Steps

Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: Great read for a sophisticated adult. Similar to Charles Bukowski. Ignore rube reviews.

Rating:
Summary: Dull
Review: I wanted to like this book, but I had to give up in the end. If the overall vignette concept is attractive enough, the execution of detail isn't -- Kosinski can't write. He tries and eventually fails to convey what he deems important, whereas the reader is always expected to discover "depth" in simplicity. Nothing to be recommended for.

Rating:
Summary: degradation as entertainment
Review: In 1969, the well-known writer Jerzy Kosinski published a novel, Steps, which won the National
Book Award. In 1975, a freelance writer named Chuck Ross was convinced that unknown writers
just didn't have a chance to have a novel accepted. To test his theory, Ross typed out the first
twenty-one pages of Steps and sent them out to four publishers, using the pseudonym "Erik
Demos." All four rejected the sample. In 1977, Ross typed out the entire book and, again using the
name "Erik Demos," sent it to ten publishers and thirteen literary agents. One of the publishers was
Random House, which had originally published Steps in 1969. The manuscript was neither
recognized nor accepted by any publishers or literary agents, including Random House, which used
a form rejection letter. That made twenty-seven rejections for a book that had won an important
literary prize!
-Gloria T. Delamar, Getting Rejected? Feeling Dejected? (Philadelphia Writersí Conference, Inc.)

Upon reading the novel, the 70's editors appear to have made the better decision : not to publish. The book is little more than a catalogue of one man's often violent sexual fantasies. I know, I know, it's supposed to be some kind of fable about how the brutality of modern life is manifested in this one victim's sex life. However, loathe as I am to defend modernity, I don't think you can blame totalitarian government, criminal violence and the other social pathologies of the 20th Century for your need to objectify your menagerie of lovers. Here is a chilling statement from the book, one that nicely sums up much of the sexual revolution :

[B]eyond you and me together, I see myself in our love-making. It is this vision of myself as your
lover I wish to retain and make more real.

Okay, so you can argue that this is the essential point Kosinski's trying to make, and I do nearly find it compelling. But, as I mentioned in my review of Painted Bird, he is just too fascinated by scenes of rape and other forms of degradation (here he adds bestiality) for the reader to accept that they are integral to the plot. Instead, the reader gets the unsettling feeling that the author is offering a too revealing glimpse of his own warped obsessions.

I don't know about anyone else, but I can think of nothing less interesting than reading about another person's disturbed, and therefore disturbing, sexual predilections. I have enough difficulty handling my own, admittedly odd, passion for Margaret Thatcher, that Iron Lady of my fevered dreams...

GRADE : D

Rating:
Summary: imagination gone wild
Review: Some imaginations are almost too much, even for me, and for that, it is impossible for me to give "Steps" a rating higher than two stars.

However, this book did not win the National Book Award on accident.

Kosinski's work is so good, it's almost hypnotic; and, as you read through each dark episode, it seems almost certain that this author weighed each word to produce the exact amount of tension for each scene. The language and structure is poetry, and Kosinski's choice of the erotic and the sexual adds as a certain amount of chaos to his text, enabling him to construct his book without any sense of time. Additionally, by focusing on sex, he chooses a subject that is universal and knows no divisions of class, gender, religion or race. The totalitarian government and the victim, the oppressed and the oppressor, are therefore merged.

What is this book really about? The passage where I think Kosinski best answers this is when he writes, "Many of us could easily visualize ourselves in the act of killing, but few of us could project ourselves into the act of being killed in any manner. We did our best to understand the murder: the murderer was a part of our lives; not so the victim." Could Kosinski have written about this same topic without the bestiality or the rape? Of course. Would it have been as effective? Would you remember it? Probably not.

This book was written to stir up uneasy images. It is meant to disturb you. And I think that in this, at least, it succeeds.

Rating:
Summary: A Masterpiece
Review: 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

Rating:
Summary: Gratuitous Sex, Bestiality, Sado-masochism, Revenge
Review: These are a few of the themes in "Steps". This book is not a novel, but is a series of dark vignettes which concern themselves with the degradation of men, women, children and animals. Sex is used as a dark means to control and kill the spirit of all including those who would read this crap. Remember the admonishment, "You are what you eat?" It could also be said that we are what we read. One certainly doesn't need to wallow in the mud and eat trash to gain an understanding of pigs, and one certainly doesn't need to read a book like this to realize that evil exists in the world. Do yourself a favor: stay away from this book and find something else to read. Your mind will thank you.

Rating:
Summary: Americans...
Review: This may be a little deviant for you. Perhaps the new Ann Coulter book would be a better choice.