Word: birdness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...take off like a bird...
...Surely I must be exaggerating," Rip thinks. "Why try to understand it all in one gulp? Why try to overtake history? Start slowly, read the leading fiction bestseller. Escape for a while." He picks up Jonathan Livingston Seagull. The story of a what? Of a goddam bird? His eye roves to the self-help books. Here's one: Primal Scream. He tries...
...excellence amounts to a stylistic tic: his repeated use of Grim Bits from Mother Nature to give symbolic weight to Whalen's flounders. The grotesque baobab tree, we learn, seems to have its branches in the earth and its roots in the air; a certain species of African bird can soar gracefully, but nearly always crashes when it lands, with the result that the earth beneath its air space is littered with broken, still living hulks. Heavy stuff, and not surprisingly it drops through the tissue of Kosinski's prose and sinks out of sight...
...author's other novels are as impressive as this one is futile. The Painted Bird follows the frightful journey of a small boy as he stumbles through war-torn Poland searching for his parents, while Steps observes a refugee's nightmarish encounters with America. A reader trying to account for the disparity between those books and The Devil Tree is driven to the not entirely convincing conclusion that Kosinski, who is a Pole, has strayed too far from his artistic roots. -John Skow
...while the other's departure prompted a discussion of his character and future course ("He's begging for change under a streetlamp on Brattle Street!" "He's copping out!"). There were only ten spectators to begin with, of course, mostly friends of the actors, and nobody ever found the bird Paul had promised would be the meaning of the play. But an 80 per cent retention rate isn't bad, and no doubt the bird is warbling a song somewhere...