Bacacay

Hilarious, disturbing, brilliantly written tales of erotic lepers, duped aristocrats, and the bizarre universe of Witold Gombrowicz.

Library Journal

Best known for his novels (Ferdydurke) and plays (Princess Ivona), Gombrowicz (1904-69) was also a deft short story writer. This collection was first published in his native Poland in 1957 and appears here in English for the first time. The stories are at once humorous, surreal, and absurd. In "A Premeditated Crime," the narrator discovers the head of household dead and with no physical evidence decides that the death was murder and pushes the family to a startling breaking point. "Dinner at Countess Parahoke's" recounts one of the countess's vegetarian suppers, where the cauliflower may not be what it seems. In "Philidor's Child Within," two academic adversaries carry their studies too far when their duel leads to the death of one's wife and the other's lover. A town bully is captured and tortured with a rat for over a decade in "A Rat." The characters and plots are unsettling enough to make it difficult to shake the stories off after reading them; however, their pacing and dated topics make large public demand unlikely. Recommended for academic collections.-Heather Wright, ASRC Aerospace Corp., Cincinnati Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969), the single most important Polish prose writer of the 20th century, spent much of his life in France and Argentina (Bacacay was the street he lived on in Buenos Aires). His novels include Ferdydurke, Trans-Atlantyk, Cosmos, and Pornografia. Awarded the Prix Formentor (1967). Johnston is Director of the Polish Studies Center at Indiana University. His translations include Gustaw Herling's The Noonday Cemetery and Other Stories (New Directions, 2003), Jerzy Pilch's His Current Woman (Grove, 2002), and Stefan Zeromski's The Faithful River (Northwestern, 1999). In 2005, he won an ASTEEL translation prize for Tulli's Dreams and Stones.