of painting a bird of one species to capture that of a different species,which after discovering it's a painted bird pecks it to death.To me it was a metaphor for how the jewish population attempted to adapt to the harsh surroundings of the time period,but inevitably were sacrificed.Kosinski presents a complex portrayal of cruelty which unfortunately must be admitted as being a portion of the modern world where a holocaust has numbed us to the nuances of man's inhumanity.Kosinski's novel works on a variety of levels,but to me it is mainly addressing the question of identity and how one becomes defined by experiences.The novel is as complex as is the personality of Kosinski,who has written under several pseudonyms.The "Painted Bird" is a novel with very vivid descriptions that has a psychological hue to it that is unforgettable after reading!It can only help to broaden one's mental horizon and get a glimpse into another man's soul,be it ever so dark and brooding!

After I read Painted Bird, digested it and read it again I was awfully excited about Jerzy Kozinski. Painted Bird is about the human condition, set in a time and place where the human condition had the whole spectrum of opportunities to manifest itself. Kozinski's perceptions of humanity are poignant, surgical, honest and brutal. I love this book.
After reading it I attempted other Kozinskis as they emerged and found that all fell completely flat for me. This one's in a class all its own, in my view.

What makes this book so brilliant is the protagonist, an adolescent viewing his world through the pure, neutral eyes of childhood. Through him, the reader is forced to confront the nature of innocence, whether or not it even exists. The child becomes a microcosm for a world without order or structure, a place where laws are arbitrary and, often, brutally barbaric.
That being said, this is not a casual read. By buying, and subsequently, reading this book, you will be forced to confront issues and ideas that you might not want to deal with.
While this book may or may not be for you, do not deny its brilliance. No book has ever moved or shaken me the way this novel has.

Personally, I am a fan of stories, tales, and movies that beat you over the head and send you spiraling down into a horrible black hole or straight to hell - but there has to be more to it than that. I got a kick out of a lot of the brutally violent or "disturbing" parts - only the best of them - but often felt unaffected and felt that Kosinski's descriptions were often too subtle and quick to really make the scenarios very effective. Most of it brushed by me as pulp to be pulp, and in such a boring, repetitive setting - it leaves me wanting something more.

I didn't sense much progression, or in this case, decomposition. Only the same thing over and over: go to the next village, learn of a new religion, belief system, or way of life - get used to it, then get abused. Then when you can't stand it anymore, leave and run to the next village - and repeat cycle. Sure, there was a subtle sense of his hope disintegrating eventually, but it was very much in the shadows. Towards the beginning of the 2nd half of the book, I started to see hints of what could take the story in a brilliant direction - but found that by the next chapter, he had abandoned the ideas and fallen back into the repetitive cycle.

Basically, there wasn't much memorable besides some of the pulpiest moments, picturing a helpless little boy running through the woods with nowhere to go, and maybe the depressing idealism/reality behind the ending. It kept me entertained. The pace wasn't horrible. But for some reason I can't fathom sitting down to write such a repetitive story in the first place. If it were effective in making you feel more claustrophobic and depressed as you read on, then it would make sense - but unfortunately it doesn't have that effect. It just feels...flatlined. Still worth reading, but by no means a masterpiece of any kind.

This is a work of fiction. Apparently many people easily lose sight of this fact when joining in the controversy of whether or not it is based on Mr. Kosinski's life or not. All this is beside the point as any work of fiction stands on its own and should be judged on its own merits. That said, this is a disturbing book and shows quite graphically the cruelty, violence and sexual depravity of the people the young boy runs into on his quest for survival. Most of his suffering comes at the hand of his countrymen which is telling. Six million people died in Poland during WWII, three million of them were Jews murdered in the death camps. Undoubtedly part of the Poles early rejection of this book was their refusal to accept complicity in this crime. One of the few Nazis the boy meets up with actually lets him escape, whereas villagers torture and try to kill him repeatedly. Kosinski describes the rampant superstitions and brutality of Polish peasants at the time, which seems rather incredulous to the modern reader. Anyone who does not believe that events like those described in this book such as mass rapes did not happen during WWII or during other conflicts should examine history before discounting the novel. These atrocities happen ALL the time. And will continue to do so. Anyone who has not lived through war has no right to cast doubt on such events. If anyone in his or her coddled existence lacks the imagination to deem such acts possible I'd urge him to wake up and look around. Man's cruelty to man and other animals is infinite and continues to this day with Islamic fundamentalists beheading westerners, Americans torturing potentially innocent people in prisons, mass slaughter of wildlife and so on. This novel is one boy's testimony to the dark side of human nature. I can only imagine what Jerzy Kosinski's life must have been like leading up to his suicide, as I think it likely that some of the experiences depicted in the book parallel his own. His despair as with others who survive traumatic circumstances like the Holocaust, must have overwhelmed him. But in the novel, the boy survives against all odds. And that is called hope. That is one fiction I'd like to believe in.

Having read a few other Holocaust era novels, I was recommended "The Painted Bird" by a friend of mine. Like the other novels, it is gruesome and portrays a life most of us would like to imagine didn't exist. Ignorance and brutality are part of the main aspects of this novel, as it portrays a young boy experiencing the horrors of ignorance and resulting brutality against him. Yes, there are sexual situations depicted; however, there is a difference between a sexual situation shown for its base nature as a foreboding element within the story and a pornographic description. (I'd noticed a lot of the reviewers couldn't tell the difference and snubbed the book because it made them feel uncomfortable.)

Part of the point of this book is to make one think, and sometimes that requires making the audience uncomfortable. There are realities that we may not have experienced that exist despite our having not experienced it ourselves. Shying away from literature that shows the baser nature of individuals and a struggle of morals does not make for anything more than a sheltered view of the world. Take a risk and try the book. If it makes you uncomfortable, keep reading. A little thought about what makes us as humans uncomfortable isn't a bad thing.

Set during WWII in war-torn Poland, The Painted Bird is about a little boy who is sent away from the city and endures the horrors and hardships of peasant life. The foreward to the edition I read states quite clearly by the author that it is not a memoir, but fiction, through and through. This does not take away from the validity of the story. Kosinski writes in a beautiful, morbid fashion. I felt compelled to keep reading, even when the descriptions grew gruesome and, at times, nauseating. The end is dark, but rich in a way that reminds one of the feeling of nostalgia.

No book can come close showing the horrors of war and the evil actions and impulses of people that exist everywhere as does 'The Painted Bird.' I read it as a teenager for a required English project for a very progressive English teacher's class. I was very impressed with the truth of the book, the horror that people endure at the hands of their fellow man in every civilization. It spoke to me, as a child of a very dysfunctional family who had witnessed violence in my own home. My father was a WWII veteran and I believe that this experience ruined his psyche and did not allow him to maintain a decent, loving relationship throughout his life. It is not for the weak of mind, those easily impressed, or for someone seeking thrills. For them, stick to the horror movies and the monsters under the bed. This book is for those who want to face the truth of the horror that exists under the thin veneer of civilization in our society.