Word: kosinski
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Lacking a human dimension, the spy seldom grows large enough to tell universal truths. Instead, he becomes an extension of the tortured child of Kosinski's indelible first novel, The Painted Bird, and the deracinated hero of his second greatest work, Steps. Like these central characters, Kosinski once fled the hell of war and totalitarianism; like them, he suffered unnamed-and perhaps unnameable-trauma. Cockpit seems to be a refraction of those anguished early years. If it is, then the novel's epigraph need not be from Dostoyevsky but from Auden, whose insight remains the subtext...
...suggests Tarden, the protagonist of Jerzy Kosinski's Cockpit. If Tarden is indeed a creature from some other writer's galaxy, that author is manifestly Dostoyevsky. For like his predecessor, Kosinski explores the classic antinomies of rationality-and of experience that defeats reason and mocks humanity...
...these are pin lights in a field of black. Kosinski's terse, unstructured style has always created images of power and authenticity. Here he uses I-am-a-camerawork to fill the mind's eye, with scenes following one another like projected slides. Incidents are unobtrusively introduced until the reader seems to be a guest, then a participant in Tarden's intrigues. Some of those plans include obsessive sexual anguish that amounts to sadomasochism. Others concern the pornography of violence; a skiing accident, stained with blood and waste, and a murder by radar are as gripping...
Ironically, it is in such moments that the author's invited comparison with Dostoyevsky weakens. Though Kosinski ends with a paragraph from The Possessed, the brilliant Polish exile reaches the depths, not the peaks, of his Russian master. At Dostoyevsky's most pathological, he still illuminated his worst sinners, sometimes with anguished faith, sometimes with a grieving moral sense. Kosinski's protagonist views sex as a corrosive, never as delight or even consolation; for Tarden, all other characters exist as so many laboratory animals awaiting his stimulus...
Allen, who received knife wounds to the neck, face and abdomen, did not appear in court to give his account of the incident. After being discharged from the Cambridge Hospital, police discovered that warrants had been issued for his arrest for parole violations, Officer John Kosinski, who made the arrests, said yesterday...