Oral Pleasure: Kosinski as Storyteller

Having once vowed never to speak in public, award-winning novelist and screenwriter Kosinski (The Painted Bird) certainly broke that promise—and the interviews, lectures, and essays compiled by his late widow, Kiki, illuminate the life he both exposed and concealed in his fiction. Kosinski (1933–1991) saw himself foremost as a storyteller, and the contents of this book are peppered with stories—most significantly the tale of his own childhood, spent fleeing Nazis across the Polish countryside during the Holocaust. In discussing the craft of writing, he emphasizes the blurred line between fiction and autobiography that leads to “autofiction,” which involves “openly integrating elements of my own life, in a distorted manner, into my fiction.” Containing more than 60 documents from Kosinski’s career, the book flows like a conversation: sometimes repeating itself, sometimes following non sequiturs onto tangential topics, but thanks to the strength of Kosinski’s voice, still coherent and recognizably whole. It takes effort to get through this book—the kind of concentration that Kosinski himself saw disappearing in America—but even without prior knowledge of his work, Kosinski rewards those willing to engage with his stories. Agent: Ellen Levine, Trident Media Group. (Dec.)