what i'm reading: steps by jerzy kosinski

I have just finished reading Jerzy Kosinski’s book Steps, and I must admit… this was a weird read. This was almost as disturbing as The Painted Bird. Almost.

This blog is reader-supported. At no cost to you, I earn a small commission from affiliate links used in this post. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. For more information, visit my legal page.

Steps is published as a novel, yet it is nothing of the kind. It’s more like a compilation of short stories, but the sections are shorter than short stories. And they’re separated by a dot and on one occasion, a butterfly.

Here’s an example of one-line section:

IF I COULD become one of them, if I could only part with my language, my manner, my belongings.

I wrote about the perils and delights of reading in two different languages in a blog post, and I feel like I’m doing it again because I have this book, Steps, in two different languages, too — as you can see in the photo below.

Turkish edition has Edvard Munch’s The Scream on its cover.

I have to say, the English Kindle version has some formatting issues. It seems someone scanned a paperback and didn’t bother to correct it. I mean, in certain paragraphs, there is no use of a full stop; the following sentence starts with a capital, and that’s how you know it’s a brand-new sentence.

My Turkish Version of Steps
The Turkish version of Steps was one of those books I inherited from my father a million and a half years ago. The first edition was published in October 1969. What I own is the second edition, and it was published in June 1971.

There were times when I didn’t understand what was being said while reading Steps in English. In those moments, I read the same chapter in my Turkish version. I don’t usually do that if I own the same book in two languages. I start with one to see if I’m comfortable with the narrative in that language. If not, then I switch to the other one. This is the first time I switched backwards and forwards several times.

Steps is an award-winning book (a National Book Award winner), and there are rumours that it was ghostwritten. Ghostwritten or not, there is no other book like it!

This is what David Foster Wallace said about Steps:

“This won some big prize or other when it first came out, but today nobody seems to remember it. “Steps” gets called a novel but it is really a collection of unbelievably creepy little allegorical tableaux done in a terse elegant voice that’s like nothing else anywhere ever. Only Kafka’s fragments get anywhere close to where Kosinski goes in this book, which is better than everything else he ever did combined.”

And it’s time for my favourite quotes and highlights from Steps:

“It was as if each of us were a stone resting in a slingshot; we never knew who would launch us, or where to.”

This one is a whole chapter-dialogue:

He once told me that in the late thirties, just after he graduated from the university, he worked for a firm of architects. His first assignment was to draw up plans for a concentration camp.
He refused.
No, he didn’t. Even though it was difficult, because there were so few precedents, but that made it all the more challenging. He told me that at that time many architects were competing for projects sponsored by the government. Of course, when they were designing a school or hospital or even a prison he and his colleagues could easily imagine themselves inside it, but a concentration camp was entirely different: it required exceptional vision. Still, there was something of the school about it, of the hospital, the waiting rooms in public buildings, and something of the funeral home also, only the section for disposing of the bodies was more efficient. Above all, it had to be functional; this was the underlying philosophy. He had carefully taken the terrain into account: one style of camp for a broken belt of rolling foothills and another for a treeless, steppe-like country. Since abundant funds and land were available, my friend’s designs were promptly accepted. Nevertheless, it was just a project. You could look at it from many points of view: in a maternity hospital, for instance, more people leave than arrive; in a concentration camp the reverse is true. Its main purpose is hygiene.
Hygiene? What do you mean? Have you ever seen rats being exterminated? Or, better—do you like animals?
Of course.
Well, rats are also animals.
Not really. I mean they’re not domestic animals. They’re dangerous, and therefore they have to be exterminated.
Exactly: they have to be exterminated; it’s a problem of hygiene. Rats have to be removed. We exterminate them, but this has nothing to do with our attitudes toward cats, dogs, or any other animal. Rats aren’t murdered—we get rid of them; or, to use a better word, they are eliminated; this act of elimination is empty of all meaning. There’s no ritual in it, no symbolism; the right of the executioner is never questioned. That’s why in the concentration camps my friend designed, the victims never remained individuals; they became as identical as rats. They existed only to be killed.

Where to Buy Steps
In Australia, you can buy it from Amazon AU. in the US, you can buy it from Amazon US.