Hermit of 69th Street

The protagonist, Norbert Kosky, is a Jewish writer in his fifties who originally came from the mythical European country of Ruthenia, where he survived the Holocaust, but who now lives in the United States. Kosky has a cabalistic attachment to letters and numbers; he is obsessed by the letters SS, which represent anything from "spiritually sacred" to "safe sex" (apart from their Nazi implications), and by the number 69. Both run like a leitmotif through the text. The narrative consists of a series of bizarre episodes. One of the most amusing is when Kosky is selected to award the Oscars; one of the most powerful is when he plays the part of the Russian revolutionary leader Nikolay Bukharin in a motion picture (which draws on Kosinski's own appearance as Grigory Zinoviev in the film REDS). Many episodes involve voluptuous young women who promise, and sometimes give, sex. Like the Holocaust, sex is never far away in this book. Kosky views it through Tantric spectacles; he has ambitions to be a kind of sexual yogi.