Product Description

In this bitterly funny novel, the hero narrates the story of his absurd transformation from confident 30-year-old man into paranoid teenage boy. Awakening one morning in the grip of fear he receives two unwelcome visitors: a ghost of himself standing in the corner of his room, then Pimko, the diabolic doctor of philosophy. As Pimko talks, the narrator finds himself shrinking and Pimko, in turn, growing larger and larger. So begins a hellish nightmare: Ferdydurke is dragged back to the school playground and forced to experience the cruel outrages which the boys perpetuate on one another all over again. Immaturity and the tensions generated by the warped relationship between the self and the surrounding world are the main themes running through Gombrowicz s work, but it is the superb combination of comedy and seriousness that earns Ferdydurke its place as a masterpiece of European modernism.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #388558 in Books
• Published on: 2005-07-21
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Review
Extravagant, brilliant, disturbing, brave, funny... wonderful… --Susan Sontag

One of the great novelists of our century --Milan Kundera

If history hadn't got in the way, Witold Gombrowicz's madcap Bildungsroman might have become the must-read for pubescent existentialists across Europe... Ferdydurke is a fantastically imagined set-piece of modernism --The Guardian

About the Author
Witold Gombrowicz was born in Poland in 1904 and has written many other novels including Pornografia, The Possessed, Cosmos and Translatlantic. His plays include Princess Ivona, The Marriage and Operetta.

Customer Reviews

humiliation etc
Gomborwicz, a vicious and hilarious writer, is disgusted by all pretence, and the elevated thoughts of literature. The poet is as pointless as the brute. The contest between the young poet and the schoolboy ends in humiliation. An individual tries to create his own space, but this will always be a sublimation of an infantile desire. The word 'pulpa,' a word that, i think, means 'bottom' but also suggests something at once sensual and sentimental, is the origin.

The book reminded me a lot of a Tale of a tub- when, for instance, the mysterious power of a sermon is not a mediation of the holy word, but a combination of austere and soporific sounds and elevated physical position, climaxing in wind, a burp, a fart. Also Gerty writing her pretty thoughts in her diary.
Life is a sequence of humiliations. Half way through the path of our life, I found myself once again a young and pathetic virgin, who had constructed a mountain of lies.
Chaucer's the house of fame is, perhaps, the closest parallel, with the chaotic ending of pure noise and also his ideas of writing, his placing of the poeticised writer in a garden full of obnoxious birds, or the young priest in the Miller's Tale kissing the behind of his muse and shrinking back, as his infantile courtly love comes into contact with the elusive and beautiful object (the wife) that it has falsified with inspired and insipid fantasy.
To say that Gombrowicz rejects literature, as he often said he did, is sentimental. Rather, like Chaucer does with his predecessors, he moves it into the corporeal world, and finds it to be a mania, that must be written into the world. Scribblers and nothing more?
'The silver vein of humour', is what remains, i could name drop beckett, joyce etc, who have similar preoccupations, though write completely differently, and are better (there are more ideas than substance in this book), umm, whatever, time to get over the pompous and disgusting fool that i have been and will be forever in order to seem like a nice person and cover my insecurities. Humiliation, perhaps you shouldn't be able to write a review of this book without humiliating yourself slightly in the process.

Damn fine novel
I read this book on the strength of Milan Kundera's recommendation in his superb book on the novel'Testaments Betrayed'. He claims that the four best (and most advanced) novelists of the twentieth century are Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Hermann Broch and Witold Gombrowicz. He was so persuasive that I read 'The Man Without Qualities' by Musil, 'The Sleepwalkers' by Broch and 'Ferdydurke' by Gombrowicz, (Kafka was already my favourite author). I fully agree about Musil, found Broch tedious, and really enjoyed Gombrowicz. This novel is very clever, very funny, and riotiously imaginative, although I don't quite agree that it is one of the greatest novels of the century. The closest comparison I can think of is 'The Third Policeman' by Flann O'Brien, which is even better, but Kundera probably isn't familiar with Irish writing beyond Joyce and Beckett.