Marta is an ambivalent figure, at best. She is ugly, foul smelling, and often ignorant of the protagonist s suffering. On the other hand, she occasionally expresses an endearing sort of sentimentality toward him, raking her long scraggly nails along his head affectionately. She also attempts to heal him when he is ill, mixing vile treatments for him to drink such as the juice of a squeezed onion, the bile of a billygoat or rabbit, and a dash of raw vodka. The Painted Bird s historical contributions lie not in the realm of factual, unbiased, detail-laden information, but in giving us a new way of thinking about the facts that we already have.
Few books focus on the internal orders of such countries as Poland.
Peasants played a major role in ethnic extermination as well by condoning, and often perpetuating, Hitler s hate. More than that, however, the book s slow panorama of superstition, Catholicism, and existentialism give us a three-dimensional understanding of all the myriad of ideas that were floating around at that time. We understand them from the mind of a child, we apply them to the experiences we see him having. Bosnia, for example, resounds with the echo of the Nazis boots. One of the greatest aspects of fiction is that, in many senses, it is always alive.