When I was younger, I re-read books constantly because I had a finite number of books and seemingly an infinite amount of time. Now the circumstances are reversed, and I have an infinite number of books to read and precious few minutes to read them. The idea of re-reading a book seems like a waste of time, so I’ve been ruthlessly culling books from my library to unclutter both my living and cerebral space. During one of these audits, I found The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski, which I read in college for a sociology class. (Oh, how I long for my college years, when my sole responsibility was to read books.)
As I held The Painted Bird, I developed an intense ache to read it again. Twelve years later, I still remember passages in great detail. It’s a brutal book based very loosely (though not autobiographical) on Kosinski’s experiences during World War II, when as a young boy he was sent by his parents to go into hiding from the Nazis in rural Poland (though Kosinski never names Poland nor makes clear if the boy is Jewish or a “Gypsy.”) The boy encounters horror after horror as he flees from one village to the next, mostly as a servant for extremely effed up peasants. I mean, not even in the darkest recesses of my imagination could I conjure such depravity. And amidst all this cruelty, violence, and all-around nastiness, a young boy struggles to make sense of a senseless world and against all odds, he survives and is reunited with his parents, damaged and fractured as the post-war world around him.
In the afterward that Kosinski penned in 1976, ten years after the book’s publication, he writes:
As I began to write [The Painted Bird], I recalled The Birds, the satirical play by Aristophanes. His protagonists, based on important citizens of ancient Athens, were made anonymous in an idyllic natural realm…the symbolic use of birds, which allowed him to deal with actual events and characters without the restrictions which the writing of history imposes, seemed particularly appropriate, as I associated it with a peasant custom I had witnessed during my childhood. One of the villagers’ favorite entertainment was trapping birds, painting thir feathers, then releasing them to rejoin their flock. As these brightly colored creatues sought the safety of their fellows, the other birds, seeing them as threatening aliens, attacked and tore at the outcasts until they killed them. I decided I too would set my work in a mythic domain, in the timeless fictive present, unrestrained by geography or history. My novel would be called The Painted Bird.
But of course, Kosinsky’s book has a very specific geography, a very specific history, of Eastern Europe during World War II. It is impossible for a modern reader to transcend this backstory and make it applicable to, say, modern-day America. It is impossible to forget that this is a work of fiction, not an autobiography, of a man who killed himself at age 57 by wrapping his head in a plastic bag. I started re-reading The Painted Bird, encountered the brutality, remembered, and stopped on page 68. I decided that I really didn’t need to read this book again.
