![]() Gombrowicz’s reputation as one of the indispensable moderns is now secure, but back then he was still a totem of the undiscovered genius, “the greatest unknown writer of our time,” in the words of the French magazine L’Express cited on the back cover. ![]() ![]() The battered copy I found in a Chicago used bookstore spun a web of contradictions. Sure enough, the book came and went in a whisper. The project aimed to disseminate Eastern European writers in the Anglophone world: a worthy endeavor, though judging from the cobbled-together edition of Ferdydurke - an offset duplication of the 1961 text, with a Czeslaw Milosz essay from another occasion tacked on as an introduction - one with a limited budget. An English version of the book, published in 1961 in the UK, had been re-issued in 1986 as part of Penguin’s Writers from the Other Europe series, edited by Philip Roth. When I read Witold Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke in the late 1980s the Soviet empire was beginning to totter and crack. The covers of the Polish first edition of “Ferdydurke” (via Wikipedia) ![]()
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