I don’t one hundred percent know the story of Jerzy Kosinski, but basically he was a literary wunderkind in the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies. He published three novels, two of which won major American awards, he seemingly came out of nowhere, and then he was almost immediately swamped with accusations of fraud and/or plagiarism.
This novel….well, I guess it doesn’t actually call itself a novel or anything. It calls itself Steps, but then it doesn’t designate. It’s a series of vignettes, some of which are fine or even good and some of which are more or less nonsense. There’s not a lot of there here.
Anyway, it reads like a good Milan Kundera short story boiled down to its essential donee, in Henry James parlance, and then on to the next one. I read this while having a beer on my porch while the dog couldn’t figure out how to go from seeing me in the window to getting herself onto the porch. It was very cute, and more or less as entertaining as this book. I guess I will put it in the little free library around the corner, but whatever.
Some of the vignettes are fine and some are not. I don’t know…I guess when I am confronted with a book that is not a novel and not really short stories and not really poetry….this is me:
So anyway, you could read this book. You could. You really could. Or you could read a Milan Kundera story, I recommend: http://shallaon.blogspot.ca/2005/12/shalla-on-hitchhiking-game-by-milan.html