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