Cosmos by Witold Gombrowicz
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"A sparrow hanged on a piece of wire, a woman's deformed lip, and the whole cosmos of connections between them, produced by human mind."
(Lukasz Pruski's entry in the contest "Summarize Gombrowicz's 'Cosmos' In Fewer Than 140 Characters.")

The vagaries of memory: I do not remember much from my first trip back to the Old Country a scant twenty-five years ago yet I clearly remember surreptitiously reading Witold Gombrowicz's Bacacay under the desk during my high-school history class exactly fifty years ago. I had cherished that collection of short stories, probably because of some sexual content and absurdist aura. Years later I was a little disappointed by universally celebrated Ferdydurke and Trans-Atlantyk was a major turnoff for me. After a 35-year hiatus it is time to return to my compatriot's prose. I have chosen Cosmos (1965), a novel which I have never read before. And Gombrowicz delivers a near masterpiece!

Witold, the narrator, and his acquaintance, Fuks, two young men from Warsaw, are on vacations in Zakopane, the popular Polish resort in the Tatra Mountains. When walking around looking for a room to rent they find a sparrow hanged in a tree on a piece of wire. They stay at a pension run by a corpulent lady ("Roly-Poly" in the English translation), where the other residents are her husband, Leon, who uses a sort of private language characterized by preponderance of diminutives, their daughter, Lena, with her husband, and the housekeeper Katasia, whose lip is deformed after an accident.

In the main thread of the novel Witold and his companion are trying to explain the mystery of the hanged sparrow. They notice an indistinct mark on the ceiling which resembles an arrow. The arrow seems to point outside the house, where - guided by an unusual configuration of stones - they find a piece of stick hanging on a thread. Hanged sparrow, the position of stones, arrow-shaped marks, and hanged piece of stick all seem to indicate intentionality; there must be a purpose of all that, perhaps even a conspiracy. By whom, though? And the gallery of strange goings-on keeps growing.

Another main theme is the narrator's interest in Lena. Stimulated by the brief glimpse of Lena's leg on a bed frame - this momentary yet powerful sighting stays with him for weeks - Witold creates an erotic image of the young woman, a mind construct that tends to conflict with Lena's actual physical being and her married status. What's more, Lena's mouth and Katasia's deformed lips seem to merge into one fascinating yet menacing image in the narrator's hyperactive mind.

The last part of the novel is an unforgettable account of a mountain excursion. Leon suggests taking the trip to show the company a secret point in the Kościeliska Valley, from where the view of the mountains is incomparably magnificent. All characters - the party also includes two newly married couples - embark on the trip in horse-driven carriages. The excursion culminates in Leon's amazing confession, and then only one major event remains in the plot.

Some loose and amateurish thoughts on the main motifs in the novella: Mr. Gombrowicz convincingly shows the enormously rich texture of everything that contributes to a single moment of human life: the totality, the cosmos of sensations experienced at each instance of time:

"Everything is equally important, everything that constitutes the current moment, a kind of consonance, the humming of a swarm." (My own translation)

Each thing, each feeling, each moment has its own universe of meanings and possible connections to all other things, feelings, and moments. The author offers an intricate psychological analysis of micro-behaviors, snippets of thoughts, sensations, and moods.

Another theme is quite awkward to describe (especially when the reviewer lacks literary talent). Consider the following quote:

"When she smells herself, it does not bother her" (my own translation)

Witold is acutely aware of the grossness of a person's physicality if that person is not him. The "physical I", the personal details of one's physical self, such as feeling one's teeth with the tongue, become alien and unpleasant when they are someone else's. On the other hand, the often repeated phrase "one's own to one's own for one's own" (again, my own translation) likely has some masturbatory connotations, but enough of amateur psychology.

Cosmos is open to a wide range of interpretations the reader may want to ascribe to it: the most obvious and simplistic one is that the author wants to highlight the human tendency to look for patterns and causation in completely random events. The novel may also be considered a classy suspense story. Or a sophisticated joke. In my view the most significant is the psychological analysis and what pushes this "borderline literary masterpiece" to the five-star territory is that the author examines the most private, secret, embarrassing layers of human psyche – the layers whose existence we are not often eager to acknowledge. Mr. Gombrowicz is at the top of his craft as an investigator of human psychology.

I do not particularly like the ending; not because I care whether it "explains" things or not; a literary work of art is obviously not required to explain anything; it is just required to dazzle the reader. Although the rather shocking ending cleverly ties the two main motifs, mouth and hanging, it also seems to trivialize the whole extraordinary setup.

I have read the novel twice, first the Polish original and then the English translation by Danuta Borchardt. I am impressed by the translator's skill: Gombrowicz's prose, especially Leon's private language, is virtually impossible to translate. Yet it is still obvious to me that the original reads much better and seems to exhibit way more depth while the English version feels somehow incomplete and superficial. (I tried a similar experiment two months ago when I read Gabriel Garcia Marquez' Chronicle of a Death Foretold in two different translations, English and Polish. In that case the English version of the Spanish original seemed better than the Polish one.)

Finally, the last sentence of the novel is certainly one of the best last sentences I have ever read. Fantastic!

Four and a half stars, rounded up.


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The Laughing Policeman by Maj Sjöwall
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"The cold bright light made every detail stand out with the sharpness of an etching. The whole bus seemed to be full of twisted, lifeless bodies covered with blood."

My main problem in reviewing The Laughing Policeman (1968), the fourth entry in the famous "Martin Beck series" of police procedurals by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, is how to convincingly justify rounding my four-and-a-half-star rating to five stars. Obviously, as a novel, as a work of literary fiction, this crime drama is nowhere near the greatness of, say, J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace or C. Nooteboom's The Following Story . While the prose is good and the plot is absolutely captivating, while there are virtually no clichés that tend to ruin most mystery novels, and while the characters are full-bodied and vividly drawn, the book - quite obviously - is not a masterpiece of literature. So why five stars? It is simply the best police procedural I have ever read, a pinnacle of its genre. I read it for the first time forty-something years ago, and the current re-read has not changed my enthusiastic opinion of the book. By the way, I am not alone in this high praise: the book won the Edgar Award for the best novel of 1970 from the Mystery Writers of America.

Stockholm, Sweden. November 1967. Most of the police force are busy controlling the massive demonstrations: thousands of people are protesting the Vietnam War in front of the American Embassy. A man walking a dog runs towards a police patrol to report a city bus that has driven off the road and stopped with its front door open. In the bus the patrolmen find nine people shot, eight to their death - the greatest mass murder in Sweden's history. One of the victims is Ǻke Stenström, a detective from Martin Beck's homicide squad. Beck and his crew of Kollberg, Larsson, Melander, Rönn as well as detectives called from other Swedish regions embark on a long and painstaking investigation with virtually no clues available in the beginning.

The story follows the investigation, detailing every small step, each iota of progress and the many dead ends. No other crime novel is better at showing the team effort, the meticulously patient work that involves searching for clues, gathering and analyzing them, the various re-enactments and brainstorming sessions. Yet even with the most dedicated work of large teams of people, success would not be attained if not for individual sparks of intuition and brilliance, like Melander's crucial question "What could Stenström do?" or Kollberg's insights into and experience with sexual behaviors. Of course, nothing much would be achieved either without quiet, assured and steady-handed leadership by Martin Beck.

The portraits of detectives and other characters are superbly drawn and several passages are indeed masterpieces of psychological observation. I have always remembered the conversations between Kollberg and Asa Torell, Ǻke Stenström's girlfriend, and they indeed stand out as luminously as I had found them in the mid-1970s. There is not a single false note in the characters' psychology. The superbly convincing and powerful ending, devoid of any idiotic plot twists, stands out as the epitome of criminal story denouements.

Considering the bloody setup of the novel, it may seem strange but there is a substantial amount of humor in the novel. Not only do Kristiansson and Kvant provide the usual laughs, but we also have the monstrously stupid detective Ullholm, "a man who knew most things and understood everything." We also have some sexual humor: Kollberg asks his wife to stand on her hands, naked, and then receives a sort of vaccination from her. I like the generous dose of black humor: for instance, a psychiatrist in a mental hospital, while evaluating a man who murdered his wife, tells Kollberg that the patient is much better after he finally got what he needed: "to be rid of that bitch he was married to."

One of the most compelling passages in the novel is a fragment I have remembered for forty-something years: it quotes the text on a sign carried by a little girl during the anti-American demonstration - I am unable to repeat it because of decency concerns - and describes what the policemen later did to the little girl after they had seen the sign.

Four and a half stars, rounded up.


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The Foxes Come at Night by Cees Nooteboom
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"The dead, if neglected for too long, can affect you that way."

Another stunning book from Cees Nooteboom! During the 60 years of my adventure with books I have had various favorite writers: from Hugh Lofting and Jules Verne during childhood, through youthful fascinations with William Faulkner, through Fyodor Dostoyevsky, James Joyce, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez - to mention just a few literary giants towering over my middle age - to the recent obsession with J. M. Coetzee, whom I first read just over two years ago. But it is the extraordinary prose of my newest favorite author, Cees Nooteboom, that resonates the strongest with my literary sensitivities. I have never been so totally mesmerized by anyone's prose: not even by Joyce's unparalleled maturity and depth of insights about people, not by the spellbinding charm of Garcia Marquez' magical realism, and not even by the crystalline mathematical clarity of J.M. Coetzee's writing. Not only am I awed by Mr. Nooteboom's poetry of prose and his mastery of evocative moods, but also his favorite themes affect the deepest layers of my emotional self.

The central themes in Mr. Nooteboom's fiction are human impermanence, the fleeting nature of our existence, the questions of human identity and the essential role of memories in shaping who we are. His stories reveal the most horrifying truth about our ephemeral existence: the ordinary people die twice: first, the death takes them away from the realm of the living, and then, gradually, they turn into complete nothingness, when people who remember them die too. Soon they exist no more and it is precisely as if they have never existed at all. My grandmother still exists a little, because I remember her. Even my grandfather, whom I never met as he died over seventy years ago in the Mauthausen concentration camp, still exists a tiny bit, because she had told me about him. When I die, though, they will disappear forever.

The Foxes Come at Night (2009) is a collection of eight short stories, ostensibly connected through their setting at various points of the Mediterranean coast, but what really matters is that they are about memories of people whom we once knew and who are now gone. Any attempt of mine to summarize the stories would be ridiculous and would debase the beauty of the prose, so let me just say that although I love each one of the eight pieces, Paula and Paula II are absolutely unforgettable. The latter, a contemplation of our gradual passing from being to nothing, is likely the most stunning piece of writing I have ever been privileged to read. Loneliness is the fate of human life and most of us realize how lonely we will be at the moment of death, but we probably are not eager to imagine the utter loneliness when the memories of us vanish.

140 pages of a literary masterpiece. Wonderful translation from the Dutch by Ina Rilke needs to be acknowledged as well.

"My fingernail pressing in your hand that time, watching Antonioni. [...] Leave-taking. The last goodbye. You have opened your window. Gust of wind. That was me. Rustle, whisper. [...] All very fleeting. As we are. Gone."

Five stars.


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