The Petty „Kosmos“ of Witold Gombrowicz

It took me 35 years to read this book. It is short, only 144 pages in the edition I have*). But it was a slog.

(Warning: Spoilers, although there isn’t much of a plot to spoil.)

I bought the book in 1989 while in Cracow for a Polish language summer school during my university studies. I started reading it and then paused, because I had to look up so many words.

I’m generally able to go through Polish books at a reasonable speed. Knowledge of the subject and the development of the plot normally allow me to ignore individual words I don’t know.

But not here. In “Kosmos”, the first-person narrator builds a network of conclusions based on small, everyday objects and their perceived relations. Little details like cracks in the ceiling are important. Every word is important. So, if I don’t understand a specific word, I’ll miss a clue, a brick in the construction of the universe the narrator is constructing.

I resumed reading the book at later stages, read a couple of pages, and put it down again. Frankly, the universe in which the narrator moves isn’t very interesting – a house outside of Zakopane where the narrator takes summer lodgings together with an acquaintance called Fuks, and the household of his hosts, and towards the end a guest house in the mountains to which everyone plus some added friends and hangers-on make an excursion. The narrator becomes more and more unsympathetic and straightway creepy. (Need I say more than that at one point, driven by his own logic derived from all his clues, he strangles the cat of the host's daughter, a woman he feels sexually attracted to?) None of the personages were sufficiently intriguing that I wanted to spend time in their company, except for the host, the retired banker Pan Leon, whose idiosyncratic behavior was at least entertaining.

So I slogged through the book, putting it down, taking it up again, in the end forcing myself to read at least a paragraph every day, not because I found the book rewarding, but just to satisfy my inner completist.

Now I’m done, and I can’t even say it was worth it. The climax (ha!) of the book is old Pan Leon masturbating in front of an audience (they can’t see him doing it, but hear the sounds). A bit before, the narrator finds that Leon’s son-in-law has hanged himself – we don’t find out why, but we get a scene where the narrator plays around with the corpse. Then a torrential rain starts, washes all the smut away, we get a hurried ending in a couple of lines without any resolution, and that’s all, folks.

Gombrowicz can do better – I liked his “Opętani” (I read it in German translation – “Die Besessenen”), which plays with elements of thrillers and Gothic novels to tell an unlikely tale that is exciting both as a work of literature and as a story. I know “Kosmos” was designed as a more experimental novel, but does experimental mean that the author has to sacrifice captivating the reader? Except for a few pages with evocative descriptions of the environment in which the narration takes place, we mostly get to see the petty mind of the petty narrator trying to bring sense into a petty world. Maybe the world needed that at some point, but I didn’t, and I feel like I wasted my time with this book. Maybe it's me, I shouldn't have listened to my inner completist.

 

*) Witold Gombrowicz, „Kosmos“, Wydawnictwo Literackie, Kraków 1988

 

Salah Michel Bouraad, “Dieu est évidence“

 Éditions du Jubilé, 2006

This book by a Lebanese Christian layman who is both a successful businessman and deeply involved in charity in his home country has two main theses, which he develops across several chapters – 1) what the world needs most is love, and 2) love is both a gift from God and the best way to God. It’s a book written in a fluent, conversational style, easy to read; it’s not a systematic exposition, but it illuminates its theses from different angles in order to support them.

Concerning the first thesis, I found myself agreeing with many of the author’s examples and observations. On the second thesis, well, as I’m skeptical concerning the existence of God, I lack the basis for accepting the premise, but the author is graceful enough to appreciate if people embrace love without God; he hopes it will lead them to God in the end. For me, if reading this book makes some of its readers want to make this world a better place, it would already justify the labor of the author. If God exists, I hope he will see this the same way.

 

Thoughts on Zinovyev’s “Zateya”

The book is a collection of satirical vignettes and thoughts about life in the Soviet Union, gathered into chapters with loose connections both within and between themselves. It looks like it was never finished by the author, so while the looseness is partially intended by the author, it’s also partially due to incompleteness and lack of clarity to the editors of which parts belonged where.

Reading the book thirty years after the end of the USSR, it doesn’t offer much that is new to anyone who is reasonably well-read on the Soviet Union. The most interesting part to me was not the satire, but Zinovyev’s thoughts about the Soviet system. He sees it as something not imposed on the Russian people from the side, by outside forces or a minority, but as something grown out of the character of the people itself, a system imposed by the people on itself. The system is due to moral degradation and causes further moral degradation. Abolishing the system won’t heal that; this can be only done by healing the moral degradation, by making people care about others more than their status and material well-being, by rejecting the temptation to use others for one’s own purposes and ignore their humanity and dignity.

This is a thought that I’ve seen showing up elsewhere; a person depicted as an example for such positive behavior is Viktor Maksimovich in Fazil Iskander’s “Stoyanka Cheloveka”. It’s certainly a sobering thought for someone like me who had hoped for a trajectory to improvement for Russia after the fall of Communism; seeing how the country now reverts to old patterns of behavior. We see the old patterns of collectivist behavior, of serving power and following the crowd for one own’s gain and in a misguide belief that this is the way to serve one’s country. It is now clear that Russia only did an incomplete reckoning with its past. I can only hope that it will free itself again, and won't miss out on the reckoning this time.

---

Александр Зиновьев, «Затея», Центрополиграф, Москва 2000

 

Philemon

 If anyone wondered who this poem was about, here he is:

An H.H.

Dem jungen Mann das Herze bricht,

Die holde Jungfer liebt ihn nicht.

Ein Ritter stirbt zur gleichen Stund,

Die Liebe schlug ihm rote Wund.

Zwei Brüder streiten tief im Tann,

Weil einer nur sie haben kann.

Der Jüngling sinkt ins kühle Grab

Und zieht Feinsliebchen mit hinab.

Nie enden Herzeleid und Tod,

Dem Dichter sind’s das täglich Brot.

Your hair is like a poem

Your hair is like a poem,

It flows from your crest,

It curls in a cadence.

It falls from your shoulders,

Its tiny feet dangling,

Dancing to the rhythm

Of your head moving,

Beating like gentle waves

Against the beach of your back.

Brushing across your face,

Opening,

Closing,

A curtain before a show,

A recital before a play,

Preparing the passion,

Announcing the drama,

Brush it away

And let me see.

Philemon

Philemon paws at the glass door, 

Answering what call? 

No cat no dog no bird to catch, 

Going against his own self? 

Up against the pane, 

Reared and aroused. 

Bring him a toy of fluffy felt 

And he’ll forget the mirror world, 

No lure no mates no more.