The Painted Bird

What a beautifully written horrid tale. The language and prose is quite stunning. But by god what an extreme series of heinous atrocities in one book.

If you like rape and bestiality this is the book for you.

After reading I'm not quite sure what the point of this book is. To reveal the evil nature of man? To explain to us that no one should be trusted? Near the end it seems to convey something of a “man is an island” sort of vision.

It's weird and awful. The amount of agony that the boy endures is surely fiction. If not this world is terrible and we should jump ship.

I recently read Dave Eggers' What is the What. And where that was also awful. It was different. More hopeful and sounded more realistic. I'm not sure what to make of this.


Edit:

I've been thinking about this book a lot these last few days. So at least there is that. The core of the story perhaps lies in the postwar scenes where the protagonist lives in the orphanage.

There is this particular passage where he and a friend find out about a railroad switch. They give it some oil and they can actually pull the lever and change the course of the train:

‘All I had to do was leap to the switch and move the points, sending the whole train over the cliff into the peaceful stream below. All it needed was one push on the lever . . .
I recalled the trains carrying people to the gas chambers and crematories. The men who had ordered and organized all that probably enjoyed a similar feeling of complete power over their uncomprehending victims. These men controlled the fate of millions of people whose names, faces, and occupations were unknown to them, but whom they could either let live or turn to fine soot flying in the wind. All they had to do was issue orders and in countless towns and villages trained squads of troops and police would start rounding up people destined for ghettos and death camps. They had the power to decide whether the points of thousands of railroad spurs would be switched to tracks leading to life or to death.
To be capable of deciding the fate of many people whom one did not even know was a magnificent sensation. I was not sure whether the pleasure depended only on the knowledge of the power one had, or on its use.'

Also I found out the made a movie out of this. Why on god's green earth would you do such a thing.