Cosmos

by Witold Gombrowicz

Book Overview

A dark, quasi-detective novel, Cosmos follows the classic noir motif to explore the arbitrariness of language, the joke of human freedom, and man's attempt to bring order out of chaos in his... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802145620
• ISBN13: 9780802145628
• Release Date: November 2011
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.6" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

poetry, philosophy, psychology

I read this book a few months ago ... but decided to write a few lines about it only now, after i finished Joseph Roth's "The Radetzky March". "Cosmos" can be considered a sequel in a sense to "The Radetzky March", even though the books have, on the surface, pretty much nothing in common."The Radetzky March" is written about the decline and fall of Austro-Hungarian empire, the whole pre-modern world, in fact, about emerging new men, who can not live by "simple" rules of their fathers.But the main character in "The Radetzky March", Carl von Trotta, is still "pre-modern", in a sense that his inner world is not developed to a degree of convoluted reflection, which is the main subject of "Cosmos".The protagonist of "Cosmos" is "super-modern", quintessentially modern ... not "post-modern", though. This highly poetic book is all about reflection, about a person observing an outside world through his own hidden impulses, vague desires and longings ... This outside world, "cosmos", is beautiful, complex, even convoluted, enticing, repulsive, dangerous ...Nobody is simple any more, each event has enigmatic second meaning - not to be fully comprehended ... ever. One more time: this is, probably, one of the most poetic books i ever read. It definitely deserves a second (third? fourth?) reading.