Word: kosinski
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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BEING THERE by Jerzy Kosinski. 142 pages. Harcourf Brace Jovanovich...
...Kosinski, 37, has lived through-and now makes use of-some of the strongest direct experience that this century has had to offer. Like the six-year-old boy in The Painted Bird, he was separated from his Jewish parents during World War II and survived as a waif in the Polish countryside. Like Chance, he suffered a physical injury that left him mute for five years. After the war he was reunited with his parents and placed in a school for the handicapped...
...first novels have been embraced with such praise and sympathy as Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird-a taut, savage story of a stray city boy's brutalization by Middle European peasants during World War II. Three years after it was published in 1965, Kosinski won the National Book Award for Steps, a montage of violent and sadistic episodes perceived with an almost fetishistic precision. Being There is a change of pace, a tantalizing knuckle ball of a book delivered with perfectly timed satirical hops and metaphysical flutters...
Precision and Balance. Chance's resemblance to Voltaire's Candide ("We must cultivate our garden") and even to Buster Keaton's deadpan clown is fairly obvious. Despite the implausibility of the plot, the precision and balance of Kosinski's laconic prose, and his ability to animate a character who actually has no character at all, make Being There much more than the heavyhanded satiric fairy tale it might appear to be. More than an antihero, Chance is a non-character-the ultimate spectator-who reflects Kosinski's concern about the future of free will...
...particularly sympathetic figure. He is in the Establishment, yet out of it; he has dipped into a dozen different fields, yet is tied to none. He possesses both passionate interest and a kind of cool grace. "He is their ultimate vision of the writer," says Polish-born Novelist Jerzy Kosinski (The Painted Bird), one of George's countless literary friends. "To them he comes closest to the American conception of what a writer ought to be-that he should not just live off the imagination, like Proust, but should re-create an ideal search for experience...