Jerzy Kosiński's weird afterlife continues with a novelization, but what would he have made of River Ridge?

It began with the observation that "doughnut" economics might put the oligarchy fluffers at One Southern Indiana out of work.

What do you know? Chance the gardener was right, after all.

The gardener in question was a fictional creation of the strange and contradictory Jerzy Kosiński.

And who defines this truth? "Bookmark: Sex, Lies and Jerzy Kosiński."

Kosiński now resurfaces in a novel about himself.

Thanks for the tip.

Jerzy Kosinski Stars in a Novel About His Own Strange Life, by Benjamin Markovits (NY Times)

JERZY
By Jerome Charyn
237 pp. Bellevue Literary Press. Paper, $16.99.

You can find him on YouTube talking to David Letterman or Johnny Carson — a celebrity novelist. Although at a certain point Jerzy Kosinski became more than that, or something different: one of those hard-to-place figures, not quite funny but not exactly the butt of the joke either. A professional oddball. Letterman doesn’t quite know what to do with him and treats Kosinski like the weird foreign uncle a well-brought-up young man should be nice to. But Kosinski played other roles too: Holocaust survivor, con man, sex fiend, Hollywood actor, seer, a guy on the make.

Jerome Charyn’s new novel covers much of the usual life story, though not in the usual order ...

And who defines this truth? "Bookmark: Sex, Lies and Jerzy Kosiński."

A recent oblique reference ...

What do you know? Chance the gardener was right, after all.

 ... led to refresher about the life of Jerzy Kosiński, author of Being There.

This clip repeats midway through, but contains an interesting conversation about television and the passive act of watching.

He was an actor, too. Here's a clip from the only Warren Beatty film that really matters, Reds, with Kosiński appearing as Zinoviev.

A strange and contradictory figure, indeed.

Sex, Lies and Jerzy Kosinski

The BBC documentary on the life and art of enigmatic novelist Jerzy Kosinski. Through interviews with his second wife Kiki von Fraunhofer-Kosinski, friends and fellow authors, and Polish villagers who knew Kosinski when he was a child hiding from the scourge of Nazism, this program attempts to assess the verity of Kosinski's "autobiographical" fiction, the need for him to maintain a nebulous mystique about his early life, and to understand his obsession with S&M sex clubs in Manhattan during the 1970s and 1980s.