The Painted Bird

By: Jerzy Kosinski

Narrated by: Fred Berman, Michael Aronov

Length: 10 hrs and 12 mins

Publisher's summary

Originally published in 1965, The Painted Bird established Jerzy Kosinski as a major literary figure. Called by the Los Angeles Times "one of the most imposing novels of the decade" it was eventually translated into more than 30 languages.

A harrowing story that follows the wanderings of a boy abandoned by his parents during World War II, The Painted Bird is a dark masterpiece that examines the proximity of terror and savagery to innocence and love. It is the first, and the most famous, novel by one of the most important and original writers of this century.

©1965 Jerzy N. Kosinski (P)2010 HighBridge Company

Critic reviews

"One of the best. . . . Written with deep sincerity and sensitivity." (Elie Wiesel, The New York Times Book Review)

"Extraordinary... literally staggering...one of the most powerful books I have ever read." ( Harper’s magazine)

A guided tour of Hell.

This book is a harrowing experience from beginning to end, no question about it. It is an unrelentingly bleak cataloging of human cruelty. There are moments that are very hard to get through. Moments when you must stop and catch your breath before going on.

I was utterly taken aback by several scenes in the novel, horrors that I knew at once I would never forget. Here are depictions of depravity so raw and visceral they leave the reader virtually poleaxed; stunned and gasping.

And then, at the end, I was equally shocked by something Kosinski says in his brief afterword.

He mentions that at a family gathering some years after the publication of his novel, family members from Eastern Europe accused him of downplaying the atrocities that occurred in their villages. Downplaying indeed.

Be forewarned. This one is a tough listen. It is however, a remarkable novel and justifiably considered a classic not just of Holocaust literature but in the larger sense as well.

Darkly poetic. Starkly beautiful. Mesmerizing and brutal. It is difficult to look away once the novel's melancholy spell takes hold.

Fred Berman's narration seemed entirely appropriate to me. Lightly accented, but easily understandable. Never overdone; never distracting. All in all, a very good fit for an undeniably difficult but worthwhile listen.

Extremely difficult

While I made it through this book - I did not enjoy it. I understand the author is making a point about the horrors of war on a civilian population - but the increasing depravity and horrid descriptions of the atrocities inflicted on animals, the protagonist, women, and a few men - were terrible to listen to. At the end, there is no satisfying conclusion to the story and it seemed sadistic and I felt a little dirty and disgusted at having listened to it all the way through. I would NOT recommend listening to this book. There was one scene in particular where I had to go into the bathroom and retch - it was that horrific.

Too miserable for me

I liked the writer's style and especially enjoyed the surrealistic moments, and the narrator was odd but perfect for the piece. However...I had to stop listening at chapter 8. The litany of cruelty to innocence is just too miserable to me. I was thinking, "OK, I get it already!" and had two thirds of the novel yet to go...really didn't need to have any more animals tortured and children abused in depressing detail to get the point. Skip to the end...

what a great book!

i read "the painted bird" when it first appeared as a pocket book around 1966 or 67, and was pretty much bowled over by it. curiously, despite the much later appearance of books like "bloodlands" by timothy snyder, which described, in gory detail, the unbelievable bloodshed that took place in that area, the "bloodlands" comprised of poland and the ukraine -- i.e., the "unnamed eastern countries" of the painted bird -- i never took kosinski's book as autobiography --- i imagined it more as a story about a "collective" character, a composite character, made up of the fates of several people that kosinski may have known or whose stories he had heard. it was, i thought, a fictional, or factive, story like günter grass's "tin drum" (based on WWII) or grimmelshausen's "simplicissimus", a story about a character lost in the terrors of the 30-year-war, of 1618-48. but also the book struck me as being on a par with those two books, which are classics in their own right, very well written, memorable. the character in TPB, a picaro, jewish, as in the very first picaresque novel i'd come across, lazarillo of "lazarillo de tormes", a spanish classic from around the time of christopher columbus -- so too, the little lazar, the little jew, in this book, wanders from one scene of horror into the next, as did the character lasik in "the stormy life of lasik roitschwantz" (1960) by ilya ehrenburg. another great book in the picaresque tradition and i'm sure one that kosinski --- an author much accused of plagiarism -- must have been familiar with -- even long before it appeared in english in 1960. the english translation of ehrenburg's masterwork is pretty poor, BTW, especially when compared to the wonderful german -- and vaguely yiddish-sounding -- translation of 1929. the point here is that kosinski's book is not without antecedent, but it appeared in the english-speaking world like a comet, out of nowhere, and certainly impressed with its blinding light. i was pleased to hear the book rendered in this un-hurried, slightly foreign-accented reading -- which could, for all intents and purposes --- be a deliberate "act", part of the voice-actor's performance --- and so, what of it? it increases the sense of verisimilitude, it improves the reading. which is totally wonderful! and yes, the book holds up remarkably well. another thing that was always obvious to me -- all the more so, when i read that roman polanski and kosinski had been friends or acquaintances at the lodz film school in poland --- was that polanski should long ago have made a movie of this book. it hasn't happened so far and may now be unlikely to happen at all. polanski did make a movie of dickens's "oliver twist", which didn't really go much anywhere beyond the level of an "illustrated classic" comic book. someday somebody may have to make that movie yet, and the more time passes while we wait for it to appear, the more the stature of the book will grow as one-of-the great-classics-of-the-20th-century-that-has-never-been-filmed, much as "the catcher in the rye" hasn't. kosinski's other great book, which i found on audible in a very calm and unaffected reading by dustin hoffman -- none less! to be sure --- is "being there", which also exists as a great movie, starring peter sellers. it just antedates the reagan presidency by a few years --- if it had appeared any later it would have been thought of as a parody or political satire. even so, it serves that purpose well, seen from today's vantage point. to wrap up the point i want to make here --- this is a great reading of a great book, and deserves all the stars it can get. i would point the listener to the shorter and very different reading of "being there" next. hoffman's reading, in its subdued, matter-of-fact voice, does the book justice, as does the sellers film, one of the great movies of the 1980s. reading, hearing and seeing just these two books should allay anybody's doubts about kosinski's true stature in american literature. "the painted bird" is a classic, and this is an excellent reading of it.

It grips you and makes you beg for mercy

What did you like best about this story?

Stark and brutal perspective of Eastern Europe during WWII

If you could rename The Painted Bird, what would you call it?

Cruelty, A Primer

Any additional comments?

A harrowing and beautifully written book. Where Vonnegut gave us the American perspective of WWII in Slaughterhouse 5, Kosinski bring us the opposite, horrifying perspective through the eyes of a Jewish child as he witnesses and deals with the madness and carnage of WWII. This novel brings to vivid life the anguish and brutality of the times more than other books, photos or movies I have read/seen...it was a difficult read, but a mesmerizing one, and I felt at several times that I couldn't read any more but at the same time couldn't put this book down. A tremendous book really, the kind that changes your perspective on political realities...and makes you thankful for the enduring peace we have enjoyed in the US, but wary of what the future could hold. A must read -- but don't blame me for the nightmares you have afterwards.

Excellent but Tough

I love Kosinski and hope more of his work shows up. But he is not for everyone. I think this is an excellent novel, very poetic, tragic and brutal. Much like Cormac's The Road it is very disturbing at times, but I think it is an important work that should be read more and not forgotten. Stylistically it is full of poetry and symbolism, but sections can be hard to get through. I recommend it with caution.

A set piece for paper monsters

Any additional comments?

For someone to sit down and write a novel they have to have a reason for doing so, be it to explore something in life that has troubled them, for financial gain or political motivations, for entertainment, or any number of reasons. A book does not just happen, at least some thought and effort goes into even the most current, vapid, ghost-written celebrity expose. And so what is the purpose of The Painted Bird? Why was this book written?What is its purpose?

In the afterword, Jerzy Kosiński goes into great detail to explain the point of his book and to defend his writing of it and the contents of its pages. He believes many people have misinterpreted his intentions and his words and that people with political motives have actively tried to harm him. He goes on to say that the terrors he writes about in his book are not even a fraction of the true events that went on in Eastern Europe during WW2. He implies he could have written an even more brutal, horrific, and savage description of what people did during that conflict. He believes he held back and others believe he went to far.

In the mini-series Band Of Brothers there is an episode which focuses on the medic of Easy Company. This medic, during his trip into town for rest and supplies, meets a young nurse who is treating the wounded and with whom he immediately forms a bond. Their relationship, though brief, is obviously deeper than an - infatuation they are two common souls who we can easily believe will spend the rest of their lives together. And she dies. And in that death, amid all the other deaths we have seen, the real tragedy of war is felt, the loss of someone who we cannot replace in our hearts and our lives, the loss of a unique and beautiful and important human being. A loss that is in part noble because of the work she was doing and also part pointless because of the whole reason why she would have to be there in the first place: a war.

I bring up this scene in Band of Brothers because that one scene, I believe, does a better job of showing us the tragedy of war than all the pages of Jerzy Kosiński's book. No amount of the brutal descriptions of torture, and rape, and cruelty going on for pages and pages and chapters and hours of reading can capture just the single image of a nurse's headscarf amid the rubble of a bombed church.

And so I have to put this book in the same category as Bastard Out Of Carolina, a disingenuous telling of a real tragedy, a book that explores real pain with dishonesty. Yes, every event Jerzy Kosiński writes about may have actually happened to any number of people during the war - I do not dispute the brutality he writes about, especially during a conflict which ultimately saw the extermination of millions of Jews and millions of others both during and then after the war in other countries. But what is disingenuous is the way he went about telling us this story.

When the book was first published it was believed to be basically a memoir, a true account of the author's actual experiences. Later it came out the book was a work of fiction whose goal was only to explore the brutality of the war and that the author was only writing about what he had heard or been told or, perhaps, imagined.

Does it matter if the book is true or not? Is that an important distinction?

Jerzy Kosiński goes to great lengths to show cruelty, especially the cruelty done to the main character at the hands of simple and uneducated peasants. They beat him, they torture him, they rape each other, they engage in the most incestuous and animalistic behaviors. To be blunt, he makes them all look like animals. In his afterword he's on the record as saying it was not his intention to be racist or discriminatory towards Eastern European peasants, that he was only showing what actually happened. And there is no denying that people who are superstitious, ignorant, fearful, oppressed, and uneducated allowed (or turned their backs to) the persecution of Jews and gypsies. History has shown, time and again, people of all races and cultures are more than capable of being tremendously cruel to each other, and the Eastern European peasants are no exception and their simple ignorance does not excuse them from terrible behavior.

But the detail Jerzy Kosiński goes into, the amount of savagery he writes about is so overwhelming, so gory, so awful that after a while it loses its potency and it just turns the very real human beings who are also Eastern European peasants into the most vile, wicked, and most horrible person's on earth. Every time we meet a new peasant for the boy to interact with we just start to wonder what sort of savagery will be unleashed on the boy and us as a reader. We are so beaten down time after time with how horrible the main character will be treated we no longer see anyone here as human.

In a way, through all this hammering of brutality, we start to understand how people can begin to look on a whole other race of people as animals, as less than humans who can be easily loaded onto trains and sent to concentration camps to be gassed. And if that was what the author was going for then I suppose he succeeded.

But he did so at the expense of turning every Eastern European peasant into the very thing he had been persecuted for. He only turned that hate and fear and ignorance back onto someone else. He solves nothing and he implies his own people have never been guilty of anything, that he belongs to a race of people who are only ever persecuted, but always righteous. Add in the line of the main character remembering his family had servants (class distinction) and it's easy to believe the author was making a class judgment all around.

Now perhaps had the main character became a murderer, had he engaged in the most heinous evil himself, had he, unlike his fellow mute orphan friend, switched the railroad tracks and committed the crime himself, had he actually descended into the depths of cruelty, then maybe we would have been given at least a semblance of a character study of how all this hate and violence can turn a person to hate an violence.

Yet as a work of fiction (which is what Jerzy Kosiński insists this is), then we have to follow the rules of fiction and ask how much does the character change? Well, he changes very little. He's been through a lot, but other than being withdrawn and mistrustful, he's a paper thin character (surrounded by stereotypes) who is a victim from start to finish, a righteous whipping post at the hands of cruel, ignorant savages. His character teaches us nothing and he shows us nothing insightful.

Personally I think Jerzy Kosiński took advantage of many of the horrific true accounts from the war and thought he could turn them into a sensationalist book that would sell a lot of copies because of the sheer tremendous amount of savage brutality he could describe. I could never shake the feeling he reveled in the gory details and that he allowed his imagination to run with a morbid frenzy all the way across Eastern Europe. I never felt like I believed all this cruelty happened to just one little boy. Could it have happened to many different people cumulatively? No doubt, unfortunately. People can be awfully cruel. But for this one boy to have gone through trial after terrible trial, to have been through all he went through is just too much to accept in a work of fiction.

Had the book been true, well, then the book would have been genuine and maybe we would have learned something different because, after all, had it really happened to Jerzy Kosiński, then he would have had something different to say and think about those events because he would have lived through them. But not having lived through them means he can't actually know how that savage cruelty can actually effect a person.

He can't know what the real horror the real people who suffered during WW2 actually went through, and it's those people, the Jews, and the gypsies, and all the others who he does a disservice to. He can't know their agony and he can't teach it to us. Only an actual survivor who actually went through those events could know that. And my instinct tells me their stories, though also cruel, would have more moments similar to the nurse in Band Of Brothers: the personal losses, than anything the author here writes about.

And let's not let him off the hook by saying since it's just a work of fiction that none of this matters, that he has no responsibility to the truth, that he's all within his rights to turn an entire race and population of Eastern European peasants into the most base savages just for morbid entertainment sake. Sure, maybe in one hundred years a person could write a book like this and not have it reflect at all on the people in it, but to write this book just 20 years after the war when it is still fresh means he has to have known that even if the book had been called "The Totally Made Up Fictitious Account of Horrible Things That Did In No Way Happen To Me, The Author", it would still have affected people's perceptions of the people in the book because there really are Eastern European peasants. You can't have it both ways. You just can't write a book that claims to be a tool to show people who horrible the war was and then also say it's all made up and the bad people in it are not actually bad people.

So, to sum up, the book is disingenuous. It teaches us nothing because it is not true and since it is a work of fiction it has to be held to the standards of fiction. And those standards show us the book is just an endless series of brutalisms over and over and with paper-thin characters who do not change and that gives us hardly any insight into the human character the author hopes to explore.

This is a bad book. The people who committed the crimes against the Jews and gypsies and all the others were human beings, not some vision of Dante's Infernal Monsters. But the truth is human beings did this to other human beings. The actual brutality Jerzy Kosiński tells us that really happened to people during this period in history is just a set piece for paper monsters and it lets the truly awful people who committed these crimes off the moral hook, so-to-speak, by turning them into something that is not obligated to be moral. We have to accept that human beings are cruel, that the worst crimes in our society are committed by people just like us. To soften the blow, to shift the blame by saying these people are not actually human in some vapid attempt to comfort ourselves, to keep us from looking into the darkness of our hearts, means these crimes will continue to happen because they will never be addressed and understood. If we keep blaming monsters for our own actions, if we refuse to accept responsibility, then we are doomed as a species.

A dark, depressing, and often surreal tale

A dark, depressing, and often surreal tale of survival in Nazi-controlled Eastern Europe. This was recommended/not recommended by a professor I had. He recommended reading it because The Painted Bird is an influential (and controversial) work of Holocaust literature and his doctorate is in that field. He also didn't recommend reading it because it is dark and brutal and more than a little WTF.

In many ways 'The Painted Bird' reminded me of Cormac McCarthy's 'The Road'. Both have a similar apocalyptic atmosphere in which the depravity of man is paramount and the desperate struggle for survival seems hopeless. However, setting historical and Holocaust literature values aside, 'The Road' is a better book. 'The Painted Bird' seems determined to beat you over the head as bluntly as possible with just how horrible people can be, especially toward an outsider (i.e. a painted bird). While this is understandable given the setting and background of the work, the repetitive brutality and increasing WTF-factor ultimately undercuts the power and progress of the story. And it is entirely possible this was the author's intent, to beat the reader down until he/she feels nothing but a grey sense of resignation and numbness to the horrors around them. It is effective in that regard, but it certainly makes for some unpleasant reading. The narration really adds to this steady slide into despair. It is not bad narration, but it is...tired. A sort of monotone drone of tired hopelessness. Again this adds to the overall unpleasantness, but it is strikingly appropriate to the story.

'The Painted Bird' is a work of historical value, and anyone interested in Holocaust literature should read it, although I was surprised how minimally the war and Holocaust itself factored directly into the bulk of the work. It is controversial, largely due to issues with the author, and I would suggest reading up on that, as well as the author's response.

Ultimately, this is a work that must be read in light of the Holocaust. On it's own there isn't really much about this book that I'd recommend, but placed in its proper context, it is clearly not insubstantial in its scope and impact.

Chilling

This book shows, more than any that I have ever read, the need for good education everywhere.

couldn't take it

stopped at chapter 7
thought I could take anything. read the rape of Nanking a few weeks back. it was easier to stomach. if this work is fictional, I can't imagine how tortured would have to be the mind that came up with this. just have to quit. good luck.

Great book / difficult content

The book is a detailed account of a boys very hard life during the war. Good book although some of the content was very detailed and difficult to listen to.

powerful

powerful history of my country, some said in past that it was not the truth story. If you reach for this book you already familiar with holocaust and you will have to make your own mind

Kosinski shows, he doesn't tell

This is not a tale but an adventure—a gruesome adventure of a boy who endured all kinds of life's adversities thrown at him. The performance was epic; I wouldn't stop or pause once I started. I traveled with the boy through villages, breathtaking landscapes, swamps, churches, and back to the city. You will too. Just pick up the book.

superb.. harrowing and poignant

I was hooked on every page.. this book will stay with me forever with its vivid imagery, journey structure and parable feel.

shocking, what a crap

true story is , he was saved by Polish family , ungrateful 😒, shambolic and sad as Western Bank occupation

the painted bird

hard to believe this story i couldn't believe people could carry any of this out. unfortunately history of the human race says different. genuinely this book scared the shit out of me

Overwhelming

An intense illustration of suffering and loss of innocence. You will feel it and quickly become addicted to the shocking story. I will try to learn more about what I should habe learned from this book. For now I'm just left with a strong sense of aftershock. Great writing, brilliant recording, rattling story.

Enthralling and hard hitting tale

This was a dark story which was hard to get through at times, but gave a realistic feeling of the horrors that war brings. The weak and vulnerable are the ones who suffer most, and the author doesn't hold back in showing this.