Ferdydurke

"It is a brilliant mixture of acute insight and bitterness…and it deserves to be taken very seriously indeed," the London Times Literary Supplement said of this strangely provocative work. The seriousness with which Ferdydurke has been taken is evidenced by its sustained intellectual influence since the date of its first publication. It has aroused the keenest excitement and controversy whenever and wherever it has been published. On its second publication in Poland—some twenty years after the first—a first printing of 10,000 copies was sold out in three days. Now in a magnificent English translation, the book is about to extend its influence in this country.

A "fountain of fantasy, humor, absurdity, lyricism, sadness and indignation," Ferdydurke partakes of myth and philosophy in somewhat the same ways the works of other already-classic modern writers do. Without in any sense being imitative or derivative, it inevitably relates to the preoccupations of Sartre, whom Gombrowicz in fact preceded, as well as to those of Joyce, Kafka, Beckett, and other unique artists of our time. The work divines, expresses, and satirizes modern society in a mode and temper peculiarly suited to it. Though it continues to escape definition or category, it is much more than a mere literary curiosity. Its readers will always be those who are less concerned with its realistic than with its intellectual daring. The forays into the wild, the anarchic, the corrupt areas of life are always conscious and controlled; the wit is always tinged with a sense of tragedy.

Basically, Ferdydurke is concerned with ideas—ideas about the formation (and the deformation) of man's image of himself and of his fellows; ideas about the ceaseless struggle of the spirit to achieve a development which is perhaps impossible; ideas about the poetic ambiguities and unresolvable complexities intrinsic to life.

Ferdydurke is not easily grasped, but it is always stimulating, and its mysteriousness sets off important reverberations.