Word: fabian
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...hard to find. In the Midwest or the desert, in banana republics or along the Florida gold coast, Fabian's mobile VanHome is seldom without its lady for the evening. Adolescents, sophisticates, even transsexuals are all given equal time. Yet the warning sign on Fabian's van says more about its owner than about the alarm system: SELF-REACTOR: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. In this picaresque, passion is reserved for the playing field. Despite his experiments with sex and drugs, Fabian truly gets high on Fabian. With characteristic insouciance, the author describes his hero's liaisons: "He found...
...South American republic where the main sources of power are the ox and the jet are masterpieces of irony and pure narrative. He tirelessly examines what he terms "the regency of pain." Like Dostoyevsky's, Kosinski's characters explore their own souls, always reaching for limits. Fabian even visits hospitals where he knows no patient, forcing himself to meet the in curable, to witness the most vulnerable lives. The results are never less than compelling, but they are never more than set pieces...
...fault, like the virtue, is the author's. He writes powerful interludes, only to vandalize them by reducing his characters to prototypes. By midnovel, Fabian is shown to be, in his creator's phrase, "a portable man," at home everywhere and nowhere. Like other Kosinski men, he is unable to love without domination or lose without humiliation. His fears are for himself, not for the human condition; his vaunted independence is merely a lack of compassion. His wanderings are like those of the brain-damaged who range farther away from an object when they try to approach...
...Only the skeleton remained before Fabian... Above all other abandoned, useless and decaying parts of the dead horse's body, the skeleton bothered Fabian most. Unlike the animal's skin or blood, the intestines, lungs, nerves or muscles, each a forge of moisture and heat, a furnace of life, the skeleton, with its two hundred and more bones that Fabian had once counted, seemed no more complex than the crude pillars, posts, joints and frames that made up the barn - and no more mysterious...
...skeleton was the bony soul, the hardened essence of the horse, it appeared, when juxtaposed with the living mass of the animal, rather as its opposite, a caricature supplanting pliancy with rigor, fluency with brittleness, motion with stillness. What would have happened to the horse, Fabian wondered, if, throughout its life, instead of relying on its instinct, the animal had sought support only from its skeleton...