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Milan Kundera called Witold Gombrowicz “one of the great novelists of our century.” His most famous novel, Cosmos, the recipient of the 1967 International Prize for Literature, is now available in a critically acclaimed translation, for the first time directly from the Polish, by the award-winning translator Danuta Borchardt.
Cosmos is a metaphysical noir thriller narrated by Witold, a seedy, pathetic, and witty student, who is charming and appalling by turns. On his way to a relaxing vacation he meets the despondent Fuks. As they set off together for a family-run pension in the Carpathian Mountains they discover a dead bird hanging from a string. Is this a strange but meaningless occurrence or is it the beginning of a string of bizarre events? As the young men become embroiled in the Chekhovian travails of the family running the pension, Grombrowicz creates a gripping narrative where the reader questions who is sane and who is safe?
About Witold Gombrowicz
The renowned Polish author, Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969) lived, virtually unknown, in Argentina, writing novels, stories, and plays for twenty-five years before taking up residence in France. He wrote four novels, Trans-Atlantyk, Cosmos, Pornografia, and Ferdydurke, which, together with his plays and his three-volume Diary, have been translated into more than thirty languages.
Editorial Review
This dark, surreal tale of two holiday boarders in a Polish country house explores the bizarre lengths to which people at loose ends will go to create meaning in their lives. As one boarder puts it, “When you’re bored, God only knows what you might imagine!” The two young men, who meet on the road, are drawn to a particular rooming house because a sparrow has been hanged nearby on a piece of wire hooked over a branch. Upon this avian crime scene, the men soon build great nests of conspiracy and obsession, following arrows they perceive in ceiling stains and rifling through other people’s rooms for such clues as a nail pounded partway into a wall just above the floor. But while they might not solve their mystery, the boarders do manage to pierce the emotional lives of their host family and uncover the odd ways they deal with their own existential predicaments. Narrated by one of the boarders in a rambling, repetitive, stream-of-consciousness, sometimes bleakly comic style that heightens the tension as the man becomes more and more unglued by and enmeshed in his mad investigation, this 1965 novel–one of four the Nobel-nominated Gombrowicz wrote before his death in 1969–will hold special appeal for fans of Camus’ The Stranger. In this deft new translation, Cosmos, appearing in the U.S. for the first time, reveals itself as a challenging but important work. Frank Sennett, Booklist
Two Men Try To Make Sense Of The ‘Cosmos’
NPR Book Review – November 15, 2011 (Excerpt)
It’s the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Or, in Witold Gombrowicz’s 1967 novel Cosmos, it’s “the drop that makes the cup overflow.” It is just a tiny thing, almost weightless, that the two men see on their way to their holiday pension, and yet there is something about that tiny thing “that’s ‘too much,’ ” says the narrator, who happens to share his name with the author. “There is something like an excess of reality, its swelling beyond endurance … I won’t be able to swallow all this.” One drop, and the spilling begins.
That drop is just a small bird. The two men, Witold and Fuks, looking for a retreat from their daily reality in Warsaw, come across a dead sparrow. It’s hanged by the neck from the branch of a tree — an execution of a harmless creature, and a senseless sight that stuns the men. The questions unfurl. Someone had to have perpetrated this unnatural act, but who? And why? And why were the traveling companions the ones to discover it? Witold chokes on all of these questions. His rational mind overruns its banks. [Read the full article...]
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THE BLEEDING HILLS
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss
I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7
The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]
The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Nobel, and any other good bookstore.
