Jerzy Kosinski Books

Few books have made me as irritated as "Cockpit," as Kosinki episodically unravels one nightmare after another. There is just a minimal spine to hold the narrative togther (American spy becomes filthy rich through his manipulation of others), minimal dialogue, and no resolution of character or story line. And to think Kosinki also authored "Being There" and was (is) a university professor! Good thing I invested just a dollar at a used-book counter.

Each little scene is often interesting but if you're waiting and hoping that the whole thing comes together and makes some kind of sense, you'll be waiting a long time. For Kosinski, there are better choices...

I've used the opening of this darkly prophetic novel--told from the POV of a social terrorist interested only in exploring the depths of human evil like Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment--in countless workshops and seminars to illustrate that your protagonist's "sympathetic" nature doesn't mean we LIKE him. 'Sympathetic' in its Greek root suggests that we can "relate to," or "suffer with," a character and from the haunting opening lines that's exactly what causes us to turn the pages--a mixture of horror and our own voyeuristic tendencies.

As I read the book I kept hoping that at some point there would be a moment of enlightenment. That there would be a place where things fell together and started to make sense. Where I'd feel like all these snippets of a guy continuously bragging about his life would have greater purpose that would make me forgive the author's pure drive to shock the reader. Unfortunately this never occurred and at the end I found myself convinced that my time would have been better spent doing or reading just about anything.

Place a razor blade in your mouth and hold it there for a few hours. Shift it around carefully, mindful of its cool threat to your tender flesh. This is the experience of reading "Cockpit," which tempts and seduces, but ultimately mangles your sense of peace. Much like his earlier "Steps," the book turns on what the desperate (or the simply sick) resort to when there is little to lose. Although I became sick to my stomach at some of the violence portrayed here, the book is worthwhile - even quite interesting - at times. Not for the faint of heart.

Allegedly Kosinski's response to charges of plagiarism, autobiographical dishonesty, and using ghost-writers to pen his bestsellers, *The Hermit of 69th Street* is a book--not a novel in the ordinary sense of that term--that not only defies classification, but defies you to read it at all.

Cluttered with footnotes, asides, and quotations that are sometimes illuminating, occasionally fascinating, but just as often tedious and unnecessary, the conceit of this book is announced in the subtitle: The Working Papers of Norbert Kosky. The idea being that very few authors write a book entirely by themselves even if the finished work belongs indisputably to one man--instead a book is shaped and brought to fruition by the efforts of a team of people, editors, typists, proofreaders, etc. Thus, by presenting these original `working papers,' Kosinski seeks, in part, to refute the charges that were leveled against him late in his career.

How well he does that--and if his argument holds water--is a matter of opinion. Certainly a lot of authors are helped by editors, but just as certainly a lot arent, or, at least, not to the degree that Kosinski seems to argue.

The rest of *The Hermit of 69th Street* is a kind of encyclopedic text of all things Kosinski. A fictionalized autobiography--Kosinski calls it `autofiction'--that brings together his lifelong obsessions with sex, spirituality, freedom, Judaism, the Holocaust, and the vocation of writing in terms of the metaphor of swimming and/or floating. A lot of this is of interest to writers--and being one myself ((*Hardcore Romeo*)), I can't accurately gauge how interesting it would be to non-writers. One thing is for certain: this is not the kind of book to read if you're looking for a `good story.' There are some interesting `behind-the-scenes' peeks at Kosinski's Oscar appearance and his flirtation with Hollywood via the film version of his novel *Being There* and his appearance in *Reds* and it can be fun to speculate who the "real people" are that Kosinski is satirizing, but otherwise this text is a little like surfing the internet or looking into a filing cabinet of someone's personal documents and notes--a grab-bag of stuff all loosely connected and every once in a while something that really surprises you.

In the end, I found this an interesting book, perhaps because of and made all the more poignant by the fact that it was Kosinski's last and his suicide followed not long after its publication--a suicide foreshadowed in these very pages. It is a very personal book by a man infamous for hiding behind a kaleidoscope of persona, a very truthful book, it strikes me, by a man whose entire life, so his accusers charge, was nothing but a series of lies. A failed experiment, if you judge such things by sales figures, an unread book, a `confession' no one wanted to hear, let alone forgive...a prayer lost like those of the victims of a Holocaust that in the end he didn't so much escape, as delay.

Allegedly Kosinski's response to charges of plagiarism, autobiographical dishonesty, and using ghost-writers to pen his bestsellers, *The Hermit of 69th Street* is a book--not a novel in the ordinary sense of that term--that not only defies classification, but defies you to read it at all.

Cluttered with footnotes, asides, and quotations that are sometimes illuminating, occasionally fascinating, but just as often tedious and unnecessary, the conceit of this book is announced in the subtitle: The Working Papers of Norbert Kosky. The idea being that very few authors write a book entirely by themselves even if the finished work belongs indisputably to one man--instead a book is shaped and brought to fruition by the efforts of a team of people, editors, typists, proofreaders, etc. Thus, by presenting these original `working papers,' Kosinski seeks, in part, to refute the charges that were leveled against him late in his career.

How well he does that--and if his argument holds water--is a matter of opinion. Certainly a lot of authors are helped by editors, but just as certainly a lot arent, or, at least, not to the degree that Kosinski seems to argue.

The rest of *The Hermit of 69th Street* is a kind of encyclopedic text of all things Kosinski. A fictionalized autobiography--Kosinski calls it `autofiction'--that brings together his lifelong obsessions with sex, spirituality, freedom, Judaism, the Holocaust, and the vocation of writing in terms of the metaphor of swimming and/or floating. A lot of this is of interest to writers--and being one myself ((*Hardcore Romeo*)), I can't accurately gauge how interesting it would be to non-writers. One thing is for certain: this is not the kind of book to read if you're looking for a `good story.' There are some interesting `behind-the-scenes' peeks at Kosinski's Oscar appearance and his flirtation with Hollywood via the film version of his novel *Being There* and his appearance in *Reds* and it can be fun to speculate who the "real people" are that Kosinski is satirizing, but otherwise this text is a little like surfing the internet or looking into a filing cabinet of someone's personal documents and notes--a grab-bag of stuff all loosely connected and every once in a while something that really surprises you.

In the end, I found this an interesting book, perhaps because of and made all the more poignant by the fact that it was Kosinski's last and his suicide followed not long after its publication--a suicide foreshadowed in these very pages. It is a very personal book by a man infamous for hiding behind a kaleidoscope of persona, a very truthful book, it strikes me, by a man whose entire life, so his accusers charge, was nothing but a series of lies. A failed experiment, if you judge such things by sales figures, an unread book, a `confession' no one wanted to hear, let alone forgive...a prayer lost like those of the victims of a Holocaust that in the end he didn't so much escape, as delay.

That is, if you can forget about the polo mistakes Kosinski or his ghost writers made. After all, polo is an abstruse sport, filled with arcane rules few understand. The rest of us can enjoy the novel for what it is, a fairly difficult novel about rootlessness and exile in 20th Century America. The hero, Fabian, takes his name from the socialist society of turn of the century England, and uses a trailer to transport himself and his animal across the nation. It's his "little home on wheels," as he calls it. Fabian is a suitable symbol for our deracinated society, in which nobody really has a home because of the topsy-turvy state of the planet.

As for the (numerous) sex scenes, Kosinski does a great job at making us care for the emotions behind the sex acts, not just the bodies, but the hearts and minds of his players. The book is called "Passion Play" not just because of the polo scenes, but because in this book JK hoped to expose the open nerves of his hero with the precision of a master surgeon, each vein and ambition caught and held deftly by a scalpel of precise imagery and language. Who would have thought that he didn't know how to speak a word of English until age eight? Play on, "PASSION PLAY."

As another commenter indicated, this book is written by someone who only wished he was a polo player. It's frighteningly inaccurate and I can't believe that one polo player in the world would agree with the presentations (or should I say misrepresentations) provided within the book. But to focus on the pathetic longings of a man who cannot even understand the rudimentary principles and practices of an elegant and beautiful sport that he wishes to focus his novel on is not even enough...no the content of the book is entirely jumbled with ridiculous sexual escapades merely placed in convenient intervals to titillate domesticated bookworms who may find men and women and transvestites and transsexuals sodomizing each other interesting. Fortunately I didn't buy this book and with the cold weather upon us I now have the kindling I need to start the Yule log--so thanks Jerzy!

You ever read one of those books and get about a third of the way in and you say to yourself "what the..."?
Well this is one of those books.
In essence its about a rather sad individual who drives across the country in a horse box with his polo ponies.
Now, anyone who plays polo and reads this book will read some of the descriptions with utter astonishment. The idea that you can stop your horsebox in a middle of a city car parking lot and practise on the tarmac is to anyone who knows about horses and or polo impossible. Immediately the writers credibility goes out the window.
This book is badly researched, dull in its content and baffling in its plot.
The second half may be much better than the first - I wouldnt know - I never got that far.

Painted Bird is on my all time best book list, so after learning that Kosinski had also written about polo--a sport I play & love, I rushed to read it. However, the main character and the baroque & over-the-top violence of the game and sex with a panoply of individuals who might be found in Joel Peter Witkin's photographs gets tiring, and Fabian always remains abstruse at best. If Kosinski desired to shock the polo world, he acheived it--see the other reviews by polo players below--and I do have to give him kudos for that, the image of the average upper-class WASP professional, or better yet macho South American, who bought the book based on polo content, reading the sex scenes does make me laugh. But in the end I'd recommend staying away from this book both from the perspective of a polo lover and Kosinski fan. There is a great novel to be written around polo, but this ain't it.

Bad condition, yellow and smelly. INCOMPLETE only 1 of the 5 books received