Cosmos [Hardcover]

Witold Gombrowicz (Author), Danuta Borchardt (Translator)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0300108486 | ISBN-13: 978-0300108484 | Publication Date: October 10, 2005

A dark, quasi-detective novel, Cosmos follows the classic noir motif to explore the arbitrariness of language, the joke of human freedom, and man’s attempt to bring order out of chaos in his psychological life.
Published in 1965, Cosmos is the last novel by Witold Gombrowicz (1904–1969) and his most somber and multifaceted work. Two young men meet by chance in a Polish resort town in the Carpathian Mountains. Intending to spend their vacation relaxing, they find a secluded family-run pension. But the two become embroiled first in a macabre event on the way to the pension, then in the peculiar activities and psychological travails of the family running it. Gombrowicz offers no solution to their predicament.
Cosmos is translated here for the first time directly from the Polish by Danuta Borchardt, translator of Ferdydurke.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

*Starred 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
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

“Borchardt’s graceful, powerful, and inventive translation is a great gift to all lovers of Witold Gombrowicz’s quirky prose.”—Jaroslaw Anders

(Jaroslaw Anders )

Praise for Ferdydurke:
“This promises to be, at last, the English translation of Ferdydurke that we have all been waiting for.”—Stanislaw Baranczak, Harvard University

(Stanislaw Baranczak )

Praise for Ferdydurke:
“Extravagant, brilliant, disturbing, brave, funny, wonderful. . . . Long live its sublime mockery.”—Susan Sontag

(Susan Sontag )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (October 10, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300108486
• ISBN-13: 978-0300108484
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #252,821 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the great absurd novels of the 20th century, April 15, 2006

By 

Ignacio (Portland OR USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cosmos (Hardcover)

I rercently reread "Cosmos" and it still holds up. Over the years I have passed this novel on to goths, punks, high school drop-outs, violinists and math wizards -- and it never disappoints. It has a deadpan, rather menacing tone that one cannot put down.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars You have to be a little strange to enjoy this book., December 26, 2005

By 

Darrel Drumm "Darrel the librarian" (Bunch, OK United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Cosmos (Hardcover)

Cosmos isn't for the average reader who likes their fiction in neat compartments. Rather, it goes off in a stream of consciousness that occasionally seems to get bogged down in the narrator's thoughts, then soars into lycism when describing his surroundings. From the beginning of the book with the sparrow hung on a wire, the writer takes us into the narrator's mind and the people's lives with which he has come in contact. It ends as it begins, with question marks.

Read it for a different look at life, but don't read it if you want "high adventure" or "action."

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Pathos and whimsy, December 21, 2011

By 

J.M. - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cosmos (Hardcover)

I see this novel as a masterpiece within a specific tradition, entirely apart from the popular palate, but not alone. That is, the tradition of Bruno Schulz, Roald Dahl, Kafka, Murakami, Kobo Abe to name a few. A shuffling, disturbed pace, but at the same time hilarious, much like "The Street of Crocodiles". Not a book to decrypt but to simply enjoy- let the muttering misguided characters get lost in the allegories of cracked-plaster text, lost in the mystery of both a bucolic Polish village and their own sanity. If this book were an allegory, I would look at it as a display of Gombrowicz's frustration with "Poland's inferiority complex". But as I said, for me, it is an engaging detective story, no more no less.
I recommend starting with this before heading on to Ferdydurke, Pornografia and the rest.