Interesting internet info on Jerzy Kosinski, author of the astonishing book The Painted Bird, which we are now reading, as well as of Being There. Turns out he committed sicide in 1991 with his literary reputation greatly tarnished. There are claims that Being There was plagiarised from a pre-war Polish book (though there must have been significant changes as there can't have been television in pre-war Poland). As for The Painted Bird, it seems that Kosinski relied heavily on translators and assistants to the point that one poet claimed he should have been given credit as author, though others could have said the same. And, in some ways worst of all, The Painted Bird is not at all autobiographical, though Kosinski - who admittedly never said it was - had encouraged people to believe it was based on his life. It turns out that far from spending his early years surviving on his own in German occupied Eastern Europe, he lived with his parents in a Russian border town in the east of Poland, admittedly told never to say he was Jewish.
While the quality of fiction is not dependent on the life of the writer, there is nontheless a problem. When some events in the book seemed not credible, the reader extended credit - after all Kosinski should know as his childhood was spent in the same horror. That authority is gone, and there is a certain sense of betrayal.
JAWORSKI TRAVELS