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 reso 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. ‘ How many sentences can one create out of the twenty-four letters of the alphabet? How many meanings can one gleam from hundreds of weeds, colds of dirt, and other trifles?’ Polish author Wiltold Gombrowicz explores the notions of order in a seemingly random, chaotic world in his 1967 novel Cosmos. Winner of the ‘International Prize for Literature’, which, as translator Danuta Borchardt asserts in her introduction, was ‘ second in importance only to the Nobel Prize’, this psychological novel bomba ‘ How many sentences can one create out of the twenty-four letters of the alphabet?

How many meanings can one gleam from hundreds of weeds, colds of dirt, and other trifles?’ Polish author Wiltold Gombrowicz explores the notions of order in a seemingly random, chaotic world in his 1967 novel Cosmos. Winner of the ‘International Prize for Literature’, which, as translator Danuta Borchardt asserts in her introduction, was ‘ second in importance only to the Nobel Prize’, this psychological novel bombards, and occasionally exhausts the reader with Gombrowicz’s characteristic subtly and mastery of paranoid over-analysis. While this novel functions on it’s own apart from the rest of his work, Cosmos is best understood as a commentary and culmination of the themes teased and expressed in his earlier novels, and his masterpiece. Gombrowicz exposes the human desire to create order from the randomness that beleaguers their existence in order to view the world as a safe, functionary society in which they are mature and essential cogs instead of a chaotic void in which we are merely immature and irrelevant. The plot of this novel is highly secondary, and consists of the narrator, a college youth on holiday named Witold, accompanying a classmate to an out of the way pension in order to study in peace.

By producing the same condition in the viewer as originally experienced by the artist in submitting to the phantasm. Presence, between the artist and his simulacrum, the simulacrum and its viewer.”11. The same conception of. In Witold Gombrowicz, Cosmos and Pornographia, trans. Eric Mosbacher and Alastair.

In the darkness of the forest, they discover a hung sparrow, which sets off a seemingly connected (or are they?) chain of events. Vague connections are drawn and Gombrowicz directs his psychological investigations in a stylized detective fashion, having the boys find ‘clues’ that are so small and inconsequential, such as what may or may not be an arrow that may or may not have been recently scratched amongst the cracks in the ceiling (‘ If it’s an arrow, it must be pointing to somethingand if it’s not an arrow, it’s not pointing.’). Through this sleuthing, the reader is invited into the feverish mind of Wiltold the narrator to question the nature of signs and deciphering symbols from randomness. Do they really stumble onto covert codes, or is it the human desire to construct meaning? ‘ No sooner do we look than orderand formare born under our very eyes.’ The style of this novel is initially bewildering. The sentences are long and rambling, meandering through a convoluted psyche that is troubled by a growing paranoia.

It takes a good portion of this short novel for the reader to get a firm footing, and unlike the powerful imagery and poetry of Pornografia, or the absurd Monty Python-esk comedy and literary investigations of Ferdydurke, Cosmos is intentionally bland. This blandness, this insistence on illustrating an ordinary, lethargic existence, further highlights the slight aberrations encountered, placing simple morbid pleasures such as Katasia’s gash that extends one side of her mouth into a slightly ‘lizard-like’ smile into the forefront of the narrators mind. These tidbits of the bizarre are constantly reexamined in his mind, ordered and picked up one by one to turn over, caress, and put back as if they were treasured items in a collection, done so an overwhelming multitude of times that the repetition is very likely to chafe on the reader.

For being short in length, the novel slogs forward through the muck of mangled reality and by the time the reader reaches the incredible and exciting conclusion, the book may have worn thin on their patience. It is important to remember that this book is more an exploration of philosophy and psychological insight than a ‘story’. Despite the few cumbersome aspects of this novel, Gombrowicz shines with his acute sense of subtly and paranoia. The narrator is constantly on the lookout for associations, often staggering when another character mentions something offhanded that can vaguely associate with the thoughts in his head. ‘ Wasn’t it like putting my own anxieties into words,’ he often thinks as he dives headlong into conspiracy theories of order.

Gombrowicz demonstrates how everything we encounter is ‘connected’ through ‘associations with’ each other event or object, and how the human mind draws these conclusions as if instinctually. The characters in the novel crave order, desire some map composed of meaning and method to abate our fear of randomness and chaos. They make order in their lives with marriage, religions, and divine a clear explanation for any of their actions.

Even the strangulation of the cat, is questioned for the motive as it cannot be accepted as having been on a whim, ‘ born out of chaos’ and a reaction to his world view of order being shattered by a seemingly pointless object entering into his scheme of meaning. When the party is faced with the powerful panoramic view of the mountains, a dance of chaos with nature thrusting into the sky at beautiful random angles, the married couple that clings to each other in overly obnoxious ‘cutesy’ ways is immediately terrified, crying out in fear and holding one another.

The chaos of nature threatens their worldview. Here is where we also find the priest, lost in the wilderness as Gombrowicz takes his standard jabs at religions method of proclaiming meaning in a meaningless world. Here is where the true nature of the title, Cosmos, a word never used in the novel is exposed. To Gombrowicz, the cosmos, the universe, is a chaotic void deplete of meaning. This notion, expressed best in when narrator Witold observes an atheist praying in church and drops into a vision of the church floating aimlessly in a void, seems to have finally grown into a full-fledged theme in Cosmos, pointed and poked at but never overtly mentioned.

The major theme from, that of immaturity, has also blossomed in this novel. The adults, those who are looked at as pillars of society and the family, most notably the bank manager, is a mere buffoon who uses childish wordplay and singsongy phrases. If we are faced with a world of chaos, a world without order, than, as in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, we must create out own order and meaning for ourselves. Gombrowicz examines this through a rather humorous onanistic metaphor, ‘ go to your own for whatever turns you on’, and self-gratification and actions preformed ‘ for oneself for the pleasure of oneself alone’ are shown as the opposing method to combat the chaotic darkness of reality than the obnoxious mapping of order and meaning. All these onanstic and detective themes of the novel come together for a startling conclusion that really makes all the pieces fit together and hum. Or do they only fit together because the narrator looks for the connections and have we ‘ exaggerated it’s importance because it turned up at the end point of our search’? These questions and more come crashing down to a surprising ‘non-ending’ that is both frustrating and brilliant considering the essence of this novel.

Cosmos is a wonderful read, difficult and annoying at times, but full of thoughts to ponder and reflect over. It would be very much advisable to have read his earlier novels first to fully appreciate the ideas at play here and to draw many of the connections left open for the reader, plus I cannot recommend many novels more highly than I do. The examination of such small 'trifles', as they are often called, to complete a larger picture reminded me much of and her one act play, which also consists of characters playing detective and illuminating a larger truth from a dead sparrow and other trifles, however, I cannot ascertain any actual connection between the two beyond simple coincidence (which, considering this novel, is rather ironic to me at present). Also, It should be noted as well that despite the strangeness of the text, this is the only translation direct from the original Polish instead of having passed through several languages before reaching an English reader, and is as faithful to Gombrowicz’s stylistic intentions as you can find in print. Explore the madness and chaos of reality with Gombrowicz, just don’t expect to find your way back from this dark forest of atheistic pleasures. 3.5/5 I could never know to what degree I was the perpetrator, configuring the configurations around me! Some time ago I was having a conversation with a friend of mine about women, specifically the art of figuring out which ones are interested in you, and he was saying that he never felt confident that he was reading the signs right; and that this lack of confidence, in a sense, paralysed him, so that he rarely approached them.

He wanted to know how I managed it. How was it that I was always so sure? Desktop Locker Express Crack more. Well, I let him in on a little secret: stop worrying about signs, as you’ll only confuse yourself.

Some time ago I was having a conversation with a friend of mine about women, specifically the art of figuring out which ones are interested in you, and he was saying that he never felt confident that he was reading the signs right; and that this lack of confidence, in a sense, paralysed him, so that he rarely approached them. He wanted to know how I managed it. How was it that I was always so sure?

Well, I let him in on a little secret: stop worrying about signs, as you’ll only confuse yourself. A glance, a nod, a smiledid she wink?something in her eye.scratch her nosewhich meansdid she sigh?a touchon the armit’s a kind of madness, all this. You can never be certain.

Getting a telephone number, like a belief in God, requires a leap of faith. Oh, of course, she can say nomaybe she will say no, it’s entirely possible, but no is an answer, it is concrete, it is not a nod, a glance, a little something in the eye, perhaps. And, please, take the no as a no, don’t try and read the no, for God’s sake. There is, with us, by which I mean human beings, an obsession, a mania, for signs, for interpretation, for creating narratives out of next to nothing. A girlfriend of mine once said to me, after the break-up, that I had, at a certain point in the relationship, given her a look of disgust, and that in that moment she had known that we were doomed.

My face nearly always looks like that. What can you do? The truth is that I had never felt disgusted by her, of course not, but, ah, the look! And what about science?

Holy science! Religion too! It’s all part of the same thing, the same madness: this need to explain, to decipher, to crack codes, to solve, to impose order and form on the worldlike reading tealeaves or looking for Jesus on a taco. “The world was indeed a kind of screen and did not manifest itself other than by passing me on and on—I was just the bouncing ball that objects played with!” I’ve been a fan of the work of acclaimed Polish author Witold Gombrowicz for some time, having read and enjoyed his amusing philosophical novels Pornografia and Ferdydurke more than once. I had, however, never got around to having a go at Cosmos. It’s too impenetrable, too zany, too dated, was the impression I had been given from the small number of reviews I had encountered.

Zany and impenetrable had been my thing at one stage, but I had drifted away from that in recent years, as I rested my feet in the clear and warm waters of nineteenth century literature. And maybe that break has done me good, because I came to Cosmos reenergised, fired up for exactly this kind of book.

Cosmos is, on the surface, a detective story. Two students, one of whom is the narrator, are looking for a place to stay when they happen upon a bird that has been hung from a piece of wire. Out of this macabre and surreal discovery a mystery develops. First of all, the men ask themselves, ‘who hung the bird and why?’ It’s not the sort of thing you come across every day, of course.

After taking lodgings with the Wojtyses family the men start to notice other unusual things [or potential clues!] – an arrow on the ceiling, a stick, a tree that appears to have been moved – which they believe to be linked, to each other and to the bird. As the narrative progresses they become more and more convinced that there is a meaning or rationale behind it all, a puzzle to be put together and solved, a bigger picture. Is someone playing a game with them? Or trying to tell them something?

Or [Hung Bird by Leonard Baskin] Ah, and so we come full circle, the snake swallows its tail! All because of the ‘or.’ We must deal with that ‘or.’ Of course, someone could be messing around, or sending a message, with the bird, the stick, the tree, but what is far more likely is that Witold and Fuks [the two detectives] are simply seeing something in these random objects that isn’t actually there, or is there only because they have, in a sense, put it there themselves [‘the arrow’, the author suggests, could be merely a scratch that resembles an arrow]. They are imbuing these things with meaning, pumping significance into them; they are imposing order and form upon the world, which is, as noted, something that we, by which I mean human beings, do all the time and can, moreover, be done in relation to absolutely anything; this is, for example, how superstitions are created. As I was reading the book I was also put in mind of modern art, something like Kippenberger’s Wittgenstein, say, which is a shelving unit painted grey. An ordinary shelving unit!

And yet people, including the artist himself of course, see something in that shelving unit, some kind of message or comment, some significance; they, yes, pump that grey shelving unit full of significance. Now that we have come this far, the next question is ‘why?’ Why do we do this? You might argue that we impose meaning on the world because otherwise it would be too overwhelming, too chaotic, too frightening. The world is bigger than us, more powerful; and therefore we need to try and bring it to heel.

What is interesting about Cosmos, however, is that Gombrowicz takes the opposing position, which is that an ordered world is overwhelming, that what is terrifying is relentless meaning. He likens this to a swarm. In all of his work he [or his narrator] is fixated on individual body parts – the mugs and pupas in Ferdydurke, for example – and I couldn’t ever quite grasp what he was getting at until I read this novel. It now strikes me that what Gombrowicz was doing was destroying form, destroying human order by breaking people down, pulling them apart. In Cosmos, Witold obsessively focusses on Lena’s hands and lips, and one can’t help but imagine these parts floating, disembodied, in space.

“Not surprisingly, because too much attention to one object leads to distraction, this one object conceals everything else, and when we focus on one point on the map we know that all other points are eluding us.” I have only read Cosmos once, and so I would not suggest that I understand it completely or that this review has nailed all its themes and ideas. Indeed, I could have burdened you with many more paragraphs, as there are a number of other subjects I would like to explore – coincidence, threads and logical connections, madness and obsession, and so on – but this review is long enough already, and there are still a couple of points I must briefly touch upon before I finish. First of all, Cosmos has been likened to the work of Samuel Beckett, and I can see that, but it is, for me, more like Beckett’s novels drunkenly carousing with Thomas Bernhard’s. I think Gombrowicz was a masterful writer, and stylist, but I will say that he is perhaps an acquired taste [and even I wasn’t keen on some of the Leon babble and nonsense]. Secondly, and most importantly of all, this is a serious contender for the funniest book I have ever read. The Lime Works, by the aforementioned Bernhard, would run it close, and I was greatly amused by both Platonov’s The Foundation Pit and Walser’s The Robber, but Cosmos had me cackling so loud and so frequently my cat is now suffering from PTSD. In fact, the Berg-Bemberg conversation between Witold and Leon [you have to read it, I can’t possibly do it justice here] brought me almost to the point of hysteria.

Which, I feel, is something that the author would have approved of. Sparrow hanging in senseless success. A choked chicken adds to the symbol equation. Fish-face's boss hates him.

In an accident they stay the night. Her mouth was a big bang. Everything means nothing, and behind that mouth this mouth. If you fuck someone you fuck everyone they have ever sheet between. Her mouth behind other her mouth, his hands on her hands your hands. Can't pick out ugly star from hot star from her sun star on his glow-worm. White ceiling skies betray signs.

Dyslexic mystery. Th Sparrow hanging in senseless success. A choked chicken adds to the symbol equation. Fish-face's boss hates him.

In an accident they stay the night. Her mouth was a big bang. Everything means nothing, and behind that mouth this mouth. If you fuck someone you fuck everyone they have ever sheet between. Her mouth behind other her mouth, his hands on her hands your hands. Can't pick out ugly star from hot star from her sun star on his glow-worm.

White ceiling skies betray signs. Dyslexic mystery. The cat crucifixation is not a mystery.

Stay the night by put to sleep. Put them all out of your mind on nails. Say it makes sense. The copy of Cosmos that I own had been read previously by a college student who clearly wouldn't have read it otherwise.

At first, his marginalia are serious and boring, like his essays no doubt. It's clear he had read a textbook, remembered a term or two from it, watched how his professer used it, waited for his chance to parrot him. It's also clear that he was also not thinking for himself.

Then, beginning on page 70(wherein a violent killing is described), he gets fed up. He stops thinking th The copy of Cosmos that I own had been read previously by a college student who clearly wouldn't have read it otherwise. At first, his marginalia are serious and boring, like his essays no doubt. It's clear he had read a textbook, remembered a term or two from it, watched how his professer used it, waited for his chance to parrot him.

It's also clear that he was also not thinking for himself. Then, beginning on page 70(wherein a violent killing is described), he gets fed up. He stops thinking through the textbook or through the mouth of his professer and he begins to, well, not think but at least speak for himself. He also makes the amateur's mistake of 'relating to' the characters and not their master. Here are a few of his comments: p.

74 'asshole!' 86 'OMG - he is such a narcissist' p. 92 'why this book is a bore' (In regards to the narrator's inability to concentrate.) p. 109 'enough w/the fucking sparrow' p. 145 'ditto for main character' (In regards to someone having 'a screw loose.' 160 'Book in a nutshell' (next to this passage: 'The eyes of boredom, old buddy, are bigger than those of fear!' 167 'removed from this world' p.

172 'oh jesus' p. 173 'you + me both, dude' (next to this passage: 'I don't even know if it is a story.'

175 'too self absorbed to see the signs?' (In regards to someone's suicide.) p. 181 'OCD weirdo' I confess, I loved his commentary. I didn't ever agree with it but I yearned to hear more. I would have liked to have been reading this book aloud to him, preferably at his bedside while he lay in a full body cast. Cosmos is obsessive, repetative in story and style, mind-rumbling and hilarious. It is weird and the narrator is a weirdo (So I do, sometimes, agree with the college student.

Yes, I think we'd get along well together, as long as I could resist the urge to 'spill' hot tomato soup down the throat of his cast.) who, I have to admit, would these days probably be diagnosed with OCD and other things. Fortunately, he 'lived' in a time when crazy could take over the page and make lovely, horrible fictions, never to be bogged down by the clinical, the catagorized, the dull. What a wonderful weirdo is he! An absurd sight of a sparrow hung from a string begins this unique tale of great paranoia and even greater mental contrivance. The central idea is of how a chaotic world is routinely, perpetually, even grudgingly, willed by us human beings into some sort of an order, and how the effects of this willing add in turn to the chaos.

Meaning thereby that man's position in the world, while necessarily that of an observer and a learner, is also, out of that same necessity, that of an a Zuks! An absurd sight of a sparrow hung from a string begins this unique tale of great paranoia and even greater mental contrivance. The central idea is of how a chaotic world is routinely, perpetually, even grudgingly, willed by us human beings into some sort of an order, and how the effects of this willing add in turn to the chaos. Meaning thereby that man's position in the world, while necessarily that of an observer and a learner, is also, out of that same necessity, that of an actor too. The problem, therefore, is one of limits. And it is through ridiculing the limits that Gombrowicz creates his dark, nonsensical humor here. The central mystery of the novel - who hung the sparrow?

- swells to heady proportions, less through the circumstances but more through the neurotic zeal of the protagonist chasing the answers. The ogling detective has a strong agency of his own, and also a fantastic imagination, and through these he contaminates the scene - which, again, exists largely in his own head - beyond all recovery. In his un-moored consciousness, everything is at once the question as well as the answer. No end is plausible for this mystery, for the mind cultivates the mystery real-time.

Unless.unless of course there are cosmic interventions. * RECOMMENDED. Of the same league as Notes from the Underground, or Hunger. If there is anyone who knows what the things are behind, in spite of and within themselves, it was this guy (I would go for 'is' though, as, I believe, now he still knows it, only somewhere else). 'To stop connecting, to stop associating.' Because it leads to madness.

But then try not to. In a way we are all mad, 'connecting and associating'. In a way it is this madness that makes us be what we are. There is also an interesting passage on bringing yourself pleasure. Out of a mouth of a nearly-madm If there is anyone who knows what the things are behind, in spite of and within themselves, it was this guy (I would go for 'is' though, as, I believe, now he still knows it, only somewhere else). 'To stop connecting, to stop associating.'

Because it leads to madness. But then try not to. In a way we are all mad, 'connecting and associating'. In a way it is this madness that makes us be what we are. There is also an interesting passage on bringing yourself pleasure. Out of a mouth of a nearly-madman or not, it sounded convincing. And the style, THE STYLE.

Two young men show up at a bed & breakfast in the Polish countryside. They've come there to get away from the hustle and bustle of the big city and have some peace and quiet, but it turns out to be anything but; not only do they find a macabre and mystifying corpse nearby, but the family they get to live with seems to have a lot of unresolved issues, which the two youngsters soon find themselves caught up in. And as always in these types of stories, somebody's going to die before it's all Two young men show up at a bed & breakfast in the Polish countryside.

They've come there to get away from the hustle and bustle of the big city and have some peace and quiet, but it turns out to be anything but; not only do they find a macabre and mystifying corpse nearby, but the family they get to live with seems to have a lot of unresolved issues, which the two youngsters soon find themselves caught up in. And as always in these types of stories, somebody's going to die before it's all over. Cosmos, like all detective novels, is all about finding the clues. Clues being that which deviates from what we perceive to be the norm; the 'C'est un cauchemar!' Spoken in the wrong language, the mysterious blue key on the table, the rake moved to point at the servant's window.

So our hero and narrator Witold and his friend start to gather evidence. But how, in a world they don't know, surrounded by people they don't know, are they supposed to know what are actual clues and what is normal? In trying to find out what things mean, at what point do they go from observing to concluding to ascribing? The defining ability of mankind is not our sense of humour, or our love, or our hate, or our ability to use tools; animals can do all of that, in one way or another.

What we can do, what only we can do, is to try and figure out meaning, to make sense. We (supposedly) understand intricate chains of cause-and-effect, we (supposedly) understand symbolism, we (supposedly) understand how context matters. And even when we get it wrong, even when there is no sense, we can make it. We look at a bunch of stars that are hundreds of light years apart and call them a constellation; we look at an abstract painting and call it a portrait; we look at a bunch of possibly related lives and call them a plot.

Where there is no causal relationship, we'll invent one – thereby becoming both cause and effect ourselves.As you may gather, Cosmos is not your typical detective story. The obsession with the tiniest details is similar to another novel I read recently, Le Clezio's Terra Amata, but the difference couldn't be more drastic; where Le Clezio's protagonist sees only beauty and harmony in the great jumble of existence, Gombrowicz's sees perversion, deviance and taboo in everything that doesn't fit his picture of what's normal; and being a good catholic, he's both repulsed and attracted, ashamed and excited by it. It's not an easy read; it's confusing, with a narrator who at times is verging on either stream-of-consciousness or full-on paranoia, another main character who speaks complete nonsense half the time, and those looking for a straight A to Z plot are advised to stay away.

As darkly humorous as Gombrowicz always is, the narrator gets on my nerves a bit after a while. Not a lot, but a little bit. And yet somehow, Cosmos is a detective story. A surreal, nightmarish, perverted detective story, but a detective story nonetheless in both plot and form.

(Then again, so is Crime And Punishment.) And like all great detective stories (and opposed to the vast majority of them) it goes much further than that; in trying to ferret out the cause and effect of what's going on, it's a perfect analogy for modern man trying to find his way in an ever more confusing world. Find the killer, save the damsel, save the world, figure out how everything works, live happily ever after. And so, the one place where Cosmos deviates (heh) from the norm is in its perception of whether that is at all possible.

The traditional detective story tries to create order from chaos; take a number of seemingly unrelated clues, and then use your little grey cells to piece them all together into a watertight cause-and-effect narration of what happened; the killer is caught, the deviant object is removed and order is restored. The story has a clear beginning and a clear end. Except Gombrowicz won't play that game; he can't see one clear meaning, one clear plot rising from chaos - you can't return to normalcy since there was never any normalcy to begin with. In trying to solve one mystery, bring order to one seemingly chaotic chain of events, the detective has just created new mysteries, uncovered new deviations. At some point, the deviation becomes the norm; as Frank Zappa once said, 'anything played wrong twice in a row is a new arrangement'. It's a hell of a novel.

It gives me a headache, and I'm actually not sure I enjoyed it all that much, but it's certainly a thinker. Much like Witold, your experience of it will probably depend on what you bring into it and how much you're willing to work.

It's a novel that makes you doubt your own reading of it, and that can only be a good thing. Be warned: Cosmos is a long 189 pages.

It is tedious during most of the first half, then explodes with power. More tedium follows, escalating to the point that it becomes nail-biting tension. A tedious denoument follows a thrilling climax. Overall, the book offers maybe a 3:1 tedium/thrill ratio and no middle-ground. Gombrowicz's translated prose here is not near as dynamic as that found in Bacacay or Trans-Atlantyk. I expect that has to do with the translators' various weighings of the demands Be warned: Cosmos is a long 189 pages.

It is tedious during most of the first half, then explodes with power. More tedium follows, escalating to the point that it becomes nail-biting tension. A tedious denoument follows a thrilling climax. Overall, the book offers maybe a 3:1 tedium/thrill ratio and no middle-ground. Gombrowicz's translated prose here is not near as dynamic as that found in Bacacay or Trans-Atlantyk. I expect that has to do with the translators' various weighings of the demands of accuracy and style. The Cosmos/Pornografia two-fer features a different translation and it may be worth a reader's time to compare the two.

Translation issues aside, it is hard to imagine a Cosmos with the energy and charm of Trans-Atlantyk. As a psychological study, though, the book is admirable and as a polemic against boredom and solipsism, it is actually quite moving.

A few years ago people started to use the phrase 'mental masturbation' to describe conversations involving an Ivy League bull session-esque, punctilious analysis focused to a fault on details, or on the wildly hypothetical, such that they do not offer any use in the real world. Reading this short novel (detective story? Confession?), translated from the original Polish, I am happy and relieved to report a different and better use for this phase. The main character in this book, a young man who i A few years ago people started to use the phrase 'mental masturbation' to describe conversations involving an Ivy League bull session-esque, punctilious analysis focused to a fault on details, or on the wildly hypothetical, such that they do not offer any use in the real world.

Reading this short novel (detective story? Confession?), translated from the original Polish, I am happy and relieved to report a different and better use for this phase.

The main character in this book, a young man who is vacationing at a family-run pensione in the countryside with a friend, narrates an irritatingly tedious stream of consciousness, what could quite well be described as 'mental masturbation.' He is fixated on tiny perceptions--trivial things like the flicker of a finger or the look of some blades of grass, and obsessively rolls over them, and, with increasing frequency, cycles amongst the various images to an ecstatic miasma--all of them colliding with each other, and 'relating' to the other in spite of their random unrelatedness. He cannot stop imagining the mouth of the innkeeper's daughter connecting to the accident-deformed mouth of the female housekeeper, and keeps himself up at night fretting over this and similar obsessions. (Lest you not come to it yourself, the translator lends a hand with a footnote explaining that another passage represents '[f]urther development of the onanistic theme.' Thanks.) This would be interrupted regularly with painfully brief moments of narrative coherence, before resuming.

Since this got old very quickly, I found it very hard to read--and if it were much more than its 189 pages I'm not sure I'd have made it; hence the mere two stars. But I did find the book fascinating and Artful in that it made to feel captive in the mind of someone lost in the noise of his own perceptions--perhaps the character is autistic? I have no idea.

I've never heard of this author, and only picked the book up by chance because it was on top of a pile in our apartment and was small enough to fit in my pocket. Clearly it's an Important Book, or at least a work of Literature (for goodness' sake, the edition I read was put out by Yale Press). But I think I'll let a little time pass before I pick another one of his up again--I need some down time in between.

The style Gombrowicz uses in Cosmos reminds me of jazz. Not quite in the pseudo-improvisational bent the way the beats interpreted it, but the structure behind it.

You have a finite number of familiar notes, chords, scales, and yet through arrangement, rhythm, and sheer ingenuity a player can rapid fire out a galaxy of unique interpretations of it. That’s how Gombrowicz uses language here, once he latches onto a particular word he then makes it part of his repertoire for the rest of the novel, d The style Gombrowicz uses in Cosmos reminds me of jazz. Not quite in the pseudo-improvisational bent the way the beats interpreted it, but the structure behind it. You have a finite number of familiar notes, chords, scales, and yet through arrangement, rhythm, and sheer ingenuity a player can rapid fire out a galaxy of unique interpretations of it. That’s how Gombrowicz uses language here, once he latches onto a particular word he then makes it part of his repertoire for the rest of the novel, dropping variations of riffs on the accumulated words.

It’s unique as a style and sort of a clever restructuring of the prose style he already had, but it’s also significant. Cosmos is about the problem of induction, that we know what we know based our perception of the necessary connections between things, which then breaks down into unreliable guesswork because of everything that goes unperceived. This “can we truly know how things work?” road is often traveled in literature, The Name of The Rose, the entire oeuvre of Thomas Pynchon and so on, but where those dress up the question in mysteries and conspiracies, Gombrowicz does as Gombrowicz often does and attacks the question directly in all the abstract surreal ways that one can out of the regular mundanity of life, blurring between funny and unsettling. The Cosmos then is, as the word implies, the entire universe of objects and matter. The characters form their own perceived cosmos in their local area they inhabit, and from their deep intimacy with their environment they trick themselves into thinking they know how and why things make sense. Then as the novel progresses it becomes clear things make no sense to them, so they head out to the wilderness where the expanse of the world beyond and the connections they’ve never known or understood overwhelms them into a sort of perverted existentialism.

From this rough sketch it’s clear what Gombrowicz is doing with his language: the logical connections between words are as important as the logical connections between events and things, and as more and more get introduced in various forms the words themselves form illogical connections to each other and become confused and disjointed, mixed up with each other, with the narrative, and with the characters. So it’s no understatement that Danuta Borchardt is an absolute divine entity to be able to render this into English, this and Gombrowicz’s other novels. It’s Gombrowicz in his top, weird, philosophical, hilarious, polemic, surreal, ballsy form, and if I put Ferdydurke above it it’s probably only because it got to me first.

Strong Recommendation. I am convinced that most people read novels such as this, can make neither hide nor hair of it, but are afraid that admitting as much is to admit that they are unable to grasp depth and meaning in the depthless and meaningless. I give this two stars only because I have a rule about allowing one star for translation. Either the translating helped the novel and the translator deserves a star, or the translator hurt the book, in which case the author should be rewarded a conciliatory star. I read o I am convinced that most people read novels such as this, can make neither hide nor hair of it, but are afraid that admitting as much is to admit that they are unable to grasp depth and meaning in the depthless and meaningless.

I give this two stars only because I have a rule about allowing one star for translation. Either the translating helped the novel and the translator deserves a star, or the translator hurt the book, in which case the author should be rewarded a conciliatory star. I read one review that praised the author for his use of words and 'parsing meaning' from them. He used the same words, lists, phrasings, pairings, over and over, and over again to the point where it all became pointless. I started out genuinely intrigued.

It's not a story styling that I usually like, but something about it grabbed Me. Until about 30 pages in, when it became unsettlingly clear that there really was no story here. It was a bunch of mumbling, repetitive nonsense. The author himself admitted as much in the beginning of the last chapter when he wrote, 'I don't even know if it is a story. It is difficult to call this a story.' Let Me help you out with that, then.

It isn't a story. It went absolutely nowhere, slowly. I might forgive you if you go nowhere at a clipped pace, but going nowhere and dragging Me along, step by tedious step, is unforgivable.

It's easy to write a bunch of incomprehensible gibberish and claim it's a study on deteriorating mental health! Actually, I should add another star just for how cute it is to attempt that!

This might have played better as a short story, it certainly didn't merit the full-length of a novel. I also wonder if something was lost on Me because I couldn't relate to it for cultural reasons? Perhaps if I were Polish, I would have been doubled over with laughter and weeping at the sheer beauty and elegance of prose. As it stands, I was not and am not -- Polish, laughing, or weeping. A comprehensive synopsis of Gombrowicz's masterpiece. If one of the spirits of literary Modernism was the search for meaning in an increasingly anomic world, Cosmos answers the call and then some: anything suggests everything else.

The resulting order of things is as comically absurd as it is horrific. The all too real world of Cosmos and its all too human instigator/victim/protagonist, the eponymous Witold Gombrowicz, confound any attempt at discerning whether these esoteri bird. A comprehensive synopsis of Gombrowicz's masterpiece. If one of the spirits of literary Modernism was the search for meaning in an increasingly anomic world, Cosmos answers the call and then some: anything suggests everything else. The resulting order of things is as comically absurd as it is horrific. The all too real world of Cosmos and its all too human instigator/victim/protagonist, the eponymous Witold Gombrowicz, confound any attempt at discerning whether these esoteric associations are being assigned by the latter or afforded by the former.

Is the Cosmos a piecemeal construction of a meandering mind, or is it always lurking in the background, in all its terrible totality, whimsically suggesting? Cosmos is a philosophical novel, yet it never preaches. Cosmos also represents a culmination of themes Gombrowicz had been wrestling with since Ferdyduke: the corruption of innocence by an irresistible depravity, maturity vs. Revere 85 8mm Projector Manual. Immaturity, aporia brought on by a plenum of capricious mereological and analogical relations. Because of this, I wouldn't recommend Cosmos as an introduction to Gombrowicz; its literary accomplishments are all the more easily recognized and better appreciated if one has previously tackled Ferdyduke and Pornografia (both of which I also highly recommend). Gombrowicz's prose is admittedly an acquired taste, and Cosmos is as fine example of an avante-garde novel you're likely to find (yet another reason I recommend beginning with his earlier novels: easier reads that should assist in acclimating to Gombrowicz's unique style).

Though I have nothing to compare it to, Borchardt's translation is taken from the original Polish and appears committed to preserving as much of Gombrowicz's eccentricities as possible. (some spoilers follow) So here's the thing: I didn't want to read this book. It's been on my girlfriend's shelf for a while, and even though the younger me would certainly read it eagerly, the current me avoids such titles. I read it though, and even worse, I'm writing a review. The problem with books like 'Cosmos' is that you can either give 5 stars or 2 (or perhaps even 1).

Giving 5 makes you a pretentious intellectual, giving 2 means you didn't understand the book and you're trying to rational (some spoilers follow) So here's the thing: I didn't want to read this book. It's been on my girlfriend's shelf for a while, and even though the younger me would certainly read it eagerly, the current me avoids such titles. I read it though, and even worse, I'm writing a review. The problem with books like 'Cosmos' is that you can either give 5 stars or 2 (or perhaps even 1). Giving 5 makes you a pretentious intellectual, giving 2 means you didn't understand the book and you're trying to rationalize it by saying you don't want to be a pretentious intellectual.

I'm giving 5 stars primarily because it's been the first book that I managed to read almost in one seating (with interest and joy) in a long, long time, and of course because I am a pretentious intellectual. This book is about the relationship between language and meaning, reality and thought. It's a story of two young men visiting the Polish countryside somewhere in Tatra mountains, trying to get away from problems they have in Warsaw. The narrator is a paranoid fella who obsesses over dead sparrows and disfigured lips, and as the story progresses, over his own thoughts and phrases. This is what Cosmos really is about: an illusion of oppression created by human mind, a paranoia fueled by words, sentences and phrases. There is no other plot here, it's essentially a plotless story.

While some may find Gombrowicz's style annoying and tedious, I found it absolutely brilliant. It serves the purpose of creating an atmosphere of absurd paranoia perfectly well, and manages to create tension (and humor) out of thin air. ‘How many sentences can one create out of the twenty-four letters of the alphabet? How many meanings can one gleam from hundreds of weeds, colds of dirt, and other trifles?’ (I read the Polish original, so if you're reading the English version you should probably try to get Borchardt's 2005 translation). I'll lose cool points here, but that's okay. This book just did not work for me.and was basically a chore to read.

Perhaps its thrust was lost in the translation (of the translation, as a fellow reviewer reports above). I'm all for an explication of an illness or mental disease, and I do think this book tweaks the underpinnings of something resembling OCD.

But merely for irritainment rather than illumination. Perhaps it could have been a beautiful poem, where its redundance would have felt more I'll lose cool points here, but that's okay.

This book just did not work for me.and was basically a chore to read. Perhaps its thrust was lost in the translation (of the translation, as a fellow reviewer reports above). I'm all for an explication of an illness or mental disease, and I do think this book tweaks the underpinnings of something resembling OCD. But merely for irritainment rather than illumination. Perhaps it could have been a beautiful poem, where its redundance would have felt more like an echo than a harangue.

Although even set in meter, 'This berging with my bemberg with all of the bembergality of this bemberg of mine' likely would not have rung too clear. As a poem, the items hanging might not have fouled the air quite as much? At times the mouth fixation made me recollect Neutral Milk Hotel's 'Two-Headed Boy.' But I suspect there are better literary takes on the escalation of fetish. Pitching this as a quasi-detective novel, now that's basically a crime. I'd gladly read another book that demonstrates the dichotymy between the inner crazy whirlings versus the more placid, heavy-lided external projection of a character. But this one just didn't work for me.

But then, perhaps that tour de tourettes de force, 'Motherless Brooklyn,' translated through French to Polish might not work for those in Warsaw? As if he were hoping to scare the less dedicated students out of an overenrolled philosophy class, Kierkegaard once started off a book with something like 'The self is a relation that relates itself to the self.' Gombrowicz seems to have grabbed hold of this tangle and run with it deep into the mountains of Poland, where an ever-larger succession of hanged animals and the mental intertwining of a deformed mouth with a smoother, prettier one occupy and torment the protagonist on an otherwise sl As if he were hoping to scare the less dedicated students out of an overenrolled philosophy class, Kierkegaard once started off a book with something like 'The self is a relation that relates itself to the self.' Gombrowicz seems to have grabbed hold of this tangle and run with it deep into the mountains of Poland, where an ever-larger succession of hanged animals and the mental intertwining of a deformed mouth with a smoother, prettier one occupy and torment the protagonist on an otherwise slow dull summer break. The plotline is largely interior, except for a few spots where it jags into the outside world and something gets hanged. Imagine a likable guy staring at a saltshaker or a ceiling thinking something like: Because this thing reminds me of that thing, they are now connected, but because they really have no outward connection, they are that much *more* connected now, simply by the oddity of their seeming to me to be connected, so there must be some point to them seeming to be connected, so someone must have set this up, and I am the centerpiece of the connection and critical for its resolution.

And everything is connected! And it's all too much!

Shades of Nausea. Inescapable, and in the end Gombrowicz seems to get tired and drop the book for dinner, which is forgivable, because it's not a book you're likely to forget. I started out disliking this book because of the confusing and rambling use of language and apparent lack of plot, but it started growing on me about halfway through. The narrator's world walks this strange line between reality and paranoia, sanity and craziness, and builds this sense of foreboding and tension that pulled me in.

The unusual style- marked with a neurotic repetition of images, made up words, and run on sentences made me feel like I was actually inside the brain of the (perhaps men I started out disliking this book because of the confusing and rambling use of language and apparent lack of plot, but it started growing on me about halfway through. The narrator's world walks this strange line between reality and paranoia, sanity and craziness, and builds this sense of foreboding and tension that pulled me in. The unusual style- marked with a neurotic repetition of images, made up words, and run on sentences made me feel like I was actually inside the brain of the (perhaps mentally disturbed?) narrator. It was one of the strangest books I've read but totally worth a read.

If you are confused and ready to throw in the towel early in the book, know that it gets better as you go. The last line of this novel reads, 'Today we had chicken fricassee for dinner.' If you are thinking, 'you SOB, why didn't you check spoiler alert,' do not worry, for no such thing has happened.

Cosmos is surely the oddest novel I have ever read, and though it does have a plot of sorts, it's sheer intensity overcomes normal considerations of such. As the bumptious landlord insists, 'My good man...

Have you ever put on your thinkie cap? You're dreaming, cooking it up, you think you'll catch it The last line of this novel reads, 'Today we had chicken fricassee for dinner.' If you are thinking, 'you SOB, why didn't you check spoiler alert,' do not worry, for no such thing has happened. Cosmos is surely the oddest novel I have ever read, and though it does have a plot of sorts, it's sheer intensity overcomes normal considerations of such. As the bumptious landlord insists, 'My good man...

Have you ever put on your thinkie cap? You're dreaming, cooking it up, you think you'll catch it all in your grip just like that dum dee dum, eh?... And this silliness is countered by the narrator's intricate search for clues, for meaning, starting with the discovery of a hung sparrow outside the house where he and a friend rent a room, continuing through their 'discovery' of a mysterious arrow (which may well be a stain in the ceiling? 'The arrow didn't point to anything in our room, we could tell at aglance, so it was necessary to extend its course through the wall, to see if it connected with anything in the hallway, and then continue the line as accurately as possible into the garden...' And in that blessed garden they find some sticks hung (just as was the poor sparrow!). And from there...

You can see that the novel is taking the existential search to heights that would make Beckett proud. There are harrowing moments in the novel, but revealing those would involve spoilers, so I will refrain. This novel is not everyone's cup of tea, believe me. But if you were entranced by Lucky's monologue in Godot, it very well may be yours. I waiver betwixt a three star and a five star review, so four, keeping the tea bag just mentioned in mind. The absurdism of Albert Camus mixed with a Hitchcockian psychological thriller. Cosmos fits in with the post WWII, philosophic, what-the-hell-is-the-point-of-life style of novel.

Much of the staccato sounds of the novel are reminiscent of the minimalist music of the post war period too. The narrator tries to piece together occurrences and fascinations that, to the reader, would never carry relevance. Gombrowitcz seems to be saying, there's no meaning in any of this, the only meaning that life an The absurdism of Albert Camus mixed with a Hitchcockian psychological thriller. Cosmos fits in with the post WWII, philosophic, what-the-hell-is-the-point-of-life style of novel. Much of the staccato sounds of the novel are reminiscent of the minimalist music of the post war period too. The narrator tries to piece together occurrences and fascinations that, to the reader, would never carry relevance.

Gombrowitcz seems to be saying, there's no meaning in any of this, the only meaning that life and the world has is what we assign it, and that meaning is generally pretty ridiculous, but without these assigned meanings, mankind is in a “Lunatic asylum”. How else are we supposed to convince ourselves that it's worth our trouble to work all of our lives, be a good family man and etc? Through a slapstick pensioner, this is highlighted when he is ruminating on the murder of a cat, “.if it's an aberration there are no safeguards. One can say that I'm dramatizing and the death of the cat is insignificant, and yet, gentlemen, the matter is unpleasant, unpleasant, because who can assure me that it will end with the cat.” With just the random murder of the cat, there isn't anything protecting us from similar, random cruelties. But giving meaning to the feline offing would make him safe. Chaos is the cruelty. Reason needs to be assigned.

The narrator tries to assign meaning to everything, including landscapes, as on this ride he looks at the landscape and contemplates how things near move by quicker than things far away: “.objects are unimportant, the landscape is unimportant, the only thing left is appearance and disappearance.” On this same journey, a priest is found wandering lost, as if to say while living in a time of religiousless-ness, without the meaning traditionally assigned by religion, mankind is wandering as well is the church wandering in this post WWII period where chaos reigns.