Word: cockpit
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Kosinski's bestial imagination hasn't failed him in his new novel: the episodes of rape and dismemberment are as brutal and varied as ever. But there is something missing, some sense of the bizarre and the demonic that inspired his early novels and, where they were inhumanly strong, Cockpit seems in the end only inhuman...
...central metaphor of Cockpit is a bicycle wheel that the narrator remembers playing with as a child. He would run along behind it, pushing it forward and controlling its path with a wooden stick: so, as an adult, he manipulates the lives of people he encounters...
Tarden isn't always the perpetrator of Cockpit's atrocities. Sometimes, as in Steps, he is only a witness; occasionally he is the victim. Once in a while, in his apparently motiveless interference in people's lives, he does them a good turn. In the process, we don't learn very much about him. He has an apparently limitless amount of money, and an extraordinary intelligence for survival (he boasts of this). He describes some of his past in a sketchy and idealized way: he managed by cunning to escape from a totalitarian, evidently EasternEuropean state; in the United States...
...WORLD of Cockpit is not only barren, it is random and irrational. Tarden's obsession with power is a way of fighting the absolute dominion of chance and accident, a way (he reverses Faulkner's phrase) of surviving where most people only know how to endure. Tarden blinds an armed attacker by luring him into a room used for treating photographic plates with powerful quartz lights. That man, he says, was a fool for taking so few precautions. Tarden, on the other hand, hooks his feet around the legs of chairs so they can't be pulled out from under...
Sweating and vomiting, trapped by the weakness of his body, Tarden is still in the cockpit. The limitations of Tarden's religion of power, suggested before, are finally confirmed. All that's left, in this bitter novel, is an unredeemed sense of futility...