A friend of mine lent/gave me a paperback copy of Gombrowicz's Cosmos and Pornografia and now that classes are over I finally got around to reading at least the first novel of the two. There's not much story to it, it's more of a dense, philosophical mania. The protagonist is caught up in his own head and cannot help picking up every thing he sees into a larger and larger stew of connections. He lists and relists the items that have come to his attention (mouths, sparrows, sticks, arrows, pins, etc.) and that listing gets longer and longer as the novel progresses and there are more things to connect and reconnect. It's quite fascinating though not necessarily a brisk read.
There's a fascinating review on amazon.com that points out the failings in the particular translation. The reviewer provides his/her own direct translation of the first paragraph and I have to say it's much more dramatic and poetic than the one in the book. I'm interested in reading some more by Gombrowicz but I'm going to look for a better translation first.
