Violent games of polo and kinky sex form recurring scenes in this novel. This is not normally why I pick up a book. But Kosinski was recommended to me by my students in Poland. I had heard the elements of his life story from them.

Little Jerzy was brought up in Poland in a place and time that brought out the worst in human kind. He inhabited a world where the authorities would make him into either a slave or a corpse. “Kosinski appears to be obsessed with finding evil everywhere,” said Ellie Wiesel in consternation some thirty years later.

When at university in Lódz he forged an invitation to an academic conference in the USA. Actually he forged whole departments and professors, both in Poland and in the USA. The authorities granted him a visa and an aeroplane ticket. He arrived at the airport with a poison ampoule in his pocket in case the scheme was uncovered at the last moment.

Fabian, the book’s hero, is a loner and seducer who plays by his own rules.

Closing in on youth – a young woman, a girl – Fabian could not resist its spell; he was compelled, his instinct honed by anguish. He would fix with an intensity almost clinical, bordering on obsession, on the sheen of a girl’s eyes, the deep colour that washed pupil and iris, each filament of hair that streamed from her head …