The Possessed
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- 5,99 €
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- 5,99 €
Publisher Description
In The Possessed, Witold Gombrowicz, considered by many to be Poland's greatest modernist, draws together the familiar tropes of the Gothic novel to produce a darkly funny and playful subversion of the form. With dreams of escaping his small-town existence and the limitations of his status, a young tennis coach travels to the heart of the Polish countryside where he is to train Maja Ochołowska, a beautiful and promising player whose bourgeois family has fallen upon difficult circumstances. But no sooner has he arrived than the relationship with his pupil develops into one of twisted love and hate, and he becomes embroiled in the fantastic happenings taking place at the dilapidated castle nearby. Haunted kitchens, bewitched towels, conniving secretaries and famous clairvoyants all conspire to determine the fate of the young lovers and the mad prince residing in the castle. Translated directly into English for the first time by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, The Possessed is a comic masterpiece that, despite being a literary pastiche, has all the hallmarks of Gombrowicz's typically provocative style.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This 1939 treasure from Polish modernist Gombrowicz (1904–1969; Pornografia), available in its entirety for the first time in English, involves a young tennis coach entangled in intrigue and supernatural phenomena. Leszczuk is visiting an estate in the Polish countryside to tutor tennis prodigy Maja Ochołowska, who's engaged to middle-class schemer Cholawicki. Knowing that his fiancée finds him repulsive and is only out for money, Cholawicki pins his hopes to clinch the marriage on inheriting or outright stealing a treasure trove of art from his employer, Prince Holszański. The nobleman, meanwhile, is haunted by the ghost of his dead son, Franio, whose apparition stalks Holszański Castle. Gombrowicz fills the plot with genre tropes, including a self-important professor who convinces himself that he would steal the prince's art for the sake of "the common good," a cowed servant who, terrorized by Franio's ghost, lets leak to Cholawicki that all is not normal in the castle, and more. What emerges is a crafty and sharp exploration of the greed, lust, and vanity that spin people out of control. Gombrowicz's gleeful misanthropy and sense of the absurd shine through the genre trappings to create a potboiler that's enjoyable on multiple levels. This works perfectly both as a straightforward gothic akin to Du Marier's Rebecca and as a knowing parody.
