Voy a contar ahora otra aventura aún más extraña. Sudor. Fuiste avanza. Yo tras el. Pantalones. Zapatos. Polvo. Nos arrastramos. Arrastramos...

El libro empieza bien y la historia que se propone es interesante, pero la pesadez del protagonista con las bocas y el ritmo que coge el libro tras el gato se convierte en un auténtico muermo. Cómo se notan mis ganas de leer cuando estoy frente a algo soporífero y algo que no lo es... ( )

"go to your own for whatever turns you on"

On losing the plot
Cosmos is a strange novel about how one little display of perversion can trigger in an impressionable mind a web of misinterpretation and paranoia.

In chapters 1-7 we see the young narrator slowly losing the plot, finding ominous and bizarre connections between the tiniest things. Couple that with a morbid undercurrent of sexual frustration and he is led by his delusional machinations into doing something horrible. It's all sublimely disturbing - an unhinged stream-of-consciousness-type narrative with some bewitching descriptions of intense summer countryside.

In the final two chapters (8-9) I almost feel like the author lost the plot - a masturbatory theme creeps in, and there's this word "berg" which is said and attached to other words ... I must admit it bemused and confused me somewhat. However, by the end, the story reached a distorted full circle and earlier events came more into focus.

A short, memorable novel, psychologically honest, depicting how irrationality can easily infect the rational, and how our intrinsic want for meaning, order and significance can make us fabricate associations that aren't there ... (or are they?!) ( )

…being a non-sparrow, it was, in a small way, a sparrow…

When two young men of middling acquaintance take a room in a country boarding house as a temporary refuge from school, work and family, their gregarious host welcomes their retreat to ‘peace and quiet, where the intellect can wallow like a fruit in a compote.' The ironic truth becomes apparent soon enough. Gombrowicz was a master of fiction that is both reflective and illustrative of our late-modern mental space, writing that conveys an idea but is also an example of that idea. If you don’t see the world as Gombrowicz did―as 'an inscrutable overabundance of entanglements,' ‘with every pulsation of our life composed of billions of trifles,’ ‘an excess of reality, swelling beyond endurance,’ ―his work will make little sense.

Our narrator Witold feels like someone looking for a melody or theme around which to re-create his history (who isn’t?) but he is distracted (who isn’t?) by concurrences, ‘the cobweb of connections.’ My hand has just moved and is touching the spoon―her hand has also moved and is touching the other spoon. All is ‘tumult’...‘cascade, vortex, swarm’...‘agglomeration, welter and whirl.’ The farther is closer, the trivial and nonsensical intrusive and hellish. The world is a trap. Everything looks like a symbol. Witold (and the reader) searches and studies as if there was something here to decipher. The decision to veer between two stones lying on a dirt path assumes an almost unbearable weight. Too much, too much. Which is the drop that makes the cup overflow?

Gombrowicz makes few accommodations to the reader. He writes books that thrum and rattle in your hand. Tone, feel, and vibe rather than character, plot, and story. (Hats off to the translator Danuta Borchardt). Best to just disremember the conventions of fiction and leap in.

The house ahead of us looked bitten by dust, to its very core, weakened…and the valley was like a false chalice, a poisonous bouquet, filled with powerlessness, the sky was disappearing, curtains were being drawn, closing, resistance was rising, objects were refusing to join in, they were crawling into their burrows, disappearance, disintegration, finality―even though there was still some light―but one was affected by the malicious depravity of vision itself. I smiled because, I thought, darkness can be convenient, while not seeing one can approach, come closer, touch, enfold, embrace, and love to the point of madness, but I didn’t feel like it, I didn’t feel like doing anything, I had eczema, I was sick, nothing, nothing, just spit into her mouth and nothing. ( )