I
occasionally chart my progress though this reading list on Facebook and invite
others to join me in reading the next book.
Once I finished Herzog, I made a blanket invitation to read The
Painted Bird with me. I noted that I
had no idea what the book was about but that it was less than 250 pages in the
version I had, so come play! There were
no takers, but then there never are, so that’s not especially noteworthy. The thing that interested me was one of my
friends’ responses: “Hooboy,” he wrote. I
asked if he had read the book and what
his comment meant. He responded, “ Yea. I have not read the Painted Bird, but it's often at
the top of ‘I want to be really really depressed, what should I read?’ threads.” His comment made me both laugh and think.
The last time I had heard someone tell me that he didn’t
want to read a book because he didn’t want to be depressed was in reference to
Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. If
someone summarized just the plot of Grapes of Wrath, I don’t think I’d
want to read it either. Similarly, if
before reading The Painted Bird, I knew that the story followed a child
as he aged from 6 to 12 in the backwoods villages of a non-specific Eastern European
country betting beaten, abused and molested while watching other get beaten,
abused, and molested until the war ends and he is reunited with his parents
only to discover that everyone is broken from the brutality of the war and no
connection with anyone else can be made—if I knew that, I would not have dived
energetically into the book.
But of course a novel is so much more than the outline of
its plot. In fact, with the exception of
plot-twist-filled mystery stories, the plot is usually the least interesting
part of any novel. If you were to give a
two page plot summary to 100 writers and asked them to tell that story, you
would get 100 entirely different novels.
A novel is created by language, by characters and characterizations, by
descriptions and the lack of descriptions.
It’s tone and perspective, sentence structure and attitude. A book is never “about” its plot, and to
dismiss a book because of its plot is to deprive yourself of some incredible
reading, especially if you are talking about Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted
Bird.
The story is riveting from the outset. Kosinski creates such a complete and
absorbing world, that I wanted more and more, no matter how horrifying the
events were to become. And even when
they were at their worst, the neutral tone and simple structure of the
sentences and observations, presented through the eyes of a child who is no
longer innocent but still far from experienced, all work together to create a
visceral and intellectual punch that provides an impact without dragging me
emotionally down. There is, in short,
nothing sentimental to gum up the works and bring the story down to an
emotional morass.
The Painted Bird is a brilliant way to approach the
horrors of World War II. The war roils
all around the action and is a constant presence even though we never witness a
single battle. The genocidal policies of
the Nazis are given a grand context of hatred and meanness that is at the heart
of the human condition, as Kosinski sees it.
The peasants of the villages that the narrator wanders between are no
romanticized or idyllic figures. The
hatred of Jews, Gypsies, and other dark-haired peoples pre-existed Hitler’s rise,
and the “science” of the Nazis that discussed brain sizes and attempted to
prove the sub-human status of a large portion of the human race are predated by
the superstitions of the villagers that can believe the narrator to be a
vampire, that the very color of his eyes are proof that he can cast curses.
In a lot of ways, The Painted Bird is a re-telling of The
Odyssey. Odysseus has become a child
wandering through the world looking for his home, suffering greater trials than
the Greek hero could imagine. The mist
of mythology is replaced by figures of earth and clay. When the boy finally reaches home, he’s not
sure that he belongs even there, as if Odysseus, upon reaching Penelope,
decides he is too changed to live the life he once did. Like all the children in the orphanage, the
narrator is scarred and broken. The
children are identified by their unique brand of destruction and brutality,
carrying names like Tank, Flamethrower, Torpedo, and Sniper. It’s an interesting indictment of war. The war is certainly responsible for tearing
all these families apart, for crushing these children and ruining their
spirits, but the narrator’s adventures show that the brutality of the world
exists even before war comes to the land, and it exists completely separate
from the war. War does not break humans;
broken humans make war.
The question at the heart of the novel is this: why do some people have the power to make
others suffer and why are others made to suffer? The narrator’s main quest is survival, and to
survive he wants to discover the secret of how he can move from a sufferer to
the other side of the equation. He turns
to Christian prayers, and when he feels that fails, he embraces the powers of
the Evil Ones. They too fail him, and he
is left with Mitka’s philosophy of revenge: if you are made to suffer, make he
who hurt you hurt equally. It is this
philosophy that leads The Silent One to kill hundreds in an engineered train
catastrophe in order to kill one man who hurt and embarrassed the
narrator. The Silent One created his own
holocaust and still failed to exact revenge on the one person he wanted to die. Clearly, this is no way to conduct our human
affairs.
In recalling The Odyssey or one of the Brothers Grimm
twisted tales, the narrative sometimes feels like a piece of folklore, and like
folklore, it holds the seeds of truth about human motivations and
nastiness. No matter how much you might
love your fellow man, you cannot deny the accuracy of the ugliness in this
portrayal. There is a ton to think about
here. There are beautiful and disturbing
passages to roll over in your mind.
There is a lot to be upset about, a lot to want to change. But there is nothing to keep you from reading
it.
No comments:
Post a Comment