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Title: Not his best
Review: It seems to me that the works of Kosinski set in Eastern Europe have far greater strength and authenticity than the work set in America. This particular little piece of ' Look at the anarchic dismal impersonal civilization we live in' school has a touch of the randonmness and violence which Kosinki's world is pervaded by.The story of the gardener whose guardian dies and who has to encounter the ' real world' for the first time gives no sense of any redeeming moment or beauty in life. One might say that Becket doesn't either and that is his genius. But I have the sense that the emptiness which Kosinki finds at the heart of 'Television Civilization's is an emptiness in the heart of Kosinski himself.Unfairly perhaps I think of Tolstoy and that kind of fiction which makes the person love life more, not wonder why one is reading something which makes one wonder if life really is so worthless and so small.
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