Jerzy Kosinski

Jerzy Kosinski is not an author with whom I was familiar, despite his having won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1969. 

Over the past week, I've made my way through Steps, the collection for which Kosinski was recognized by the National Book Foundation (and the work for which he is most commonly associated today).  

I should say at the start that Steps is a hybrid: part novella, part short stories, the collection takes as its subject the sexual awakening of its unnamed protagonist, a university-aged student forced to navigate the repressive qualities an equally unnamed totalitarian state. The result is a work in which sexual relations become regulated: like financial currency, sex is subject to the edicts of a bureaucratic state. Kosinski's characters emerge as paranoid lovers, desensitized to their pursuits: everything functions as an exchange. 

But more than that: Steps, I thought, served as a reminder of the extent to which Stalinist states traded in rumor and reputation. On several occasions, characters are ruined as a result of association, of rumors traded about their backgrounds or love interests. Here, again, the result is a novella in which sex is regulated: Kosinski is clear that the act itself is subservient to laws and language regulating it. 

This is not a perfect collection, but Kosinski has certainly achieved something: as his central character evolves, so too do his sexual awakening. What starts with childish exploits ends with philosophical meditations on the limits of human arousal and the pain so often associated with pleasure. By the culmination of Steps, almost all sexual encounters in the book are tinged with a tragic quality, as if all that we can hope to do in our partnerships is identify a flicker of ourselves. This is one of the most bleak byproducts of the Stalinist state.