The Painted Bird

The Afterwordwas written in New York City in 1976, eleven years after The Painted Bird was published. Formatted in memoir fashion, it is a reflection on how the book came to be and on its reception.

In 1963, while Kosiński and his wife were in Switzerland, they met a group of wealthy Western Europeans who’d fled their countries before World War II. These now elderly exiles, having escaped the horrors of war, “knew the war only vaguely” and “believed that reports about the camps and gas chambers had been much embellished by overwrought reporters” (x). As a survivor of the war, Kosiński was troubled by the guests’ “hazy, unrealistic view of the world,” and believed fiction “could present lives as they are truly lived” (xi). To this end, he decided to write a novel; the book would be in English, as he hadn’t used his mother tongue since he left his homeland.

In his novel, Kosiński sought to explore “the individual’s relationship to society”—more specifically, “the essential anti-human condition” (xii). When The Painted Bird was first published, it contained little information about him, and he declined to be interviewed. He believed author background was a “thrust between the book and its readers,” and information about him “violated the novel’s integrity” (xiv).