Short and interesting. Would have been more impactful at a little bit longer, but a nice little fable about the nature of celebrity in a TV soaked culture.

Started off great, but was ultimately very short with an abrupt ending. The movie is better in many ways. And it’s my understanding that a strong case of plagarization was made against the author.

A very fun take on the shallowness of present day society and people in general. Beautifully depicted and yet sad that it was so short. Seems that there was an entire world to explore here but alas -
Good fun. 4 stars

This book places a naive, childlike character into the world to act as a focus for a satirical critique of society. In that sense, it's like other books of the same period - Dr Strangelove by Peter George or The Magic Christian by Terry Southern. All three books, of course, have been made into films starring Peter Sellars.
It's essentially a simple gag: turn him loose and let a series of minor misunderstandings build into a shared narrative that is soon so accepted that the whole world shifts around it. It's pretty funny and short enough that it doesn't get boring. Even so, if I'd been the editor I'd have maybe suggested that it didn't need two fairly similar sex scenes, one after the other. I think we got the point the first time.
It holds up pretty well: the political and media landscape aren't the same now, but we still see the same kind of things going on: spin applied to out of context quotes, political brands being built up on the basis of very little real substance... Yeah, it still works in the twenty first century, in spite of everything.

Book with dark humour.

What an awful, horrific, hater's book! Jerzy Kosinski, the author, must have had a bad year going to meet-and-grins in high society. Nobody is ok in this book. In Kosinski's bleak, black satire, he blasts away at civilized humanity, and at our poseur thinking selves (avatars is what I actually want to say). In truth, the hidden extreme self-involvement and the resulting recursive solipsism driving every single human being, in the author's opinion, is an ugly thing.

The book was written in 1971, but of course, it appears to reveal our current environment of politics and TV news scarily, exactly, resoundingly perfectly. Yikes. So much of what happens in this book seems to be actually happening right now. It feels like we are in a time where the spirit of Chance is holding on to the legs of our current politicians and Big Business CEOs.

I don't think some readers understand that Chance is a symbol of the inner self, not a reflection. Chance embodies what is dreadfully wrong with every character in the book except for The Old Man, who has the good sense to keep Chance as far away from him as he can. Chance isn't a real person. He is a monster. He's of the same type of creatures Dickens used in his book, 'A Christmas Carol', when Scrooge is visited by ghosts, in which one of the ghosts had attached to him creature children he called Want and Ignorance. Chance is a creature child attached to society and power in this monstrous fable.

Chance represents a miserable and devastating aspect of our natures that causes awful self-delusion and poverty of thought. The resulting harm of mistaking empty witless 'authenticity' for substance is terrifying.

By the way, the garden is another literary symbol turned on it's head as is everything in this book. Chance's garden is the Garden of Hell and the Tree of Ignorance.

http://zimlicious.blogspot.com/

Being There is the story of Chance, who's a gardener working for an old man. He doesn't have a family, he's never left the house his entire life, and all he does pretty much is tend the garden and watch TV. And then, after the man he works for dies, he has to move out because there are no records of him working there or living there or even existing at all. On his first day out, Chance is in a car accident and ends up living at the home of an ill, wealthy businessman. After that his life changes.


The books is described as "a satiric look at the unreality of America's media culture," but I think this story could have pretty much taken place anywhere. As soon as he starts communicating with the outside world, people start making assumptions about Chance. As events unfold, he goes by what he knows about gardening and what he saw on TV, without ever lying to anyone. But, of course, people see what they want to see, and believe what they want to believe, and him not talking much about himself makes him even more irresistible.

"As long as one didn't look at people, they did not exist. They began to exist, as on TV, when one turned one's eyes on them."

That's exactly what happens to Chance. All of a sudden, he's the right hand of the wealthy businessman, and even the president ends up quoting him in his speech. It really shows how people are fascinated by a few simple remarks just because they understood it the way they wanted to. Chance learning everything from TV and proceeding in real life according to what he "learned" from TV was a bit over the top in some parts... But when you look around and see people who want to be Carrie Bradshaw, try hard for it and believe it, it all makes sense.


P.S. I found out Kosinski stole the idea from a 1920's Polish Novel called The Career of Nikodem Dyzma by Tadeusz Dolega-Mostowicz. Although I haven't read this one, it doesn't make Being There any less great for me.

Chance was astonished that television could portray itself; cameras watched themselves and, as they watched, they televised a program.