Review in the NYT of Witold Gombrowicz's Cosmos. The essay's approach is a little fancy, more interested in the history of ideas than history as such, but it doesn't mistake the novel terribly: one of my favorite books, and one read well before grasping much of the literary theory to which the author refers. It is not in fact a novel that requires any specialized knowledge to read, unless patience for the slow narrative—the comically horrific nervous paralysis that descends from, say, Auto-da-fé and perhaps as well from Musil; this must have something to do with mitteleuropa's charnel-house modernity, no?—is "specialized." I don't have a lot of it, but Cosmos (my edition is called Kosmos) kept me in it long enough to get hooked, and then transfixed. If books are supposed to make the world around you shiver (and I'm not sure this is their purpose; they are good as well for flattening posters that have been rolled away in a tube since you last moved), Cosmos had me shuddering for days.
Posted by jane at November 19, 2005 08:36 AM | TrackBack