Volume 12, Number 4 · February 27, 1969
Lean Creatures
By D.A.N. Jones
Steps
by Jerzy Kosinski
Random House, 148 pp., $4.95
Up
by Ronald Sukenick
Dial Press, 330 pp., $4.95
Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon
by Marjorie Kellogg
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 216 pp., $4.95
Yellow Flowers in the Antipodean Room
by Janet Frame
Braziller, 256 pp., $5.95
Jerzy Kosinski's collection of painful scenes is compared by his publishers with a set of Goya etchings: certainly the subject matter is comparable, in the cruelty of the events represented, but Goya used to add comments—reprimands, prayers, and curses. There is not much of this kind of feeling in Steps. On the dust jacket is quoted a 100-word extract of, no doubt, widespread appeal: it describes a naked woman imprisoned in a cage suspended from a ceiling. There are also rapes, persecutions, cruel revenges, and unjust executions. In its determination to avoid shallow feeling, Kosinski's chill prose recalls Thom Gunn's verse and similarly reflects the imagination of a postwar adolescence. (Kosinski was born in Poland in 1933.) 'After the history has been made,' begins Gunn's poem, Adolescence, which concludes:
Review, 3010 words
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