Status
Available
Call number
Genres
Collection
Publication
Penguin Books Ltd (1989), Paperback, 320 pages
Description
In this bitterly funny novel a writer finds himself tossed into a chaotic world of schoolboys by a diabolical professor who wishes to reduce him to childishness. Originally published in Poland in 1937, Ferdydurke was deemed scandalous and subversive by Nazis, Stalinists, and the Polish Communist regime in turn and was officially banned in Poland for decades. It has nonetheless remained one of the most influential works of twentieth-century European literature. "Ferdydurke, among its centrifugal charms, includes some of the truest and funniest literary satire in print."--John Updike "A wonderfully subversive, self-absorbed, hilarious book. Think Kafka translated by Groucho Marx, with commentaries."--Kirkus Reviews "The author's exuberant humor, suggesting the absurdist drama of Eugéne Ionesco, if not the short fiction of Franz Kafka, is readily apparent in this new translation. . . . Highly recommended."--Richard Koss, Library Journal Winner of the 2001 National Translation Award given by the American Literary Translators Association… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member deebee1
This book is, as Susan Sontag in the Introduction says, "an epic in defense of immaturity", and it is like no other. Gombrowicz insists on the word immaturity, and not youth, because it represents something unattractive, something inferior. Thus being, how can such a book grab us? But grab me it
Joey is a 17-year old schoolboy, recently 30-year old writer who was torn between his obsession of projecting an image of serious maturity to the outside world through his writing and his inability to let go of his infantile self.
But I was, alas, a juvenile, and juvenility was my only cultural institution. Caught and held back twice - first by my childish past, which I could not forget, and the second time by the childishness of other people's notions of me, a caricature that had sunk into their souls - I was the melancholy prisoner of all that is green, why, an insect in a deep, dense thicket.
Joey's transformation into his juvenile self occurred as a result of his abduction by a professor Pimko into an absurd world where everything was grotesque, upside down and inside out -- the big was small, the small monstrously big, the shapes unnatural, gestures outrageous, actions manic, and reasoning absurd. Here, he could let himself go; the more infantile one was, the better. Pimko takes him to a schoolyard full of sniveling brats where his idiotic pupa paralyzes him amidst their infantile tricks, violence and teenage braggadocio. (In the translator's notes, "pupa" is described as Gombrowicz's metaphor for the gentle, insidious, but infantilizing and humiliation that human beings inflict on one another, or belittlement.) Here, it is the vilest, most disgusting, and most distorted expressions and behaviour that are rewarded. After a while he realizes he has to run away, lest he fall prey to all this freakishness.
Yet instead of running away I wiggled my toe inside my shoe, and the wiggling paralyzed me and foiled my intentions to run, because how was I to run while I was still wiggling my toe...?...All I needed was - the will to run. But I lacked the will. Because to run one needs the will, but where is the will to come from when one is wiggling one's toe....
Joey's education in this world continues beyond the school confines, to his boarding house where he becomes infatuated with the daughter of his landlady, who represented everything he was not. Between school and home, we see his encounters with contrasts: maturity/immaturity in all its forms, modernity/old fashioned ways; youth/old age; innocence/knowledge; ability/ineptness; awkwardness/sophistication; politeness/impoliteness; faces/counter-faces; composition/decomposition; symmetry/assymetry; artificiality/naturalness; thesis/antithesis; theory/practice.
He journeys with Kneadus, a classmate, into the countryside to look for a farmhand whom they wished to emulate (again the contrast -- cityboy/farmboy), and came to the estate of Joey's aunt and uncle. Here, he finds another world where the lords of the manor and the peasantry entrap and hold onto each other in childishness. He sees more contrasts: city ways/rugged farmhand ways; the city streets/the countryside; lords/servants.
Blind actions. Automatic reflexes. Atavistic instincts. Lordly-childish fancy. I walked as if into the anachronims of a gigantic slap in the face, which was simultaneously a tradition of many centuries and an infantile smack, and it liberated, in one fell swoop, the lord and the child.
After a while, Joey decides to escape from this world where he felt totally infantilized. And again, an abduction takes place which he thought would bring him back to the city...and, we hope, the maturity that has so far eluded him. But really, what hope does he have? At the book's closing, Joey assumes the author's voice taunting, challenging, provoking us, "graceful bundles of body parts, now let it all begin -- come, step up to me, begin your kneading, make me a new mug so I will again have to run from you....Because there is no escape from the mug, other than into another mug...." And ends with, "It's the end, what a gas, And who's read it is an ass!" I can see Joey sticking out his tongue at me, and doing an anti-face grimace. How can it not be.
This was a fun read, and I found some of the situations truly hilarious. There is nothing subtle about them. An example is the face/anti-face contest which was so inane and truly gross, but also so stupidly funny. It struck me that this was not so unreal, as kids actually do it. What I didn't enjoy though was the brutality with servants (hitting the face -- mug/pupa?) though it was regarded common practice by masters, and was accepted without question by, and even was a point of honor among servants. I was also turned off by references to rape of the female servant by Kneadus.
The playfulness of the subject extends to the fantastic wordplay that Gombrowicz employs, which I enjoyed very much. And we do not mind the inanity and grossness that assail us readers, the pokes at our sensibilities -- it is all fun. And why should a mirror into ourselves show only what is decent, mature, and sophisticated? Why can't we look at the mirror of Ferdydurke, see our own pupas and laugh at the same time? We might yet take advice from Joey, in his former 30-year old self, when he reflected:
What is the connection, where is the bond between the king of beekeepers and the inner man, between the man and the youth, between the youth and the boy, the boy and the child that, after all, he once was, what comfort is the king to the little brat in you? A life unmindful of these bonds, a life that does not evolve in unbroken continuity from one phase to another is like a house that is being built from the top down, and must inevitably end in a schizophrenic split of the inner self.
Show More
did, as I was in turns amused, repelled, entertained, annoyed, mostly provoked by the idea of immaturity as embodied by Joey (can a name be more annoying than this?) and his friends. I read on, more out of curiousity at how much more bizarre and eccentric things can turn, how twistedness and contrariness can continue to be served up without the author exhausting the themes with repetition. But Gombrowicz is not the master for nothing, and the excellent translation captured the nuances and moods, that the reading (including a couple of chapters which were more like essays by the writer on writing), was a pleasure and an experience in itself. Joey is a 17-year old schoolboy, recently 30-year old writer who was torn between his obsession of projecting an image of serious maturity to the outside world through his writing and his inability to let go of his infantile self.
But I was, alas, a juvenile, and juvenility was my only cultural institution. Caught and held back twice - first by my childish past, which I could not forget, and the second time by the childishness of other people's notions of me, a caricature that had sunk into their souls - I was the melancholy prisoner of all that is green, why, an insect in a deep, dense thicket.
Joey's transformation into his juvenile self occurred as a result of his abduction by a professor Pimko into an absurd world where everything was grotesque, upside down and inside out -- the big was small, the small monstrously big, the shapes unnatural, gestures outrageous, actions manic, and reasoning absurd. Here, he could let himself go; the more infantile one was, the better. Pimko takes him to a schoolyard full of sniveling brats where his idiotic pupa paralyzes him amidst their infantile tricks, violence and teenage braggadocio. (In the translator's notes, "pupa" is described as Gombrowicz's metaphor for the gentle, insidious, but infantilizing and humiliation that human beings inflict on one another, or belittlement.) Here, it is the vilest, most disgusting, and most distorted expressions and behaviour that are rewarded. After a while he realizes he has to run away, lest he fall prey to all this freakishness.
Yet instead of running away I wiggled my toe inside my shoe, and the wiggling paralyzed me and foiled my intentions to run, because how was I to run while I was still wiggling my toe...?...All I needed was - the will to run. But I lacked the will. Because to run one needs the will, but where is the will to come from when one is wiggling one's toe....
Joey's education in this world continues beyond the school confines, to his boarding house where he becomes infatuated with the daughter of his landlady, who represented everything he was not. Between school and home, we see his encounters with contrasts: maturity/immaturity in all its forms, modernity/old fashioned ways; youth/old age; innocence/knowledge; ability/ineptness; awkwardness/sophistication; politeness/impoliteness; faces/counter-faces; composition/decomposition; symmetry/assymetry; artificiality/naturalness; thesis/antithesis; theory/practice.
He journeys with Kneadus, a classmate, into the countryside to look for a farmhand whom they wished to emulate (again the contrast -- cityboy/farmboy), and came to the estate of Joey's aunt and uncle. Here, he finds another world where the lords of the manor and the peasantry entrap and hold onto each other in childishness. He sees more contrasts: city ways/rugged farmhand ways; the city streets/the countryside; lords/servants.
Blind actions. Automatic reflexes. Atavistic instincts. Lordly-childish fancy. I walked as if into the anachronims of a gigantic slap in the face, which was simultaneously a tradition of many centuries and an infantile smack, and it liberated, in one fell swoop, the lord and the child.
After a while, Joey decides to escape from this world where he felt totally infantilized. And again, an abduction takes place which he thought would bring him back to the city...and, we hope, the maturity that has so far eluded him. But really, what hope does he have? At the book's closing, Joey assumes the author's voice taunting, challenging, provoking us, "graceful bundles of body parts, now let it all begin -- come, step up to me, begin your kneading, make me a new mug so I will again have to run from you....Because there is no escape from the mug, other than into another mug...." And ends with, "It's the end, what a gas, And who's read it is an ass!" I can see Joey sticking out his tongue at me, and doing an anti-face grimace. How can it not be.
This was a fun read, and I found some of the situations truly hilarious. There is nothing subtle about them. An example is the face/anti-face contest which was so inane and truly gross, but also so stupidly funny. It struck me that this was not so unreal, as kids actually do it. What I didn't enjoy though was the brutality with servants (hitting the face -- mug/pupa?) though it was regarded common practice by masters, and was accepted without question by, and even was a point of honor among servants. I was also turned off by references to rape of the female servant by Kneadus.
The playfulness of the subject extends to the fantastic wordplay that Gombrowicz employs, which I enjoyed very much. And we do not mind the inanity and grossness that assail us readers, the pokes at our sensibilities -- it is all fun. And why should a mirror into ourselves show only what is decent, mature, and sophisticated? Why can't we look at the mirror of Ferdydurke, see our own pupas and laugh at the same time? We might yet take advice from Joey, in his former 30-year old self, when he reflected:
What is the connection, where is the bond between the king of beekeepers and the inner man, between the man and the youth, between the youth and the boy, the boy and the child that, after all, he once was, what comfort is the king to the little brat in you? A life unmindful of these bonds, a life that does not evolve in unbroken continuity from one phase to another is like a house that is being built from the top down, and must inevitably end in a schizophrenic split of the inner self.
Show Less
LibraryThing member Eurydice
A minor grotesquerie, Ferdydurke is brilliant on issues of form, antitheses, emotional blackmail, and immaturity, and with language. There's a witting and fervent unsavoriness in Gombrowicz's exploration of immaturity and infantilization, with so full a vitality that it's not unlike the hormones
Danuta Borchardt's translation is likewise vital, fluid, and so verbally inventive, it deserves honors.
Show More
gone awry in adolescence. Everything is in full swing, intense, emotionally violent, full of effrontery, mildly warped - even morbid, dark - but cavorting, stuffed full of ideas, and intensely alive.Danuta Borchardt's translation is likewise vital, fluid, and so verbally inventive, it deserves honors.
Show Less
LibraryThing member JimElkins
My third or fourth of Gombrowicz's books.
He is fabulous, and if it weren't for modernism's (and even postmodernism's) ongoing earnest self-regard, this book would be read alongside Finnegans Wake and other early postmodern classics. But Gombrowicz's theme in this book prevents him from displaying
Personally, I don't think I've spent much time worrying that I might be infantilized, although it's certainly a common enough notion. I recognize it throughout the novel, but I mainly recognize it as someone else's fear. So on that level the novel doesn't quite work for me as I imagine Gombrowicz hoped it would work for his ideal reader: but that's not an uncommon problem. Misidentification is a condition of all fiction, because I never immediately or fully identify with the desires and sense of self of the characters. Novels like this one bring out that common condition by insisting that some uncommon desire is transparently universal. What matters, in the end, is not whether or not I share the protagonist's continuous and always justified fear that he will be "dealt the pupa" (Gombrowicz's wonderful personal code for the fear that someone will infantilize him), but that he bizarre and infantile things that happen in this novel make other recent fiction -- from Barthelme to Pynchon, but emphatically including all the most ambitious and apparently experimental fiction out of McSweeny's -- seem hopelessly, misguidedly, stolid and adult. Real comedy is corrosive: dazzling, hysterical, hyper-eloquent comedy -- as in McSweeny's -- is safe and, in the end, perfectly mature and annoyingly immune to being dealt the pupa.
Four stars instead of five only because there are some set pieces in this book ("The Child Runs Deep in Filidor" and the hysterical encounter with "the schoolgirl" in chapter 6-10) that are stronger than the intervening material, which comes to seem more like a necessary overflow of excess, excess's proof of its own excessiveness. (The same is true of the relation between this book and Gombrowicz's shorter novels.)
He is fabulous, and if it weren't for modernism's (and even postmodernism's) ongoing earnest self-regard, this book would be read alongside Finnegans Wake and other early postmodern classics. But Gombrowicz's theme in this book prevents him from displaying
Show More
the sort of formal mastery and control that continues to be expected even in authors who work with comedy, from Barthelme to Pynchon. And Gombrowicz knows this perfectly well, which means that this book is exceptionally brave: he would have known that he was closing doors on himself as he wrote it. His protagonist in this book is a serious young novelist who cares about form, and there is a long interpolated chapter in Gombrowicz's own voice (the first "Preface"), theorizing the importance of form. And yet the book is utterly dedicated himself to a theme that makes form, seriousness, and ambitio inaccessible or illegible. That theme is the paper-thin facade that keeps us on the side of maturity, and how it can be so easily ripped, exposing us to the frantic, ridiculous, misshapen, fragmented world of immaturity, with its bottomless embarrassments, awkwardnesses, itches, giggles, blushes, and babyish noises. Personally, I don't think I've spent much time worrying that I might be infantilized, although it's certainly a common enough notion. I recognize it throughout the novel, but I mainly recognize it as someone else's fear. So on that level the novel doesn't quite work for me as I imagine Gombrowicz hoped it would work for his ideal reader: but that's not an uncommon problem. Misidentification is a condition of all fiction, because I never immediately or fully identify with the desires and sense of self of the characters. Novels like this one bring out that common condition by insisting that some uncommon desire is transparently universal. What matters, in the end, is not whether or not I share the protagonist's continuous and always justified fear that he will be "dealt the pupa" (Gombrowicz's wonderful personal code for the fear that someone will infantilize him), but that he bizarre and infantile things that happen in this novel make other recent fiction -- from Barthelme to Pynchon, but emphatically including all the most ambitious and apparently experimental fiction out of McSweeny's -- seem hopelessly, misguidedly, stolid and adult. Real comedy is corrosive: dazzling, hysterical, hyper-eloquent comedy -- as in McSweeny's -- is safe and, in the end, perfectly mature and annoyingly immune to being dealt the pupa.
Four stars instead of five only because there are some set pieces in this book ("The Child Runs Deep in Filidor" and the hysterical encounter with "the schoolgirl" in chapter 6-10) that are stronger than the intervening material, which comes to seem more like a necessary overflow of excess, excess's proof of its own excessiveness. (The same is true of the relation between this book and Gombrowicz's shorter novels.)
Show Less
LibraryThing member donato
First things first: this book needs to be read quickly. Not superficially, nor lightly, but in less than 3 days. Unfortunately that's not the case here, for various reasons (one of them being leaving it 3500 miles away...) What's necessary is to be caught in its special web, to live in its
At first I thought I was in for a Pirandello redux (1st chapter)[1], and then (2nd chapter) I started almost actively hating it, saying, but this isn't even a novel! (it's a philosophical-psychological-political treatise, I thought). But of course I should have known better, because as always the first pages tell you how to read the rest of the pages (waking from a dream that puts into question his very being, the narrator contemplates the state of his writing, and thus his soul). And WG was way ahead of me, predicting my reaction, as we see in the brilliant 11th chapter [2]. (I'd already been hooked by the 4th...)
So what do we have here then? Well, if not a story (as I was clamoring for in the 2nd chapter), scenes then, and certainly a world, our world, through a comic and surreal (yet all too real) lens of immaturity. And body parts. Yes, body parts, parts not connected to the whole... Can our ideologies (trans)form our faces? What exactly is the connection between our bodies and our souls? In our infancy (immaturity), they (everyone really) entrap us inside someone else's body, someone else's soul, but that soul fits us like a shoe that's too tight...
Yawn. Boring, you say. Been there, read that (Pirandello, for one). But the beauty is in the unpredictability of it all (as in Bolaño, who called this book one of the "key novels of the 20th century" [3]). You don't know what's coming next because you've never seen what's happening now. Dancing inside the bedroom of a teenage girl's bourgeois parents in order to "cast" some sort of bad-taste spell? A colonel who shoots a tennis ball out of the air right in the middle of a game, and the players continue to play for a bit? Two dueling philosophy professors who shoot off the body parts of their respective wives/lovers? There's that, and more, my friends...
[1] I'm thinking of Pirandello's _One, no one and 100000_. Right down to the narrator's name: here Gingio, there Gengè (translator's license, or original? Most likely the former...)
[2] "It would also be appropriate to establish...whether what we have here is a novel, a diary, a parody, a pamphlet, a variation on an imaginative theme, a work of non-fiction..." (p 172, my translation from the Italian...) (the answer is "all of the above", of course...)
[3]"Tra Parentesi", page 123 of the Italian Adelphi edition. Apparently, Milan Kundera said something similar: "I consider _Ferdydurke_ one of the 3 or 4 greatest novels written after the death of Proust" (my translation of the Italian translation of the French in the article _Gombrowicz malgré tous_ in "Nouvel Observadeur", March 1990).
Show More
linguistic reality. At first I thought I was in for a Pirandello redux (1st chapter)[1], and then (2nd chapter) I started almost actively hating it, saying, but this isn't even a novel! (it's a philosophical-psychological-political treatise, I thought). But of course I should have known better, because as always the first pages tell you how to read the rest of the pages (waking from a dream that puts into question his very being, the narrator contemplates the state of his writing, and thus his soul). And WG was way ahead of me, predicting my reaction, as we see in the brilliant 11th chapter [2]. (I'd already been hooked by the 4th...)
So what do we have here then? Well, if not a story (as I was clamoring for in the 2nd chapter), scenes then, and certainly a world, our world, through a comic and surreal (yet all too real) lens of immaturity. And body parts. Yes, body parts, parts not connected to the whole... Can our ideologies (trans)form our faces? What exactly is the connection between our bodies and our souls? In our infancy (immaturity), they (everyone really) entrap us inside someone else's body, someone else's soul, but that soul fits us like a shoe that's too tight...
Yawn. Boring, you say. Been there, read that (Pirandello, for one). But the beauty is in the unpredictability of it all (as in Bolaño, who called this book one of the "key novels of the 20th century" [3]). You don't know what's coming next because you've never seen what's happening now. Dancing inside the bedroom of a teenage girl's bourgeois parents in order to "cast" some sort of bad-taste spell? A colonel who shoots a tennis ball out of the air right in the middle of a game, and the players continue to play for a bit? Two dueling philosophy professors who shoot off the body parts of their respective wives/lovers? There's that, and more, my friends...
[1] I'm thinking of Pirandello's _One, no one and 100000_. Right down to the narrator's name: here Gingio, there Gengè (translator's license, or original? Most likely the former...)
[2] "It would also be appropriate to establish...whether what we have here is a novel, a diary, a parody, a pamphlet, a variation on an imaginative theme, a work of non-fiction..." (p 172, my translation from the Italian...) (the answer is "all of the above", of course...)
[3]"Tra Parentesi", page 123 of the Italian Adelphi edition. Apparently, Milan Kundera said something similar: "I consider _Ferdydurke_ one of the 3 or 4 greatest novels written after the death of Proust" (my translation of the Italian translation of the French in the article _Gombrowicz malgré tous_ in "Nouvel Observadeur", March 1990).
Show Less
LibraryThing member palaverofbirds
Like Sartre's Nausea, only good.
LibraryThing member araridan
Ferdydurke is a novel that often times just seems like sorta funny nonsense, and other times like a philosophical take on the importance of "immaturity" as fuel for creativity.
The premise of the story is that our protagonist is somehow regressed into a teenager (all though he still looks like a
Since this book was originally published in Poland during the 1930s, I think an American living past the year 2000 cannot possibly understand all of the references and cultural items that are being poked fun at. However, there are enough instances where even the basic plot is pretty hilarious or completely strange. It seems fitting that Crispin Glover plays the lead role in the film based on this book that came out in 1991
The premise of the story is that our protagonist is somehow regressed into a teenager (all though he still looks like a
Show More
30-year-old...everybody just seems to overlook that). In school his classmates debate over purity vs. vulgarity as the ultimate expression of immaturity. When he is forced to live with a family that includes a very beautiful schoolgirl we hear conversations dealing with modernity vs. old-fashioned values...to an absurd degree. And lastly we are confronted with a scene dealing with class issues as a friend of the protagonist desperately tries to "fraternize" with a farmhand/peasant. Since this book was originally published in Poland during the 1930s, I think an American living past the year 2000 cannot possibly understand all of the references and cultural items that are being poked fun at. However, there are enough instances where even the basic plot is pretty hilarious or completely strange. It seems fitting that Crispin Glover plays the lead role in the film based on this book that came out in 1991
Show Less
LibraryThing member ursula
I wondered a bit about where to start with comments about this one, but it's the sort of thing you just have to dive right into. The plot defies description - the narrator, a man of 30, is dragged back to middle school and treated as if he is a child. Everyone refuses to listen to his protests that
Immaturity, new vs. old, conformity and indoctrination into what is considered "good art" are a few of the topics and themes that Gombrowicz tackles throughout the novel. I liked the book in the beginning, and then the style started to wear thin for me in the middle. It picked back up toward the end, though, and I was definitely glad I read it. It's good to get a mental workout from a book where the style is at least as importance as the substance, and I also found it quite quotable.
Recommended for: fans of Tristram Shandy.
Quote: "Is this why an author tries to show his skill in the way he constructs his work, so that an expert may show off his expertise on the subject?"
Show More
he's actually an adult, and pat him on the head and infantilize him at every turn.Immaturity, new vs. old, conformity and indoctrination into what is considered "good art" are a few of the topics and themes that Gombrowicz tackles throughout the novel. I liked the book in the beginning, and then the style started to wear thin for me in the middle. It picked back up toward the end, though, and I was definitely glad I read it. It's good to get a mental workout from a book where the style is at least as importance as the substance, and I also found it quite quotable.
Recommended for: fans of Tristram Shandy.
Quote: "Is this why an author tries to show his skill in the way he constructs his work, so that an expert may show off his expertise on the subject?"
Show Less
LibraryThing member leakim
Mindbending prose that sets all of our taken för granted truths about ourselves and our place in society in a new light. What does "growing up" mean when you think about it? Ferdydurke makes you wonder...
LibraryThing member soylentgreen23
I'd been told to read this for so many years that when I did I kind of looked up and said 'huh'?
LibraryThing member stillatim
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
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.
Show More
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.
Show Less
Subjects
Awards
Language
Original language
Polish
Original publication date
1937
1961 (English translation : Eric Mosbacher)
1999 (English translation : Danuta Borchardt)
1961, 1. edizione italiana, Einaudi
ISBN
0140116397 / 9780140116397