Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
---|---|---|
Searching... Hardwood Creek Library (Forest Lake) | FICTION CHA | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
"A moving attempt to trace the connections between Kosinski's wartime struggles and postwar fictions." -- New Yorker
" Jerzy is a novel with a light touch that's still capable of lifting heavy subjects. Charyn knows what he wants to do and knows how to do it. . . . [He] show[s] that all forms of power are pretty much alike, or at least connected--Hollywood, Capitol Hill, Kensington Palace, the Kremlin. Because Kosinski is a figure who proves (if we still need to learn it) that the craziness of American life may have more in common with the craziness of Russia and Europe than we like to think." -- New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)
Jerzy Kosinski was a great enigma of post-World War II literature. When he exploded onto the American literary scene in 1965 with his best-selling novel The Painted Bird , he was revered as a Holocaust survivor and refugee from the world hidden behind the Soviet Iron Curtain. He won major literary awards, befriended actor Peter Sellers (who appeared in the screen adaptation of his novel Being There ), and was a guest on talk shows and at the Oscars. But soon the facade began to crack, and behind the public persona emerged a ruthless social climber, sexual libertine, and pathological liar who may have plagiarized his greatest works.
Jerome Charyn lends his unmistakable style to this most American story of personal disintegration, told through the voices of multiple narrators--a homicidal actor, a dominatrix, and Joseph Stalin's daughter--who each provide insights into the shifting facets of Kosinski's personality. The story unfolds like a Russian nesting doll, eventually revealing the lost child beneath layers of trauma, while touching on the nature of authenticity, the atrocities of WWII, the allure of sadomasochism, and the fickleness of celebrity.
Jerome Charyn is the author of, most recently, A Loaded Gun: Emily Dickinson for the 21st Century , Bitter Bronx: Thirteen Stories , I Am Abraham: A Novel of Lincoln and the Civil War , and The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson: A Novel .
Author Notes
Jerome Charyn is the author of more than fifty works of fiction and nonfiction, including Sergeant Salinger ; Cesare: A Novel of War-Torn Berlin ; The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King: A Novel of Teddy Roosevelt and His Times ; In the Shadow of King Saul: Essays on Silence and Song ; Jerzy: A Novel ; and A Loaded Gun: Emily Dickinson for the 21st Century . Among other honors, his novels have been selected as finalists for the Firecracker Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Charyn has also been named a Commander of Arts and Letters by the French Minister of Culture and received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in New York.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Charyn (The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson) peels back the layers of myth and artifice built up by chameleon-like Polish-American novelist Jerzy Kosinski, author of The Painted Bird and Being There. A World War II survivor and international icon, Kosinski was a celebrated and controversial writer who rose to prominence in the 1960s only to crumble under the weight of his lies and accusations of plagiarism. To unravel Kosinski's story, Charyn begins at the end and works his way backward through Kosinski's life. He uses four main characters-an assistant to Peter Sellers, Joseph Stalin's daughter, an alcoholic socialite, and eventually Kosinski himself-to highlight the many ways Kosinski reinvented himself in order to climb the social ladder throughout his life. The narrative is passed from person to person like a relay race, with Kosinski always on the periphery of another, larger story being told. Charyn's clever novel underscores the sense that Kosinski was a man impossible to nail down, given to wild changes in personality and appearance depending on his own wealth, desires, and mood. Through triangulating voices and stories, Charyn manages to get close to the truth, and does so with beautiful, spare prose. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
The rise and fall of novelist Jerzy Kosinski (1933-1991) emerges in an offbeat way through real and imagined figures in his life.The narrative moves fitfully through Kosinski's life in five chapters that almost reluctantly form a mosaic of the whole man. The long opening section, the most charming of the quintet, touches on the entire span and the main characters that will follow. But it's dominated by Peter Sellers and narrated by the actor's driver as they seek an audience with Stan Laurel, dally with Lord Snowden and Princess Margaret, and then, for six years, pursue Kosinski's blessing to let Sellers play the character Chance in the movie version of Being There. Charyn (A Loaded Gun, 2016, etc.) gives a chapter to Stalin's daughter, who in fact lived next door to Kosinski in Princeton, looks into his strange marriage to an alcoholic heiress (her late husband changed here to the fictional Petroleum Jelly King), and revels in a dominatrix calling herself Anna Karenina who helps Kosinski, a patron of sex clubs, find the ideal editor. For a time, Kosinski was a darling of New York society, famed for colorful tales of his boyhood in wartime Polanda period covered in the last chapterand a serious artist, winning the 1969 National Book Award for Steps. Then came the 1982 Village Voice article that exposed his poor English skills and total reliance on the rewriting of secret editors. Charyn refers to the problem oftenoften enough to raise the question of how much schadenfreude is operating here. Kosinki's is a sad tale; he was a gifted raconteur except on the page in his chosen language, a flaw all the more obvious when conveyed through Charyn's resourceful imagination and always-colorful, punchy, provocative prose. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Versatile and inventive Charyn continues his audacious fictionalization of writers' lives, following The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson (2010) with an erotically charged take on Jerzy Kosinski. Hailed as a brilliant Polish WWII refugee for his first novel, The Painted Bird (1965), Kosinski became a high-profile celebrity who was subsequently accused of plagiarism, a charge left unresolved when he committed suicide at age 57 in 1991. Charyn seeks to fathom the mysteries of this enigma of many masks, myths, and disconcerting powers in a novel that jump-cuts back in time as various unreliable narrators recount provocative experiences with this literary chimera. There's Ian, factotum for Peter Sellers who will sell both their souls to play the leading role in the film version of Kosinski's Being There (1971); famous defector Svetlana, Stalin's daughter; Jerzy's wealthy ex-wife; a lesbian dominatrix; and a sexy ghostwriter. Jerzy emerges as a hawk-like, sinister, and lustful sorcerer and pathological liar. As Charyn, deeply versed in Kosinski's worlds, reaches back to young Jerzy's mastering of the art of lying to survive the war, he ultimately portrays a traumatized, desperately masquerading artist caught between languages, identities, and cultures, and between renown and scandal. Daringly imaginative and profoundly insightful.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE EVANGELICALS: The Struggle to Shape America, by Frances FitzGerald. (Simon & Schuster, $35.) FitzGerald's fair-minded history focuses on the doctrinal and political issues that have concerned white conservative Protestants since they abandoned their traditional separation from the world and, led by Billy Graham and others, merged with the Republican Party. WHITE TEARS, by Hari Kunzru. (Knopf, $26.95.) Two white hipster record producers create a "classic" blues song as an internet hoax, but it turns out (perhaps) to be real. This dark, complex ghost story about racial privilege, cultural appropriation and (of course) the blues is written with Kunzru's customary eloquence and skill. SEX AND THE CONSTITUTION: Sex, Religion, and Law From America's Origins to the Twenty-First Century, by Geoffrey R. Stone. (Liveright, $35.) A professor's history takes off as it approaches the increasingly tolerant present; Stone can recognize a good anecdote or a colorful character when he sees one. JERZY, by Jerome Charyn. (Bellevue Literary, paper, $16.99.) This novel, based on the life of the celebrity fiction writer and fabulist Jerzy Kosinski, has a light touch but manages to lift heavy subjects. Charyn makes the real and the imagined sound equally plausible. BLITZED: Drugs in the Third Reich, by Norman Ohler. Translated by Shaun Whiteside. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $28.) The Third Reich was literally an altered state, according to Ohler's provocative account: methamphetamines for the SS and the troops, along with factory workers and housewives; cocaine, steroids, sex hormones and an early form of OxyContin for the Führer. THE NOVEL OF THE CENTURY: The Extraordinary Adventure of "Les Misérables," by David Bellos. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) Rarely has a work of literature suffered so at the hands of publishers, translators, filmmakers and musical impresarios, as Bellos's impeccably researched and pithily written book demonstrates. It doubles as a fascinating partial biography of Victor Hugo. EVENINGLAND: Stories, by Michael Knight. (Atlantic Monthly, $25.) Knight pays careful writerly attention to the details of desperation among prosperous characters in his impressive story cycle set in and around Mobile Bay, Ala. The ghost of Walker Percy hovers. THE IDIOT, by El if Batuman. (Penguin Press, $27.) An innocent, language-intoxicated teenager, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives at Harvard in the '90s to pursue love and (especially) literature in Batuman's hefty, gorgeous digressive slab of a novel. EARTHLY REMAINS, by Donna Leon. (Atlantic Monthly, $25.) The seemingly unstoppable polluting of Venice's great lagoon is at the heart of this new mystery. The 26 th of Leon's novels featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti, it is one of her best, and saddest. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books.