| by Witold Gombrowicz
▾Members
▾Tags ▾LibraryThing Recommendations ▾Member recommendations 50 Tough Books for Extreme Readers(53) Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Showing 1-5 of 8 (next | show all) 'go to your own for whatever turns you on' slplst | Jun 23, 2019 | On losing the plot Cosmos is a strange novel about how one little display of perversion can trigger in an impressionable mind a web of misinterpretation and paranoia. In chapters 1-7 we see the young narrator slowly losing the plot, finding ominous and bizarre connections between the tiniest things. Couple that with a morbid undercurrent of sexual frustration and he is led by his delusional machinations into doing something horrible. It's all sublimely disturbing - an unhinged stream-of-consciousness-type narrative with some bewitching descriptions of intense summer countryside. In the final two chapters (8-9) I almost feel like the author lost the plot - a masturbatory theme creeps in, and there's this word 'berg' which is said and attached to other words ... I must admit it bemused and confused me somewhat. However, by the end, the story reached a distorted full circle and earlier events came more into focus. A short, memorable novel, psychologically honest, depicting how irrationality can easily infect the rational, and how our intrinsic want for meaning, order and significance can make us fabricate associations that aren't there ... (or are they?!) ( ) BlackGlove | Jan 20, 2018 | …being a non-sparrow, it was, in a small way, a sparrow… When two young men of middling acquaintance take a room in a country boarding house as a temporary refuge from school, work and family, their gregarious host welcomes their retreat to ‘peace and quiet, where the intellect can wallow like a fruit in a compote.' The ironic truth becomes apparent soon enough. Gombrowicz was a master of fiction that is both reflective and illustrative of our late-modern mental space, writing that conveys an idea but is also an example of that idea. If you don’t see the world as Gombrowicz did―as 'an inscrutable overabundance of entanglements,' ‘with every pulsation of our life composed of billions of trifles,’ ‘an excess of reality, swelling beyond endurance,’ ―his work will make little sense. Our narrator Witold feels like someone looking for a melody or theme around which to re-create his history (who isn’t?) but he is distracted (who isn’t?) by concurrences, ‘the cobweb of connections.’ My hand has just moved and is touching the spoon―her hand has also moved and is touching the other spoon. All is ‘tumult’...‘cascade, vortex, swarm’...‘agglomeration, welter and whirl.’ The farther is closer, the trivial and nonsensical intrusive and hellish. The world is a trap. Everything looks like a symbol. Witold (and the reader) searches and studies as if there was something here to decipher. The decision to veer between two stones lying on a dirt path assumes an almost unbearable weight. Too much, too much. Which is the drop that makes the cup overflow? Gombrowicz makes few accommodations to the reader. He writes books that thrum and rattle in your hand. Tone, feel, and vibe rather than character, plot, and story. (Hats off to the translator Danuta Borchardt). Best to just disremember the conventions of fiction and leap in. The house ahead of us looked bitten by dust, to its very core, weakened…and the valley was like a false chalice, a poisonous bouquet, filled with powerlessness, the sky was disappearing, curtains were being drawn, closing, resistance was rising, objects were refusing to join in, they were crawling into their burrows, disappearance, disintegration, finality―even though there was still some light―but one was affected by the malicious depravity of vision itself. I smiled because, I thought, darkness can be convenient, while not seeing one can approach, come closer, touch, enfold, embrace, and love to the point of madness, but I didn’t feel like it, I didn’t feel like doing anything, I had eczema, I was sick, nothing, nothing, just spit into her mouth and nothing.( ) 1HectorSwell | Apr 15, 2017 | Cosmos didn't work for me, and I'm having trouble deciding if it's entirely due to Gombrowicz's writing style, or if it's half that and half because aspects of the book genuinely don't work. With the pure stream-of-consciousness style of Cosmos, I knew within the first few pages that the book would have to be something special to win me over. Under the Volcano managed to overcome my usual preference, but generally stream-of-consciousness style writing is not something I enjoy. Here, Gombrowicz's writing emphasizes all the parts of stream-of-consciousness that I dislike, with random asides and ideas pulled out of the aether and cobbled together into disjointed passages. Page flowed into page, the words washing over me but holding little significance and never inspiring me to care. Which raises the question, is it just because I disliked the style so much that I found the characters uninteresting and indistinct, and impossible to invest at all in the 'action' of the story? Or does the book genuinely have bland characters and writing that fails to build up any sense of import? All I know is that on page 63 there is a passage that reads '[r]eality intruded with lightning speed--everything returned to normal, as if called to order. Katasia: a respectable housekeeper who had injured her lip in a car accident; we: a couple of lunatics.' The passage is clearly intended to snap you out of the perspective of the main character and remind you of the absurdity of the situation, but it failed for me because it relies on you being absorbed by the writing and wrapped up in the worldview of the narrator- neither of which happened to me, so for me the passage served as an unnecessary reminder of what the actions of the narrator would look like to a rational person. This book is reliant on you completely buying into the distinct perspective of the narrator and the absurdist mystery of the story, and if for whatever reason you don't the work falls apart. In the end the writing irritated me, I felt no connection to the narrator with his shades of ADD/OCD/paranoia/autism, and finishing the book became a chore. I'm sure that there are others out there who would enjoy this, but they'd have to be very different readers from myself. ( ) BayardUS | Jan 10, 2016 | What a great little find this was. It's one of the best short novels I've read. Gombrowicz's 'cosmos,' is a classic modernist universe: grim, alienated but full of dark humor and wild imagination. He's like an inverse Kafka--instead of giving you the total isolation of the individual, in his world everything is connected to everything else, but the connections are all toxic, creepy, and ultimately deadly. The translation seemed solid and assured--what a challenge, since the book's filled with wordplay. ( ) 1CSRodgers | May 3, 2014 | Showing 1-5 of 8 (next | show all) ▾Published reviews
A vicious and uncompromised little gem of the obscene. added by paradoxosalpha | editThe Believer, Adam Novy(Feb 1, 2006) Is contained inFerdyduke; Pornografia; Cosmos by Witold Gombrowicz Cosmos and Pornografia: Two Novels by Witold Gombrowicz ▾Common Knowledge
References to this work on external resources. Wikipedia in EnglishNone No library descriptions found. ▾LibraryThing members' description
|
Audible(0 editions) Project Gutenberg(0 editions) Swap(29 want) Popular coversRatingAverage:
An edition of this book was published by Yale University Press. |
Gredients that Witold Gombrowicz combines in his 1965 novel Cosmos. The story is presented through the perspective of a young man, also named Witold, who has taken up temporary lodging as a border in a countryside home, sharing a room with his melancholy companion Fuchs. Both are escaping an un-pleasant situation in the city—. Read Cosmos by Witold Gombrowicz for free with a 30 day free trial. Read unlimited. books and audiobooks on the web, iPad, iPhone and Android. A “creatively captivating and intellectually challenging” existential mystery from the great Polish author—“sly, funny, and. Lovingly translated” (The New York Times).