Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #685518 in Books
• Published on: 1998-02-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Customer Reviews

Dangerous beautiful, descraceful and Darling.
Read Blind Date by Jerzy N. Kosinski
The only the real life of Kosinski is as strange as his fiction.
And his fiction is strange yet utterly plausible in the mind of the reader.

I liked it, the main character is capable of quite morally good things as well as dark dangerous things. Some is very true the two most unlikely stories in the book actually. Kosinski writes about his main character missing the plane to LA and all his friends were killed in a mass murder, Kosinski was supposed to go to Roman Polanski's house but lost his luggage and was delayed a day just causing him to miss arriving the night of the Charles Mansion Helter Skelter murders. The second story is about his main character marring a rich heiress for love only to see her die. This actual happened to the Kosinski. His mixture of pure fiction with the Autobiographical is mesmerizing. Leventur his main character is a Russian émigré who has many international adventures. He is a womanizer, a killer, a hero victim, avernger and villian. The plot bounces around the world from the opressed world of the Soviet Union to the extra
grandure and freedom of america. I also loved Being There.

Beautiful-Ugly
Sex, terrorism, incest, mass murder, betrayal, rape, prostitution. Somehow, Kosinski is able to show us the worst aspects of humanity and get us to completely accept them, even embrace them. The story is episodic. Through those episodes, Kosinski shows us something very like real life. It's more exciting than many people's lives, but there's no grand plan, no overreaching narrative arc. To paraphrase the Simpsons, it's just a bunch of stuff that happened, but it certainly was a very interesting read.

ONE THAT WILL STICK WITH YOU.
Kosinski has always been one of my favorite authors since I started reading him in the mid 1970s. This work, like most of his books (A Painted Bird comes to mind), are the type that will stick with you long after you complete the last chapter. This particular book, Blind Date is a series of events from one man's life. It takes us around the world and explores events that, while ugly at times, never-the-less need to be examined now and again. This life, as represented by the main character, is not one that the ordinary person will ever witness, but it is written in a fashion that is almost hypnotic. Our main character, like all of us, is made up of both good and evil. Kosinski merely enhances the good and bad acts and gives us quite a griping collection of small stories. Some of the subject matter, such as rape, incest, murder, etc. are rather distasteful, to say the least, but the author is able to pull it off.

I have to agree with the suggestion of another reviewer here when he suggested you THINK while reading this book. I say this, if for no other reason, than you are reading some pretty good writing. This is a well done work. Now I doubt if this one will fit the taste of everyone (my wife hated it), but it is a work that you should at least give a chance. As pointed out by yet another reviewer, part of this tale is fiction, part is semi-autobiographical. This is quite fascinating.

All in all, I do recommend this one. I have read it several times over the years (just finished another reading) and it has aged well and is certainly worth the time and effort. I am glad it is still in print. It is one of those books that sort of define an era in our history, both physical and literary, and deserves to be around for a bit.