Cockpit

Rating:
Summary: Yeah, A Really Limber Back
Review: I thought this book was terrific when I first read it back in the 1970s, but subsequent examinations made me conclude it was simply a lot of literary sensationalism -- the author concocted weird vignette atop weird vignette in an effort to simply shock or repel. While some of the material is riveting (such as the escape from the Soviet Bloc, requiring great imagination and coordination), much of it is simply gross.

That escape story, by the way, was supposed to be true, but I read later that Kozinski fabricated most of it, at which point I lost some esteem for him.

Rating:
Summary: You Too Can Lose Sleep Tonight!!
Review: If you enjoy reading unconnected, plotless, sometimes titillating, always depraved vignettes, than this is the book for you. While I enjoyed some of Kosinski's sometimes lush prose, I prefer an interesting plot with at least one admirable character, and so this work rates as the very worst novel I have ever read. That can't be true, can it? I'm thinking. I've read some time-wasters, but no, this is the biggest one of all. Very disturbing as well. The soft cover advertises that 'Tarden is the "ultimate secret agent". I see him rather as the ultimate demented mind. Very twisted. Tarden makes "dysfunctional" seem like a worthy goal.

The jacket promises that "the silently suffering are quietly rewarded and the unjust are mercifully punished." Horsehockey. Tarden punishes those who do not do what he requires; and I saw little evidence that anyone is "quietly rewarded" except those readers who pass this book up.

Rating:
Summary: GROTESQUE SALAD
Review: In COCKPIT, Kosinski presents the reader with a caricature of a hero. This anti-hero intensified his sadistic, bad seed behavior as the pages were turned. The reader must be hungry for a grotesque salad. Why not scrape off some raw flesh from the reader's bones? This is sure to wet their appetite. Throw in some good old fashioned animal torture. Toss in scenes where this caricature hero pays derelicts to gang rape a woman, bound and gagged. Let him loose in a supermarket to squirt syringes full of poison into packages. Give the hero inexhaustible wealth and let him play a dozen nasty, repulsive games with his money hungry, vegie-victims.

Here is a hero character who was obsessed with manipulating and controlling even casual acquaintances. Why? Because he had no children, no family, no relatives, obvious justifications. Life to this hero became a game to satisfy his blooming impotence. He used himself as bait in traps that only he knew were being placed. This anarchist, naturally, had to make up the rules of the game as he went along.

The reader may have at least hoped for some finality to this charade of realistic cruelty. In the final pages the hero became trapped in a broken elevator that would forever run up and down, up and down. This would have offered a hellish, no exit ending, but alas, this was not allowed to occur.

Rating:
Summary: A good representation
Review: It's hard to decide which of Kosinski's vignette-based novels is the best, since they're all fairly similiar, and passages are interchangeable. There are slight varitations in theme - the protagonist of The Painted Bird is a child, and in Blind Date you have an investor, while in The Devil Tree you have a wealthy young man, but on the whole each one is as good as another. Considering it, though, I think that Cockpit is the best overall, with some of the most interesting vignettes and the most consistently good writing, and one of the stronger protagonists. It's also the only Kosinski book which I can really say shocked me - usually, I'm prepared for the horrible things which his characters do to each other, remembering that it is Kosinski even when things seem to be going well, but there's an episode in Cockpit involving the elderly which took me by surprise. I reccomend this as an introduction to Kosinski's work, or, if you only read one, make it this.

Rating:
Summary: Unlike any book you'll ever read.
Review: This book is excellent in that it shows how one man can intimately weave his way into others lives without them knowing it, and alter their lives; somtimes joyously sometimes catastrophically. The more you read this book, the more you identify with the psyche of Tarden, the book's hero. Tarden's life will make anyone's life seem boring and mundane compared to his. International travel, spying, deception, sex, and a 200 lb. horseshoe. Read it and see what I'm talking about.

Rating:
Summary: You Too Can Lose Sleep Tonight!!
Review: When you are in the cockpit you have total and absolute control over hundreds of lives. You can do with them what you wish. If you choose, you could end every life or just give them a good scare. In Jerzy Kosinski's novel "Cockpit" the hero - Tarden - is always in the cockpit, always in control. This book makes you realize how easy it is for a total stranger to, through a few mundane manipulations, have your entire life in his hands. A chilling thought indeed.