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Binding: Hardcover
EAN: 9780517031827
ISBN: 0517031825
Label: Random House Value Publishing
Manufacturer: Random House Value Publishing
Number Of Items: 1
Publication Date: 1990-02-25
Publisher: Random House Value Publishing
Product Release Date: 1990-02-25
Studio: Random House Value Publishing

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: More like a wrestling match than a reading experience...
Review:

Allegedly Kosinski's response to charges of plagiarism, autobiographical dishonesty, and using ghost-writers to pen his bestsellers, *The Hermit of 69th Street* is a book--not a novel in the ordinary sense of that term--that not only defies classification, but defies you to read it at all.

Cluttered with footnotes, asides, and quotations that are sometimes illuminating, occasionally fascinating, but just as often tedious and unnecessary, the conceit of this book is announced in the subtitle: The Working Papers of Norbert Kosky. The idea being that very few authors write a book entirely by themselves even if the finished work belongs indisputably to one man--instead a book is shaped and brought to fruition by the efforts of a team of people, editors, typists, proofreaders, etc. Thus, by presenting these original `working papers,' Kosinski seeks, in part, to refute the charges that were leveled against him late in his career.

How well he does that--and if his argument holds water--is a matter of opinion. Certainly a lot of authors are helped by editors, but just as certainly a lot arent, or, at least, not to the degree that Kosinski seems to argue.

The rest of *The Hermit of 69th Street* is a kind of encyclopedic text of all things Kosinski. A fictionalized autobiography--Kosinski calls it `autofiction'--that brings together his lifelong obsessions with sex, spirituality, freedom, Judaism, the Holocaust, and the vocation of writing in terms of the metaphor of swimming and/or floating. A lot of this is of interest to writers--and being one myself ((*Hardcore Romeo*)), I can't accurately gauge how interesting it would be to non-writers. One thing is for certain: this is not the kind of book to read if you're looking for a `good story.' There are some interesting `behind-the-scenes' peeks at Kosinski's Oscar appearance and his flirtation with Hollywood via the film version of his novel *Being There* and his appearance in *Reds* and it can be fun to speculate who the "real people" are that Kosinski is satirizing, but otherwise this text is a little like surfing the internet or looking into a filing cabinet of someone's personal documents and notes--a grab-bag of stuff all loosely connected and every once in a while something that really surprises you.

In the end, I found this an interesting book, perhaps because of and made all the more poignant by the fact that it was Kosinski's last and his suicide followed not long after its publication--a suicide foreshadowed in these very pages. It is a very personal book by a man infamous for hiding behind a kaleidoscope of persona, a very truthful book, it strikes me, by a man whose entire life, so his accusers charge, was nothing but a series of lies. A failed experiment, if you judge such things by sales figures, an unread book, a `confession' no one wanted to hear, let alone forgive...a prayer lost like those of the victims of a Holocaust that in the end he didn't so much escape, as delay.

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