Steps

This book is a masterpiece in the weighted sense of the word. Notice the two reviews on the main page which were negative: "just a bit too much for me" "Some imaginations are almost too much, even for me" You two, my friends, are not the sort who should be reading great literature, and I don't know how you stumbled upon it. If this book is too much, then the world is too much, and reading real books is not the domain for the shy and weary. Kosinski's understanding of the world reveals a side many people, especially those whose idea of "what the world is like" is as cushioned as it is for most of us in America, wish did not exist. The book is really about power. It is present literally everywhere, it cannot be ignored, and in each power equation there is someone on both sides. But I am wrong to say that it cannot be ignored, and a great many modern lives are focused on doing just that. Nevertheless, this doesn't mean we should not understand it and see it in glorious action. These things happen everyday in the world. They happened to happen to this narrator. And this narrator happened to write his experience down into a solipsistic fragmentary masterpiece which portrays his battle with being a single human, a solipsistic human, in a world of other solipsists. What I haven't mentioned so far is that this 149 page book is the most exciting and fun read I've had in a long, long time, and someone craving a taste of what the world is like should grab it right now. It is pure fun. You won't be able to put it down. And its crowning prose achievement is the outrageously pregnant concision, like Kafka's work, but in a way that seems even less possible to replicate. I wish I knew how he did it.

Great read for a sophisticated adult. Similar to Charles Bukowski. Ignore rube reviews.

Kosinski, or the Kosinski committee or whatever it was (Paul Auster is one of many who claim to have been paid to 'fix up' his early drafts), wrote some psychologically fascinating and beautifully written stuff (The Painted Bird, Steps, and to a lesser extent, Cockpit and The Devil Tree) and some really bad stuff (Pinball, The Hermit of Whatever-it-was-th Street). This is probably the best of them all. Buy it.

A magnificent achievement! Oddly touching psychology and searing brutality work together to create a portrait of a man who for all mankind represents how multifaceted we can become in the face of wide ranging experience. Made me hungry to experience new and exotic emotions and experiences. An eternal masterpiece which demands re-reading.

Steps is amazing, spellbinding, and entrancing. the narrator is distanced to such an eextent that the amorality permeates every word. There is a strong anti communist vibe which no longer feels relevant, instead summing up a time I didn't really live through. Everything in the books feels both distant and close