What a curious little book...

Many fans of David Foster Wallace are familiar with a short essay he wrote entitled "Overlooked," where the man Himself discusses 5 U.S. novels written after 1960 that he considers to be "direly under appreciated." I discovered this essay while reading Gass's 'Omensetter's Luck' (also on the list) which I consider to be one of the top 10 brain explodingly awesome books I've ever read. Another book on the list was David Markson's 'Wittgenstein's Mistress,' which I am More...

Have had this since 1997, a crusty old paperback taken for free or not much more from a neighbor's yard sale. Read some in the past but never persevered to finish. Recommended for fans of dark, violent, realist fables. Call it skewed yet scarily/stuntedly straightforward post-traumatic stress syndrome lit? Sometimes like Kafka anecdotes but never even a smidge irreal (what seem at first like humanoids are simply humans), also lacking suggestion of a spiritual side? Sometimes like Jesus' Son but More...

From my Amazon.com review:

Riveting, gripping, amazing. If art is, in part, the dance between artist and audience, then Steps is art in its highest form. I found myself dancing & reacting in ways I wish I hadn't; found myself physically aroused by portions of the text that I found intellectually / psychologically repugnant. That's a neat trick, Kosinski.

In spare prose, the author takes his breathless reader (think of how your oxygen intake changed while watching 'Panic Room') on a "depraved" More...

This book is super dark and sexual. It's fun to read on the subway when you're surrounded by people who don't realize the dirty stuff you're reading. Also, just for the record, a girl reading "Steps" on the subway is automatically hot; I just thought I'd mention this in case you're a girl and you're on this site in search of subway reading that will help you be more alluring to strangers.

Was Jerzy Kosinski the Twentieth Century's Marquis de Sade? Albeit a far less sexually explicit, but no less sadistic de Sade?

Reading Steps certainly makes me wonder -- and that's a compliment to Kosinsky's skills at creating discomfort in his readers, at least his readers with "typical" moral sensibilities.

Who is this twisted first person narrator of Steps, guiding us through this sordid collection of demented anecdotes and mostly vile (when they're not violent) vignettes?

"I'd be embarassed to More...

Do you remember the game "Where's Waldo?" You can play a similar one with this (47 maybe--If I'm remembering correctly) episodic narrative: "Where's the act of consumption?"

Note: many of the vignettes are either sexual or violent, or violently sexual. The protagonist is on a quest to find a stable sense of identity in his (post)modern world. The question then becomes whether he succeeds or not.

Steps is like something a younger, hornier Haruki Murakami might write. You've got these terse, surreal little vignettes that are sort-of-but-not-really linked together, and all of which share this dark, creepily sexual sensibility. A bunch of odd little nothings, though not without their charms. I can't imagine what combination of substances the people who chose the national book award in 1969 must have been smoking/drinking/dropping/snorting when they picked this. Fair warning, there's bestial More...

Great novel. Almost a collection of short stories? Or maybe they were short thoughts…? Recommended this book to others, when I could properly recall the name of the author. Jerzy Kosinski. An alias, I am pretty sure. And I like what I read about him, too. Very controversial. The book, Steps, has some strange content with an interestingly unique writing style. Surprisingly, he learned English at age 24. It doesn’t seem possible, to have that type of control of a foreign language. Maybe he does..o More...

probably like a lot of people, i read "the unbearable lightness of being" when i was pretty young and loved it. now i sort of doubt my judgment, especially considering that kundera replaced ayn rand as my favorite author at the time (early high school.) i have not revisited it since then.

i was titillated at the time, but kundera seems awfully vanilla in comparison to kosinski. it's a similar approach, philosophy told through sexual picaresque, but kosinski is more depraved and darker, and instea More...

Steps changed something in me. As a writer myself, I thought something strange about the format and broken gestures of this book. The anecdotes which seem to play out from scene-to-scene have made some believe it is all happening to one person, but I don't think so in the slightest. It's a story of how we hurt each other (at a basic level) and how we get by doing it (at a deeper level). When you begin to get past some of the images and ideas which initially have a sort of suburban cringe (what s More...

Consider mortadella. The Italian lunchmeat. It is like baloney but is remarkably better. All boiled and minced meats and chunks of fat pressed into a log and the sliced impossibly thin, each translucent circle having a sharper taste than any thick slab of anything. It is a little repulsive, but in a way that is shockingly delicious.

Jerzy Kosiński's STEPS is a pound of fresh, thinly-sliced fiction mortadella, except it is cut from a log of pressed frailty, pornographic fantasy and sharp, hilario More...

This is a collection of unrelated works done in the first person. I cannot call them short stories; most lack plotting. They resemble something someone might tell to a confidant, a bartender, or a group of friends getting together and talking about their sexual exploits. The narrator is male, but I am not sure it is always the same voice relating these episodes. There is no dialogue.

Like that of James Cain, Kosinski’s prose is simple, lean, hard and powerful to the point of being troubling at t More...

Steps is neither a novel nor a collection of short stories, but rather a series of untitled vignettes that may or may not be narrated by a consistent voice. The "I" in each story is clearly male, but little else is known about him; in each vignette he passionlessly details a series of events, most often culmintating in some kind of violence, usually against a woman. It is obvious that Kosinski's intent is to delineate a world in which actions mean nothing, and those acting feel nothing. The ques More...

Male, female, or intersex, you will hate this book.

Remember back in the good old days when the whole country was sexually frustrated and guys who wanted to get laid wrote about how good their characters were in the sack, with the implicit understanding that it was they theyselves (the authors) who knew a little more or had that special extra inch more in their pants than the next guy? Well, this book seems to be a remnant from that sad and pathetic era.

Steps is an unqualified jerkoff book, lack More...

Huh. I reread this with the express hope of afterwards being able to articulate what hit me so hard about this book the first time I read it.

Now I find myself even more convinced that this is a masterpiece, yet struggling to find the words to write either an extensive or pithy summary of my reaction to it.

Naturally, I looked up Kosinski's Wikipedia page, because that's just what you do. I found that one great academic and one great author had both said these great little bits on Steps:

"the nar More...

Being familiar with Kosinski to some degree, having read Being There and Cockpit (many years ago, wasn't taken to it greatly), I found Steps to be a simple prose progression of what the book's summary highlights, that being the oppressor and oppressed, in various timeless and geographically void communities. What I like about Jerzy's work is his sometimes absurd narrative explications on character motivation such as in one moment a character happens to be talking to a Detective Agency who sugges More...

Lately, I've been reading all of Milan Kundera's books. I was at the used bookstore the other day and saw this book on one of the shelves. It looked like an easy, light read, so I bought it. I got tired of Kundera's dialogue and decided to take a reading break. I thumbed through the pages of Steps, and I couldn't stop myself. I made myself stop reading halfway through so I would have something to look forward to going home over thanksgiving break.

I don't really know what to say about this book, More...

Brief, distressing fables of brutality, modest to vicious, and ambiguous moral order. It reminds me at times of the sheer human destruction of Last Exit to Brooklyn, but more condensed, refined, universal. Not a word is wasted, and the simple, eloquent language makes this exceedingly readable if at times difficult to absorb. DFW was evidently a fan, calling this slim set of vignettes better than all of Kosinski's other books combined, and I suspect he borrowed bits of its style and formatting fo More...

There was a time when creepiness was a virtue in popular literature. Jerzy Kosinski's Steps has no redemption arc. The series of discrete vignettes create a momentum and a cohesive narrative, even though the only recurrent character is the undifferentiated self that does all the talking.

The scenes build on one another without being interlocked, and each new anecdote tears back another curtain, revealing a deeper reality behind the reality that was center stage in the previous recollection. The b More...

I'm not sure what to make of this book. The perverted sexuality/violence didn't ring any of my bells as it did for some others (notably DFW). It's not that I'm bothered with the themes (which will turn off a bunch of readers), but I had the same reaction reading this as I had for 2666 and Blood Meridian*, which is, maybe it's intellectually stimulating for some people, but not for me.

Reading some other goodreads reviews, I noticed that the people who enjoyed this book liked being forced to recon More...

Unnerving stories told from the perspective of a man who finds himself in odd situations, most of which are sexual or violent, or both. He's usually a member of some sort of institution (e.g. an unspecified university) and is taking advantage of his powerful situation, without necessarily knowing why. Or he's the one who's lost and suffering under the thumb of some powerful institution or group. It's unclear whether we're hearing the story of one man, or several, but the ambiguity is probably th More...

I came to this after The Painted Bird, and curious about DFW's high praise for it over TPB. The latter connection makes it very difficult to read Steps without thinking of it in terms of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. I found it all-but impossible to avoid thinking of Steps as Brief Responses Provided by a Vaguely Hideous Man. Except that he's really not all that hideous. The prose embodies that nice (for me, anyway) style which juxtaposes alarming/confronting scenes with an abstract, dispas More...

Steps will always remain a controversial book. Chronicles of a deviant mind are not easy or even desirable to read. I read this in my twenties when I wanted to push all boundaries just because I could. Part of the appeal with Kosiński is that the stories are not gratuitously violent or deviant, although one could spiritedly argue that they are. Morbid and decadent, yes, but I believe the writings have a reflection of the author's demons or predilections, like them or not. Kosiński read to termin More...

This unstructured novel filled with graphic violence and sex, for all its salacious material, does little to either titillate or instruct the reader with any moral or aesthetic lesson. Quite the opposite, Steps is wholly amoral. This would be fine, if the writing had some scintillating quality; if the characters were richly drawn; if the flow of the narrative was swift, effective, tense. But this novel has none of these things. It seems difficult to believe, based on Steps, the Kosinski was once More...

"Steps" is an unsettling and strange book, which I like, even though it probably brings my own tastes and grasp of reality into question. It's a disjointed collection of short stories, some no longer than a few paragraphs, all relayed in a very matter of fact, almost emotionless manner. This gives it a feeling akin to dream-walking through a haunted museum filled with horrible, glitchy short films and grotesque, perverted exhibits and dioramas depicting unspeakable acts of trickery, cruel (sexua More...

A difficult to classify book, Steps was better the second time around when I skipped over the italicized parts entirely. In comparison to the tight, controlled prose of the other sections, the dialogue felt gross and overblown. As a collected piece, you could look at the italicized sections as the actual story of a romance between two people and the other sections being stories they told eachother, if you wanted, or hell vice versa, but either way the italicized sections felt out of place and di More...

First Reading: I was totally unprepared for how enjoyable this book would be. Small glimpses and recounts of various immoral situations, often no longer than a page or two each, told in a unique and irresistable prose. An architect that designs concentration camps, discovering a rape barn, a mad scientist that pins condoms instead of badges on party members and sordid army games are just some of the many peverse pleasures contained within. Bless you vintage conemporaries.

Second Reading: Still ju More...

Almost a perfect cross between Céline's Journey to the End of the Night and Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, complete with the mysterious (and creepy) protagonist and general misanthropy of the former, and the weird quasi-mystical (and, again, creepy) sexual encounters of the latter.

Both of those, however, are a little self-indulgent. Journey is long and rambling and vitriolic, and Interviews, while not as long, goes on long digressions and gets mired in self-consciousness and occasi More...

I walked through the districts where they lived surrounded by fetor and disease. They had nothing to possess or to be proud of. They were united only by the shade of their skin—and I envied them. I walked the streets in the heat of the sultry day and peered into rooms full of screaming infants and rotten mattresses piled on the floor, the old and the sick lying flattened on their beds or bending low in their chairs. In the dead-end alleys I watched the girls in groups, giggling. I stared at the More...

Talk about bite-sized pieces. I've been meaning to read Kosinski's Steps for some time now, after the Painted Bird made a huge impact on my sensibilities as a reader.

These days, with the challenges of choosing which books to put in one's head, it's nice to find myself re-reading paragraphs, and even chapters, because they're worth engraining into the psyche, like the replaying of a nice song, versus having to re-read to catch a drift of some vague stylized notion.

Some say "life is meaningless, More...