Word: kosinski
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...Jerzy Kosinski has never been in the mainstream of this particular movement, and he manages to keep writing, evidently comfortable with his very characteristic narrative style. Born in Poland in 1933, Kosinski writes a clean, workmanlike English: fluid enough, if not exactly mellifluous, but always steely and gray. Beckett, who also chose to write in a language not his own, did so, in an odd way, for the discipline; Kosinski has said that English, for him, is a language of bare bones, lacking the richness of a lifetime of connotations. At the end of The Devil Tree, Kosinski's last...
This is the way Kosinski uses words: without gravity or resonance...
There is some perversity in using language to desiccate, rather than to enrich, and some danger. The risk Kosinski takes is like the risk Beckett and Barth took; the barrenness of his words and of his landscapes threaten to consume the whole. A Literature of Desolation that engenders only desolate novels is, to say the least, self-defeating...
SOMEHOW, though, Kosinski's early novels achieved a startling intensity of expression. The horrors witnessed by a child refugee in the villages of a malign, warravaged Eastern Europe in The Painted Bird take on an added dimension in its clinical, matter-of-fact narratives...
...Jerzy Kosinski's work glistens with social observation and psychological apprehension. Not since Conrad has an Eastern European found so profound a voice in the English tongue. Such relentless talent, such flashes of genius, make the reader hope one day for a book that can look past retribution to seek...