Word: kosinski
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...aura of amiable averageness. The producer Alfred de Liagre said that Reagan on film "always had the manner of an earnest gas-station attendant." Liberal writers have dismissed him as ideologue, cretin and airhead, or worse. They have thought of Chauncey Gardiner, the transcendentally brainless seer in Jerzy Kosinski's novel Being There. Gardiner, in the eloquence of his idiocy, becomes a national oracle. "How humiliating," the columnist Nicholas von Hoffman wrote of Reagan in 1982, "to think of this unlettered, self-assured bumpkin being our President...
...does seize upon a bright idea, he usually destroys it by overstatement. There is nothing inappropriate, for example, about an aspiring artist like Dreyfuss having a Piet Mondrian painting adorning his wall. It is corny and implausible, however, for him to name his dog Balzac and give a Jersey Kosinski novel to a child who whines and calls his mother "monkey nose...
...ended with Night, he would still have earned an international reputation as a founder of Holocaust literature. Once the novel was published, others dared to speak out: Nelly Sachs' laments were carried in O the Chimneys; André Schwarz-Bart chronicled The Last of the Just; Jerzy Kosinski described The Painted Bird. Wiesel himself was set free; his other books rushed into print: Dawn, The Accident, The Town Beyond the Wall, The Gates of the Forest, A Beggar in Jerusalem...
Inevitably, Tzili invites comparison with the little boy hideously brutalized by peasants in Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird. But Kosinski's martyred child survives with nothing but rage and revenge; Tzili is strangely passive, accepting the insults and the blows as her destiny, if not her due. Kosinski's novel is a series of surreal images; Appelfeld's is a shadow play whose characters move mutely behind a scrim of inexpressible sadness...
...with having fun at the expense of the Brearley School, an ancient and awesome institution on the upper East Side dedicated to the intellectualization of genteel but swinging young ladies. And somewhere in there Prager takes a lot of free-falling pot shots at novelist Jerzy Kosinski, possibly because of the jet-set crowd with which he has lately associated himself...