eBook Pinball (Kosinski, Jerzy) download

Kosinski was the greatest in his genre!

"Pinball" (1982) comes late in Kosinski's career, his penultimate book and may compare poorly to his earlier much tougher episodic tales ("The Painted Bird," "Steps,' "Cockpit" particularly). It is a much more conventionally plotted novel with more of a throughline and suspense set up, a discovery of mysteries behind a musician and the people who are looking for his true identity, what motivates him, and in the process we find out what motivates them to go to the trouble to do so.

The story is, like most Kosinski, focused on a lonely man toughened by life's disappointments (in this case, two of them: Domostroy, a classical composer no longer inspired to write, alternating with Goddard, a mysterious rock star who produces his music from behind a veil of mystery, that Domostroy is trying to uncover). The use of two protagonists widens the scope of the book, but also dilutes the power we associate with Kosinski. The plot is increasingly episodic, building through a series of events, encounters, and shifts back and forth from Domestroy to Goddard ("hiding" as his real-life alter-ego) until eventually they meet (although initially they don't realize they've "found" each other). There's also a somewhat fractured time narrative (the flashbacks are casually interjected and long, though often to good effect) like K's earlier works like "Cockpit" and "Steps," but not as much as a book called "Pinball" might suggest. It's pretty straight-forward.

What makes this novel unique is the clear developing narrative as Domostroy meets a woman Andrea who wants to find Goddard, and his understanding of how musicians think and what and who (what kind of fan letters, for example) will capture his imagination to lure him. They make a plan and exploit various acquaintances, unintended or duplicitous, to get to the bottom of who he is, using clues in his music.

At the end of a long career, Domostroy knows much about music being an expression of the soul and that connecting with another human being, sexually or through conversation or even letters, is a powerful seducer and fuels creativity. His understanding of the musical mind drives the search for Goddard as well as facilitating his unexpected mentoring of a promising and sexually precocious concert pianist (Donna) of the nuances of Chopin, pedals, and fingering. So we have an almost dual story, one of Domestroy's inner understanding of what makes a musical composer tick, and Goddard's hidden and immature influences that map upon Domostroy.

While the search is the novel's foreground plot, it is in its digressions and collection of side characters and incidents, from students at Julliard (Donna) to Goddard's lost love Leila to visits to sex clubs, that the main thrust of the novel coalesces into an investigation into creativity and the urge to connect with someone who understands, who inspires, who motivates. Kosinski is not interested in the cultural dichotomy between classical music and pop art, or between corporate concerns and heartfelt/homemade "personal" music. Instead the subtext hinges on being able to get someone's attention by a meaningful performance; in a letter of analysis; a well-played piece of music that captures the sexuality of the artist; the connection between a lover and a voyeur.

It is not a book about music; it is a book about creating.

Sex scenes seem to appear every 20 pages; fine, and here they are more sexy and effective than Kosinski's written before (more than mere couplings, they serve as symbolic attempts to span the gulf between desire and self-expression). His ending seems rushed and overdone here, overly melodramatic and violent and less satisfying than it could be (basically, "he talked in his sleep"). But here as before ("Blind Date" or "Passion Play") he has managed to find a metaphor for a lifestyle, a kind of living hell in which artistic survivors live on the fringes of regular culture, not in control of their own fates as they struggle to find meaning in the random and violent or sexual surprises life throws at them.

The subtext of musical creativity, with occasional passages of well-written insight into playing and inspiration (suggesting it comes from personal incidents rather than process), sheds light on Kosinski's own writing, always folding his life into his fiction, as well as foreshadowing an increasing preoccupation with death and a sense of dread he's famous for.

The title "Pinball" is a nice metaphor for the events in the lives of the characters in the book, bouncing and reversing identities and partners like a ball in a machine. He doesn't hit it on the head too hard or lean on it more than it's able to support, and it works.

Several reviewers, showing no reverence, appear not to have heard that Jerzy took his own life some years ago. PINBALL may have been Jerzy's best effort. He inserts layer after layer of the pinball metaphor, a ball bounced hither and fro, mostly by chance. He compares the unexpected motion of a pinball to the music of his hero, Domostroy. These elements of chance plague all his characters. The unexpected, unforeseen, unpredictable falling of the pinball is a metaphor for the sudden cessation of life.

The shadow of death permeates this story. The character Goddard is panicked by the sudden death of a girl he picked up by chance. To him it was as if a phonograph had suddenly been unplugged. The music, ever a metaphor for life, just stopped. What meaning can there be in a life so casually turned off? This anticipation of death was much worse than death itself. Kosinski saw the grim reaper as the ultimate controller of all life.

The rise and fall of Domostroy's career in music was another layer of the pinball metaphor. The search for the composer's inspiration always led to female embedded sex. All love was unrequited. In fact, music itself was presented as the joining of male and female notes. The characters were all presented as puppets whose strings were being pulled by the puppeteer called Music.

Kosinski used the two characters, Domostroy and Goddard, to show the toll that celebrity had inflicted on his own life. The question is, can an artist separate himself from his works once he chooses to exhibit them? Goddard had hoped to avoid the fate of John Lennon by constructing a dream world where he remained anonymous. While Domostroy chose to live in a cell of his own making to avoid the consequences of his own failed music and his own pinballed life.

PINBALL is a surreal, intense meditation on the relationship of art to the artists that produce it, and the relationship of artists to their audience.
Reportedly written in response to JohnLennon's assassination, PINBALL is the story of an obsessive fan's search for the world's most popular rock star, the mysterious Goddard. Goddard does not perform in public; no one has ever seen him, no one knows who he really is. Andrea, the obsessed fan, seduces has-been classical pianist Patrick Domostroy to help her in the search. As the search develops, Domostroy wonders about its true motivation, and begins to understand that the revelation will inevitably be a disappointment. It's the art that matters, not the artist -- but he does not know what Andrea has planned for Goddard once she finds him.

Occasionally overwritten and melodramatic, PINBALLnevertheless exerts an almost hypnotic spell on a first-time reader. Domostroy's search takes him from sex clubs to society parties, all of which are acutely observed, as is the character of Domostroy himself.

Domostroy is the novel's most fully developed character; others appear more as archetypes than as real people. This is only appropriate, however, when one considers PINBALL as an allegory, a fable similar to the story of the goose that laid the golden eggs. PINBALL repays multiple readings, and lingers in the mind long after the last page is turned.