Jerzy Kosinski's second novel, Steps (1968), is made up of a series of vignettes set in Poland during and after WWII, and in "the West." Always the setting is exotic; always we sense, in Thoreau's phrase, that we are immersed "in dreams awake." The protagonist-narrator of Steps is alternately the dark-complected boy of Kosinski's first novel, The Painted Bird (1965), and that same boy as an adult. He is variously a waif, soldier, photographer, waiter, day laborer, servant.

In whatever guise, he is—when not merely the witness to enormity—that agent of a malignity so darkly inscrutable that, by comparison, Shakespeare's Iago seems the Man from Glad. The only absolute in the world of Steps is the self of the protagonist-narrator—an utterly solipsistic Self for whom the Other is no more than an occasion for the fulfillment of outrageous fantasy….

The vignettes have to do with murder, disease...