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Jerzy Kosinski won France's Best Foreign Book Award for The Painted Bird, the National Book Award in Fiction for Steps, and received the American Academy and National Institute of Arts and Letters' Award in Literature. He is also the author of Being There, The Devil Tree, Cockpit, Blind Date, Passion Play and Pinball, and of several non-fiction works. His books have been translated into most major languages. Mr Kosinski taught English at Wesleyan, Princeton and Yale Universities. He was the President of the American Center of P.E.N., an association of writers and editors, and was active in many human rights organisations. He died in 1991.
After the literal horror of The Painted Bird and the inchoate horror of Steps, this is a seriocomic cryptofable, a commentary on 'being there' or rather not being at all, in which passivity is perhaps a kindlier fate than participation. The non-hero, non-entity is Chance who has spent many years walled off from the world gardening or watching television. When forced out, he permits himself to be programmed from one experience to another. He becomes the protege of people in high places; his few simple remarks are assumed to be momentous as well as prophetic re the state of the nation; a foolinnocent, he only watches as he always has and thus remains unspoiled and walks away from the contamination-corruption of others to contempler son jardin in serenity. Mr. Kosinski's quizzically amused and amusing small story rebukes here, affirms there, and exposes, just as blatantly as a commercial, the styrofoam composition of our society. As an envoi, who could say it any more persuasively than Mr. Kosinski's Russian writer: One could make this fable clearer still: but let us not provoke the geese. (Kirkus Reviews)
