Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

This novel certainly isn't for the faint of heart. It's very graphic in its violence and is stomach churning in its sexual depravity. In many ways it is the most disturbing novel I have ever read and it was actually banned in Kosinski's native homeland of Poland for twenty three years.
The book consists of twenty chapters each detailing the journey of a boy whose name we never learn. It takes place during World War II at a time when the, possibly Gypsy/possibly Jewish, boy is sent away by his parents to live in a village in order to escape the Nazi's. It soon becomes apparent that his life will be filled with hatred, violence and sexual depravity. As his story unfolds, each chapter taking the boy to a different setting and new masters he must serve, we observe all that happens through his eyes. Due to each chapter bringing a new setting and new people the characters in this novel, apart from the boy, come and go very quickly and no emotional attachment is made to them. To compensate for this it appears that Kosinski exposed characters to the most extreme situations he could imagine to pull the reader into the story and garner a response. A few examples of this are a daughter forced to have sex with a goat and her brother, a mentally disturbed woman having a bottle shoved into her vagina, where it's purposely smashed before she's beaten to death, and a plowboy whose eyes are gouged out with a spoon. These are by no means the three most shocking incidents chosen to make an impact in this review as each chapter brings along equal amounts of evilness and perversion. Unfortunately, that evilness and perversion are the only things that make the book stand out. The writing itself is okay but the story is far fetched to the extreme (it was initially passed off by the author as his real life experiences as a child although he later admitted it was a complete work of fiction) and the amount of brutality imposed upon the boy would no doubt have left him dead long before the end of the story.
There are, however, some redeeming qualities although they themselves are steeped in the aforementioned violence and sexuality. For instance, the book's title stems from the time the boy is living with a professional bird catcher. The catcher will paint a bird different colors and then free it so it can go back to its flock. Due to the unnatural colors the bird is now shunned by the flock it was once a part of, turned upon and killed by its own kind. What the author is doing is using birds as an allegorical form in order to mirror the horrors of the day with Jews and Gypsies being massacred by fellow "humans".
The ending of the book didn't seem like an ending at all, a follow up was never penned, and it really didn't make much sense to me. It was almost as if the author couldn't be bothered writing anymore of the story and so decided to end it quickly and abruptly.
I've found that opinion is divided on this book as to whether it's a masterpiece or a load of rubbish. In my opinion I wouldn't recommend it and if you read the plot of the book on its Wikipedia page then you've practically read the story with all the graphic violence and graphic sexuality taken out.