Word: kosinski
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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STEPS, by Jerzy Kosinski. Acts of cruelty and voyeurism unfold in a series of episodes that are bound together by the author's private vision of inhumanity...
STEPS, by Jerzy Kosinski. In his second novel, the author of The Painted Bird coolly describes a series of acts of voyeurism, cruelty and revenge that combine to form a shocking picture of a pathological mind...
STEPS, by Jerzy Kosinski. In his second novel, the author of The Painted Bird coolly describes a series of acts of voyeurism, cruelty and revenge that combine to form a shocking picture of a pathological mind...
...Some of Kosinski's treatment of Communism is pure Gogol. Says one freedom-starved university student: "I've discovered more than thirty public buildings in different parts of the city, all with temples like this, all waiting for me." He is referring not to clandestine churches but to the freest places in the country-the stalls in public toilets. Elsewhere the narrator attends a party reception and observes a disaffected scientist pinning foil-wrapped condoms to the chests of unsuspecting apparatchiks...
...such comic relief is overwhelmed by the savage purity of Kosinski's vision -that of a man stripped of all humane conventions and in complete control of his impulses and appetites. In fact, the protagonist's obsession with control becomes indistinguishable from the book itself. Every word is weighted to produce the precise tension that each episode calls for. The effect is hypnotic but short-lived. For unlike The Painted Bird, this novel lacks the grounding situation, the structure and the connective tissue that could have made it more than a rather abstract expression of a pathological state...