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    Steps
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    Steps
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    Steps
    Ebook134 pages2 hours

    Steps

    By Jerzy Kosinski

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction

    From the esteemed author of the classics The Painted Bird and Being There comes this award-winning novel about one man's sexual and sensual experiences, the fabric from which his life has been woven.

    Jerzy Kosinski's classic vision of moral and sexual estrangement brilliantly captures the disturbing undercurrents of modern politics and culture. In this haunting novel, distinctions are eroded between oppressor and oppressed, perpetrator and victim, narcissism and anonymity. Kosinski portrays men and women both aroused and desensitized by an environment that disdains the individual and seeks control over the imagination in his unforgettable and immensely provocative work.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGrove Press
    Release dateDec 1, 2007
    ISBN9780802195746
    Unavailable
    Steps

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    Reviews for Steps

    3.5/5

    158 ratings10 reviews

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    • 4/5
      St. Bart's 2016 #6 - Very strange little book......i had no idea what to expect and was startled at what transpired.....a whole bunch of tiny vignettes, most completely unrelated, and many rather sexual in nature. Some seemed to have a point, others did not....many about survival against oppression in rather corrupt environments.....it is an oddly disjointed book, but in a mysteriously appealing way. Does that make any sense???? I didn't think so.....but I cannot think of anything else to say.
    • 4/5
      Terse and jarring set of stories. Impersonality of voice and tone well done here. Read the whole thing in one sitting.
    • 1/5
      This book of short stories won the National Book Award for fiction for 1968. It is the 58th such winner I have read. There are nine such winners I have not (yet) read. Steps makes very litle sense, and there is no named character. There is a lot of description of outre sex, which makes for some repulsive reading. I did not think the stories made any particular sense but the book is short (only 176 pages) and the stories are mercifully short so it was not a chore to read the book, which I did in less than a day.
    • 2/5
      Choppy and disjointed. Dark. Violent. Very sexual in a dry way. Artsy. Without emotion or passion or sensuality. It was interesting.. I suppose.
    • 4/5
      The second coming of The Marquis de Sade. Albeit a far less sexually explicit, but no less sadistic de Sade.Who is this twisted first person narrator guiding us through this sordid collection of demented anecdotes and mostly vile (if not violent) vignettes? Is it Kosinsky? Is it us?Did this, whatever this - Steps - is, truly win the National Book Award in 1969? Yes. It's not a novel, but at 146 pages I wouldn't call it a novella, either. Short story collection? Not by a long shot. So, what is it?It's loosely connected, pieced-together, malevolent, merciless episodes following the (s)exploits of one twisted, wicked man, hell bent on punishing his persecutors (whether they've indeed persecuted him or not) and even if it means tricking their children into swallowing fishhook-embedded balls of bread dough whole, so that they'll die excruciatingly agonizing slow deaths later...I loved it! Er, loved it like I "love" witnessing torture.Kosinsky seemed to delight in torturing his readers by evoking in us (or at least attempting to) pleasurable reactions from sick perverted scenarios which should - should - shock us into moral outrage enough to put the damn book down, but he knows the vignettes will make us only mildly wince (it's just a story after all, right?) and that we'll keep reading wanting more. In essence, Kosinsky tricks us to keep reading (knowing as readers we'll think there's some "payoff " by the end) but the only payoff is Kosinski's, not ours, his "amoral" audience, so to speak, and when we reach the last page he's already indicted our depraved indifference as readers - and as a culture - his main target, and we can't help seeing that the sick joke's on us; on us readers - on society in general - that's so compelled, so easily amused and entertained by atrocity: barrages of gang rapes, beheadings, untold degradations of women, and exploitations of the mentally ill. Kosinski gets us good, and we're indicted down to that last destitute image.Steps takes us step by step, evil by evil, deeper, with every (ours) volitional turn of the page, into the depravity residing inside us (or at least attempts to). Not a pleasant Sunday stroll, Steps, though forty years removed from first publication, these steps are still worth taking.
    • 5/5
      Haunting. Vivid. I could pretty much stop writing here and you would know what you're getting with this book. Kosinski writes in terse, emotionless prose that leaves the reader feeling the isolation of the narrator. If you like your novels well-grounded, conventional and nicely packaged then you may not find too much enjoyment here. This is a novel that explores themes of serious literature: identity, politics, immigration, sexuality, violence, and quite possibly the search for the meaning of life.The novel is separated into vignettes, only sometimes relating to each other. Interspersed is a dialogue with a woman. Most of these stories centre around sexual acts and sometimes about violence, and sometimes about not much. They're all readable, they're all engaging, and all have some striking image that like a quote on the rear of the book says, will pop into your mind every now and again. There are stories and scenarios here that I have never heard or even thought of before. Sometimes I wonder how autobiographical this is, or where the inspiration came from. At times they border on the absurd and I think this is where the critics run for their Kafka books. I won't disclose what these stories can be about because discovering them is what makes the book so intriguing. Just know that they will not bring a smile to your face or enlighten your day, they will, however, shock.Steps went on to win the National Book Award for fiction, which is and isn't a surprise. Surprising because of the content, but the precision of the prose and the general themes make it a suitable award winner. Do not expect this to be a neat story; it is very open-ended and very enigmatic - just like its author.
    • 4/5
      Kosinski is a very disturbing writer. Much of this seems autobiographical, and yet it is called a work of fiction. Vignettes, ranging from the banal to the grotesque to the sadistic, form the storyline. Reading it is in moral terms voyeurism. The reader is complicit in allowing the author to tell the story. It is hard to rate a book like this, because structurally and in terms of writing skill it is well done. It is the content itself that is objectionable. Be wary of treading this path lest it contaminate you.
    • 4/5
      The second coming of The Marquis de Sade. Albeit a far less sexually explicit, but no less sadistic de Sade.Who is this twisted first person narrator guiding us through this sordid collection of demented anecdotes and mostly vile (if not violent) vignettes? Is it Kosinsky? Is it us?Did this, whatever this - Steps - is, truly win the National Book Award in 1969? Yes. It's not a novel, but at 146 pages I wouldn't call it a novella, either. Short story collection? Not by a long shot. So, what is it?It's loosely connected, pieced-together, malevolent, merciless episodes following the (s)exploits of one twisted, wicked man, hell bent on punishing his persecutors (whether they've indeed persecuted him or not) and even if it means tricking their children into swallowing fishhook-embedded balls of bread dough whole, so that they'll die excruciatingly agonizing slow deaths later...I loved it! Er, loved it like I "love" witnessing torture.Kosinsky seemed to delight in torturing his readers by evoking in us (or at least attempting to) pleasurable reactions from sick perverted scenarios which should - should - shock us into moral outrage enough to put the damn book down, but he knows the vignettes will make us only mildly wince (it's just a story after all, right?) and that we'll keep reading wanting more. In essence, Kosinsky tricks us to keep reading (knowing as readers we'll think there's some "payoff " by the end) but the only payoff is Kosinski's, not ours, his "amoral" audience, so to speak, and when we reach the last page he's already indicted our depraved indifference as readers - and as a culture - his main target, and we can't help seeing that the sick joke's on us; on us readers - on society in general - that's so compelled, so easily amused and entertained by atrocity: barrages of gang rapes, beheadings, untold degradations of women, and exploitations of the mentally ill. Kosinski gets us good, and we're indicted down to that last destitute image.Steps takes us step by step, evil by evil, deeper, with every (ours) volitional turn of the page, into the depravity residing inside us (or at least attempts to). Not a pleasant Sunday stroll, Steps, though forty years removed from first publication, these steps are still worth taking.
    • 4/5
      What a perverse, creepy novel! Depraved! And it belongs to an author whose checkered past is even more deranged than the novel! The author, Jerzy Kosinski, for a short time was part of an elite "glitteratti," a guest on late night TV, always in the company of beautiful women, an incredible rags-to-riches story, and the winner of the National Book Award with this bleak novel. He was also dead by his own hand at age 57. Even though his langage was Polish, his taut, brutal voice was beautifully realized in a terse masterful English. Or was it? So much of this author's life is shrouded in ambiguity and deceit, very much like the characters who inhabit his novels. American novelist David Foster Wallace, another suicide by the way, described Steps as a "collection of unbelievably creepy little allegorical tableaux done in a terse elegant voice that's like nothing else anywhere ever." Nonetheless, Steps is a short, powerful read, not to every one's taste, even mine!
    • 4/5
      Despite the grim nature of these stories, I was moved by this book. I was particularly stunned by the final story, and it has stayed with me for years. Any book that can leave such an impression—even if that impression is one of shock and despair, and one that makes me question the honesty of my OWN emotions, is a worthy read.