Word: tarden
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Passion Play, Kosinski's seventh novel, the man's name is Fabian. But in essence he is the bloodless Levanter of Blind Date (1977), the vengeful wanderer Tarden of Cockpit (1975) and the haunted boy in Kosinski's first and best fiction, The Painted Bird. Fabian differs from his predecessors chiefly in occupation: he is a competitive horseman. The aging jockey plays a strange sort of polo - a one-on-one contest in which animal and rider become a single figure jousting on a timeless range. Like many equestrians, Kosinski's rider is graceful on horseback...
...diminish the impersonality of Kosinski's narrative technique, Tarden says virtually nothing about how he feels, or about what sort of person he is. Once or twice he relates a view of him reflected in the perceptions of some third person, as when he eavesdrops on a mistress describing him to someone else; on those occasions it is as if a bit of recognizable reality has accidentally made its way into Tarden's nightmarish, monomaniacal descriptions of torture and death. There is no question but that Kosinski is a fiction writer of considerable craft, as well as imagination. These...
...WORLD of Cockpit is not only barren, it is random and irrational. Tarden's obsession with power is a way of fighting the absolute dominion of chance and accident, a way (he reverses Faulkner's phrase) of surviving where most people only know how to endure. Tarden blinds an armed attacker by luring him into a room used for treating photographic plates with powerful quartz lights. That man, he says, was a fool for taking so few precautions. Tarden, on the other hand, hooks his feet around the legs of chairs so they can't be pulled out from under...
...even Tarden cannot endure beyond the limits of chance and his own mortality. His tireless self-confidence finally shaken by a narrow escape from a broken elevator in one of his high-rise apartment buildings, he conjures up this final, barren image...
Sweating and vomiting, trapped by the weakness of his body, Tarden is still in the cockpit. The limitations of Tarden's religion of power, suggested before, are finally confirmed. All that's left, in this bitter novel, is an unredeemed sense of futility...