This edition of two short novels that are not quite novellas is a good introduction to Witold Gombrowicz, a strange polish exile writer more interested in philosophy than literature. Do the books stand alone if Gombrowicz's mind games don't enthrall you? He is a strange storyteller. One is almost tempted to call him almost amateurish. He seems to get bored with scenes and finish them summarily. Characters are shadows whom we get to know only by the level of contempt the narrator, who is named Witold Gombrowicz, has for them. However, Gombrowicz then throws in some violent action that seems to both bring together his narrative and settle his argument.

Gombrowicz is strange writer, given to megalomania in small spurts but capable of humanity, humility and humor. He is hard writer to recommend but and an equally hard writer to leave out of the conversation. ( )

well worth reading as is most of his writing. ( )

ok strange but compelling..... ( )

Right from the beginning, you get the sense of how much is fastened, rattling, to the train of this man's thought. A sentence from page two: "I wondered, standing in the midst of this chaos, this proliferating vegetation with its endless complications, my head full of the rattle and clatter of the nightlong train journey, insufficient sleep, the air and the sun and the tramp through the heat with this man Fuchs, and Jesia and my mother, the row about the letter and my rudeness to the old man, and Julius, and also Fuchs's troubles with his chief at the office (about which he had told me), and the bad road, and the ruts and lumps of earth and heels, trouser-legs, stones and all this vegetation, all culminating like a crowd genuflecting before this hanged sparrow--reigning triumphant and eccentric over this outlandish spot."

The narrator obsessively accumulates arbitrary signifiers, shuffling every loose end back into play in an effort to make things cohere. When his associative chains threaten to disintegrate, he begins to act and advances the plot with his compulsive, crowded manifestations. On the one hand (via the character of Leo) eccentric, privately-gratifying constellations of meaning are presented in a disarmingly sympathetic manner that becomes almost celebratory in the final quirky moments. On the other hand, the narrator, last name Witold, grinds his teeth over his different obsessions to an uncomfortable degree; a fact that he acknowledges in scattered moments of especially self-aware narrative: "I must stop connecting and associating." "Such a continual accumulation and disintegration of things can hardly be called a story" And "Oh, merciful, almighty God, why was it impossible to concentrate on anything?"

While the inevitability of Witold's relentless recombination of items (a hanged sparrow, a deformed lip, a pattern on the ceiling) gets a bit oppressive, there is a dependable vein of humor in "Cosmos" that makes it a pleasurable read. The characterisation of Leo's family, his maid, two newly-wedded couples, Witold's friend and a fidgety rural priest is distinct, detail-oriented and intense. Witold finds the comic elements of everyone who surrounds him and skewers them to the wall.

BIG CAVEAT: This book is called a "version" of "Cosmos" because it is a translation of two other translations (to English from the French and German translations from Polish). I'm not really comfortable with a text so far removed from the actual language of its author and I might not have purchased or read this "version" of the text if I had noticed what a game of telephone it has already passed through.
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Pornografia" is more entertaining than "Cosmos" and a better introduction to Gombrowicz. The narrator contextualizes his "feverish" excitability--the animating force, mirrored in Frederick, his peer, that bullies this story forward--by saying, "it must be understood that all this suddenly happened to me after stifling, gray years of horror and exhaustion, or of insane extravagance. During which I had almost forgotten what beauty was." Frederick and the narrator set about trying to manufacture beauty in a delusional and ruthless fashion, using all of the ancillary characters of the book to advance their scheme of prompting a young man and a young affianced woman to hook up with one another, simply on account of their proximity and youthful freshness.

As in "Cosmos," much of the reality is compiled and determined by two quite similar middle aged men with too much free time and great psychological insight with little psychological grip. A representative passage: "He was abject, humbly odious in this submission to his own horror--and his abjection contaminated me to such an extent that my own worms arose, crawled out, climbed up, and polluted my face. But that was not the limit of my humiliation. The sinister comicality of this situation was mainly due to the fact that we were like a couple of lovers deceived and rejected by another couple: our passion, our excitement had nothing on which to feed and now raged between us." "Sinister Comicality" may be the best overall descriptor of Gombrowicz's style. His protagonists are decidedly creepy, unstable looming voyeurs, who for all their menace are endearing for their superior intelligence and dependable wit.

Readers see everything from the perspective of these idle men, who are happy to introduce other characters in this fashion (of Hippolytus): "He looked as though he were bloated by a tumor that had distorted his limbs and stretched his flesh in every direction so that his repulsively flourishing body was like an erupting volcano of meat." And when this same man is speaking, "At the same time his disillusioned, implacably present face was a real insult to Amelia and her guests. The destructive force of his speech was inconceivable, and you could see this force, this marginal force, carry away the orator like a bolting horse." The humor in these excerpts is characteristic of "Pornografia," which for all it's violence and foul intent is lighter and more digestible than "Cosmos."

I wonder what influence Gombrowicz had on Thomas Bernhard. ( )