Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird Hatters Cabinet（像是一部画鸟,帽匠的内阁）.pdf

“KO SIN SK I’S TH E PA IN TE D BIRD ” A .E .M . BA U MA N N – PA G E 1 – J erzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird A.E .M. Baumann © 2014 As is often the case, happenstance led me to read Jerz y Kosinski’s The Painted Bird : the timing of seeing it on some “top-50 variety lists followed by watching over an FB discussion on the book. I have to say I very much enjoy ed it, plowing through it in but four days (which is quick for me, considering my fiction reading usually gathers the least attention). It is a literary work, one that works not in the mechanical ticking of standard narrative but within the symbolic realm of myth. I would not raise it to the highest level of literature, but I would solidly put it on the second tier. That probably means nothing to anyone but me, so let me say instead that I would love to teach the book, and I am very discriminatory about the books that I might bring into a classroom. I do not care about a work’s popularity or social importance: I care only for its merits as a work of literature, as an attempt at art. The syntax is mostly direct, generally avoiding complexity in its semantic style. Where the work rises above the norm is in how it drifts from narrative to exposition without ever losing the framework of being within the mind of the child; in how the book sets itself within a mythic world and sustains it through the whole of the book, if the reader at all participates; it how in its depictions of violence and sex it never falls into monotony or banality; and in its philosophical aspects it never devolves into ideology. Plus, its primary theme – that of the individual – is one inevitably attractive to me. The book is unified, envisioned, and well executed. On the