'There is nothing that the mature hate more, there is nothing that disgusts them more, than immaturity' writes Gombrowicz in this comic masterpiece of Polish literature. Be prepared to embrace your immaturity as Gombrowicz attacks so-called 'maturity' and exposes it as a fraud in this story about an aspiring author who is reduced to back to his childish teenage self before a former professor and brought back to school. This first novel of his was banned by the Nazi's and Communist parties for it's stinging criticisms on society and authority. Gombrowicz toys with the absurbed as he delivers a hilarious blend of comedy, political and social satire, literature and psychological critique and the question of identity all while exposing man as an immature being.While Gombrowicz is considered a major figure in Polish and Eastern European literature, and his first novel, Ferdydurke, is considered one of his foremost novels, it wasn't until the later stages of his career, however, that Gombrowicz's genius became widely recognized. A major factor of this is due to a fateful trip to Buenos Aires on the eve of WWII. Upon arrival, he discovered Hitler had invaded Poland and chose to remain abroad, working in a bank owned by another Polish expatriate, and did not return to Europe until the 60's. The translation of this novel, as the introduction will pound into your head, attempted to maintain Gombrowicz style and nuances as best as possible. This includes using a variety of diminutives and not translating certain key phrases, including many of the Latin and french idioms that would have been intentionally left untranslated in it's native polish. This choice also gives us a great new word that you will use constantly, probably to the annoyance of others, after this novel: 'the pupa'. The pupa is a very encompassing word that most often literally means the butt. Yes, assess play a large part of this novel. There are hilarious bits of 'mommy's and aunties' peeping through holes in the fence around the playground to talk amongst each other about 'what cute little pupas, pupas, pupas our little darlings have!'. The pupa is used very freely, often times standing in for various ideas of immaturity and youth. This novel is teeming with immaturity symbolism, so keep a sharp eye out.This novel is a perfect blend of high-brow and low-brow humor. It's as if Frasier and Monty Python got together for a social satire aimed at intellectuals. The novel is basically split into three parts, each with a break from the story for Gombrowicz to discuss literature and tell side-stories that offer further insight into the novel's themes.(the short story of The Child Runs Deep in Filidor would even be worth reading on it's own). There is the school scene, which pits cliques of schoolchildren against each other, creating a metaphor of Polish politics with different groups symbolizing various political parties. This section showcases children trying so desperately to hard to be tough and vulgar and 'adult' that they are simply 'innocent in their desire not to be innocent'. This brought to mind the poem 'Schoolchildren' by [Author: W.H. Auden], which I would highly recommend. The teachers are also shown through the lens of Gombrowicz as being just as juvenile and foolish as their students. All institutions and values and ideas that would present themselves as 'above the common rabble' or 'mature' comes under fire from Gombrowicz's cutting critique. He dissects the 'modern family' with all their progressive ideas, making them into a laughable fraud of immature beings posturing as respectable. Cities and university's are mocked and belittled, relationships are made out as foolish, while peasants and especially lords get the biggest brunt of Gombrowicz's fist to the mouth of society. The last scenes of this novel are incredible and very Monty Python-esk in their absurbdity. Even the moon in the sky becomes a giant pupa shinning down on us all. You will want to call every nose a 'snoot' and every face, or more accurately, every identity, a 'mug' after reading this. The closing lines of the story are even a slap in the face to you the reader, and you will laugh and relish in your own humiliation.As an author, Gombrowicz is cunning and deft and can manipulate words with the best of them. He has a brilliant, insightful mind and is eager to share it with the reader, managing to show off an assumed arrogance but while being more than inviting. His greatest skills are his grasp on the human psyche, and he manages to deconstruct human nature wonderfully. In scenes where the narrator is toying with the minds of others and creating a sense of unease, the reader will feel it too and Gombrowicz seemingly enjoys making the reader uncomfortable as he slowly tightens the screws of his psychological terrorisms. He laughs in the face of humanity, reducing anything beyond juvenile immaturity as merely posturing, 'a series of empty phrases and grimaces' and a false facade. His lecture on being an author offer some of the finest insights into falsity in art; he reflects that man too often just tries to create what others would enjoy and in the end we trap ourselves in 'an ocean of opinions, each one defining you within someone else, and creating you in another man's soul' all because 'man is profoundly dependent on the reflection of himself in another man's soul, be it even the soul of an idiot'. This is just scratching the surface of the full-frontal barrage of arguments Gombrowicz throws about. 'Let me conceive my own shape, let no one do it for me!' he bellows. This novel, wholly original, creates a Gombrowicz that you will enjoy through further novels. I feel he achieves this lofty goal.This is one of the funniest novels I have ever read, and is a wonderful satire that will reveal itself further if you put a little work into it and research some of the many allusions. Also, the cover art is done by none other than Bruno Schulz, another incredible major figure of Polish literature. Oh and Ian, this is definitely Literary Comedy. Gombrowicz will insult everything you know, and you will love him all the more for it. From a human being one can only take shelter in the arms of another human being. From the pupa, however, there is absolutely no escape.A clear 5/5
Where has this book been all my life? Gombrowicz might be a 20th century version of Swift. It's all fart jokes and nose-picking until you realize it's actually one of the smartest books you've ever read. But be warned: if you come looking only for the fart jokes and nose-picking, you could easily be disappointed. Many reviewers, perhaps misled by Susan Sontag's introduction, and Gombrowicz's own much later statements, suggest that this is a book in praise of immaturity and damnation of adults. Certainly adults are damned, but not because they're mature. Also, like Swift, what could look like anal expulsiveness is nothing of the sort. Taking the expulsiveness issue first, Ferdydurke is almost overly structured. The narrator wanders around, yes, but his wanderings have very distinct waypoints: first, a fight between schoolboys, over whether schoolboys should be noble or, well, expulsive; second, a fight between parents, their daughter, and two men who lust after said daughter; third, a fight between the narrator's 'aristocratic' family members, one of their peasants, and the narrator's friend. Our man leaves all of these fights still in progress, and we're given to believe they remain in progress till the end of time. There are also two short stories inserted into the novel, involving fights between professors, on the one hand, and the high bourgeoisie, on the other. You get the point. As for the immaturity point: you could certainly read the novel as an attack on maturity, if you were so inclined, but the self-consciously immature come off just as badly, as do those who are infantilized, and those who do the infantilizing. No doubt Gombrowicz would have been horrified to hear me put it in these terms, but what we have here is basically a dialectical book. The stupidities of the mature/noble/aristocratic cause stupidity of an immature/base/slumming kind. The more someone insists, falsely, that so and so *is* mature/noble/aristocratic, the more people react and insist that they are immature or base or try to sleep with farmhands. And the cycle continues, as the stupidities of the immature cause others to set themselves up as mature or noble, and then everyone fights, and the fight does not end. And the genius of this book is how much of humanity it describes, just in those terms. It concludes with our narrator 'giving in' to a dream and kissing a woman he's just 'abducted'--dream or ideal vs reality being another of these dialectical situations. The genius of this book, also, is that it does all that in the form of fart jokes. Only really funny books should be taken seriously.
What do You think about Ferdydurke (2000)?
The curse and joy of returning to one's youth with all of one's thirty-something literary grown-man cultural baggage intact. Lovely, troubling, a punk rock slap in the face to all our feigned adulthood, seriousness, and sobriety. A rather serious lark. I disagree with Susan Sontag's introduction, however. Gombrowicz's presentation of youthful extravagance, tension, and conflict is a far cry from modern American popular culture's re-presentation of youth as some sort of white bread yesteryear of tamed revolution out of Happy Days and the Fonz or little mamma's boy Elvis Presley standing in for the big black dick of jazz, rock n roll, marijuana and true virgin estrogen and testosterone in a high school gym. This is real youth. The modern schoolgirl's potency intact. The sodomy of two boys fighting over innocence or youthful cynicism with their mugs. This is some serious frivolity. It does make the classical adult world look ridiculous through the ridiculousness of youthful idealism, mugging, and all of its (semi-literal) spunk.Hated the translation, however. "Pupa" just wasn't fair. And there were so many Briticisms in a translation trying so hard to be American that it was clearly a foreigner's work, not native to either idiom--and not in a good way. Confused, in the way of the meaning of the story rather than facilitating it. A disaster. Felt like I was getting the book in spite of rather than because of the translation. Maybe I wasn't getting it at all. I'm a rather young 50-year-old myself.There has to be an English word for "pupa" there has to be. A child could probably tell it to you. An old child.
—Lee Foust
Out element is unending immaturity. What we think, feel today will unavoidably be silliness to our great grandchildren. It is better then that we should acknowledge today that portion of silliness which time will reveal . . . and the force that impels you to a premature definition is not, as you think, a totally human force. We shall soon realize that the most important is not: to die for ideas, styles, theses, slogans, beliefs; and also not: to solidify and enclose ourselves in them; but something different, it is this: to step back a pace and secure a distance from everything that unendingly happens to us.Surreal slapstick. Callow and immature. Guys and lads. Always mocking. The occasional philosophical digression. Form and chaos. The child runs deep in everything. Mugs! Pupas! There is no escape.But amidst this circus Gombrowicz throws some perceptive haymakers at the pretense and hypocrisy of people, institutions, and society. Adulthood, he insists, is merely an amalgam of arbitrary social constructions that conceal the underlying immaturity behind everything.
—David Ranney
Subversive & whimsical. There's a playful streak that runs throughout this story which sends someone backward from man to the "brat within" as if to upend our expectations of storytelling as much as his fictional world. Publishers Weekly called it "a novel that remains a singularly strange exploration of identity, cultural and political mores", but I think it's more of a pastiche of styles and types of narratives than a conventional novel. Written in 1937, banned by the Nazis, suppressed under the Communists, it has been reissued several times since, and most recently translated from the Polish to English by Danuta Borchardt who speaks of "the emphatic or spellbinding repetitions, the headlong sentence structure, the verbal signals of a narrator seeking to engage, provoke or coerce the reader" in her essay in Exquisite Corpse: A Journal of Letters & Life (issues 5&6) on Gombrowicz and the challenges of translating such an inventive, disturbing, satirical writer into another language. I read a different edition long ago. This one looks terrific.
—Trina
