Word: tarden
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...narrator, Tarden, is the agent of the horrors suffered by the brutalized boy in The Painted Bird and perhaps his inevitable successor. Where the boy was tortured by a primitive, irrational peasantry, Tarden is the tormentor, choosing his victims arbitrarily and without passion. As a child of three, he recalls, Tarden plunged a pair of scissors into the breast of his nurse; he remembers watching the purple stain spreading through her blouse. He moves on to varieties of cruelty that defy, one would have thought, imagining...
...Tarden isn't always the perpetrator of Cockpit's atrocities. Sometimes, as in Steps, he is only a witness; occasionally he is the victim. Once in a while, in his apparently motiveless interference in people's lives, he does them a good turn. In the process, we don't learn very much about him. He has an apparently limitless amount of money, and an extraordinary intelligence for survival (he boasts of this). He describes some of his past in a sketchy and idealized way: he managed by cunning to escape from a totalitarian, evidently EasternEuropean state; in the United States...
...Camerawork. For all his adrenal meanderings, Tarden is not without wit. He often affects an officer's uniform of no known country, then parades through towns watching functionaries cringe and scrape before him. By seizing upon the paranoid fantasies of East European officials, he forces a bureaucracy to fall of its own weight and makes good his escape-as did his creator 18 years...
...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 and horrific as any passage in any of this year's thrillers...
...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...