The existence of a writer like Kosinsky (Josek Lewikopf in reality) is marked by something as serious as the ethnic persecution of Nazism. Without a doubt that is transmitted to a narrative work, from the most obvious argument of "The Painted Bird" to the latent background of any of his other novels.
If virtue is to be extracted from the uncanny, Konsinki's plots offer us that metaphysical glimpse that goes far beyond the sophisticated but hollow salon philosophy. Because reaching deep meanings of who we are is a task that is best approached from traces of depersonalization and transmutations of scenarios towards the dreamlike if it touches. Because the sense of being is moved by a violent notion of existence.
Because life is because death awaits us. And in the meantime what moves us are drives capable of fulfilling the most intense desires and making us prisoners of unapproachable feelings ... This is how Kosinski can mate with another great Polish writer like Stanislaw Lem. And this is how Polish literature of the 20th century ends up offering us glimpses of transcendence on the border of the two Europes.
Jerzy Kosinski's Top 3 Recommended Novels
The painted bird
One of the most moving and terrible novels ever written about the barbarism experienced in Eastern Europe during World War II. The notion of the autobiographical draws that landscape even more captivating by its true shadows, by the regret of the tragedy made voice of the narrator in the first person.
In the autumn of 1939, in an unnamed European country, a six-year-old boy is sent by his parents to a remote village. They want to save you from the horrors that lie ahead. They soon lose contact with their son who, left to his own devices, will be forced to wander until the end of the war, becoming the victim and witness of an unimaginable nightmare. Considered one of the hundred best English novels of the XNUMXth century, The Painted Bird is one of the most moving and terrifying books ever written about the barbarism experienced in Eastern Europe during World War II, a book that cannot be read without experiencing fear, shame and deep sadness.
From the garden
The utopia of the most chrematistic human ambitions. The material above anything else up to the impossibility of selling a soul in exchange or selling a past or even losing the shadow ...
Chance is a great enigma: the hero of the American "mean". Television loves him, newspapers and magazines are after him. Gardiner is a familiar face in American homes. Everyone talks about him, although nobody knows what he talks about. Nobody knows where it comes from, but everyone knows that it is a magnet for money, power and sex. Has he succeeded thanks to the charming and well-connected wife of a dying Wall Street mogul?
Or has he placed himself on the crest of the wave because, like television images, he has come into the world driven by a force that he has never seen and cannot name? Does Chance know something we don't? Will fail? Will he ever be miserable? The reader is the one who must decide.
Steps
Everything has a sexual explanation. All our acts are that desire for immortality, that need for cellular survival that begins with an orgasm as the beginning and the end, as the death drive, or petit morte, as the French would say. A short and luminous novel about experience and sexuality, winner of the National Book Award in 1969.
Steps is a terrifyingly beautiful novel about the sexual and sensual experiences with which a man has woven his life. This man, the narrator, moves through a world whose inhabitants are prey to excitement and at the same time victims of insensitivity, a world that enslaves the imagination until it becomes docile. But it is also a world in which the exaltation of sensuality, free will, rebellion beats surreptitiously. With Steps, which won the National Book Award in 1969, Jerzy Kosinski masterfully drew the underground forces that underpin modern politics and culture.
