Bacacay

by Witold Gombrowicz

Book Overview

A balloonist finds himself set upon by erotic lepers...a passenger on a ship notices a human eye on the deck...a group of aristocrats enjoy a vegetarian dish made from human flesh...a virginal young... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0972869298
• ISBN13: 9780972869294
• Release Date: October 2004
• Publisher: Archipelago Books
• Length: 275 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.5" x 7.7"

Customer Reviews

anticlimatic in a good way

I must take every opportunity I get to say that I love Gombrowicz. His writing is anti-climatic, childish, petty, ridiculous, sometimes disgusting, irrational... Some stories are great, some are just mediocre, a couple are boring and seem like practice sessions, but they all make me appreciate how fantastically preposterous Gombrowicz is.

Like a fine punch; you might like other parts better

This 2004 translation from the Polish by Bill Johnston (Director of the Polish Studies Center at Indiana University) of the early stories of Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969) begins with seven stories written between 1926 and 1932, which were originally published in 1933. The other stories appeared in a collection published in Krakow in 1957. After a scholarly edition appeared in 2002, as the first volume in a definitive edition of Gombrowicz's collected works, this fresh English translation based on that version is the most logical book to have for English readers interested in the literary beginnings of the great Polish novelist. The Afterword by Bill Johnston provides enough background, revealed by Gombrowicz in POLISH MEMORIES, to picture Gombrowicz already trying to write novels, but only pleased with some brief pieces that "gave birth to some scene that was truly crazy, removed from the (healthy) expectations of mediocre logic, and yet firmly rooted in its own separate logic." (p. 271). Comedy is a poor excuse for claiming intellectual bondage to a thinker who died during an early stage in my lifetime, when I was totally preoccupied with other thinkers. He studied law at Warsaw University and philosophy in France long before I was born, but the sequence seems to be appropriate to the subject matter of these stories and to the nature of my outlook as well. Philosophy is a step in a peculiar direction for anyone who comes to the conclusion that justice is unlikely to be obtained in any matter in which the government has an interest, and this book starts with stories that make such an outlook something like an obsession. The psychological compulsion which determines the activities of Gombrowicz's characters tops any other meaning that readers might attempt to find in these stories. The first, "Lawyer Kraykowski's Dancer," certainly captures the motivations which made me decide that I wanted to attend Harvard Law School in 1968 before receiving my draft notice, so that two years later I would have no trouble returning to the first year classes with "a letter of recommendation from your commanding officer in the military, or the warden of your prison" as the Dean of students put it in his address to entering students who were not entitled to draft deferments as first-year graduate students in 1968. As a prospective information looter and shooter, it seemed noble to me to allow the government to have the first few years in which I would be forming my opinions about government policies to put me wherever there was the greatest need for someone who had the intellectual capacity to observe what was going on and make a few guesses about what it was all about. Having learned the military manner of shouting, I am particularly struck by the humiliation suffered by the narrating character in his first encounter with the Lawyer Kraykowski: "Was it you who did me the honor?" I asked in a tone that might have been ironic, perhaps even sinister, but