". . . the power and clarity of the images are cinematic. It surpasses most of the books in which experience of terror and physical cruelty are told, because by the great beauty of its style it lifts the entire experience to the philosophic, mythological realms of knowledge."
—Anais Nin

This is a story about the proximity of terror and savagery to innocence and love, a vision Kosinski shares with Heronymus Bosch. A dark-haired, olive-skinned Boy, perhaps a Jew or a Gypsy, is abandoned by his parents during the War, and wanders alone from one Slav village to another, through sunless forests and endless marshes, sometimes hounded and tortured, sometimes sheltered and taught.  Through the juxtaposition of adolescence and the most brutal forms of fallen adult experience, The Painted Bird sums up a world of abysmal excess in scenes of lust, bestiality and suffering fused in a myth of concentration and clarity unrivaled in contemporary literature.