Novel
Pornografia
Witold Gombrowicz · 1960
Synopsis
In 1943, in occupied Poland, the narrator, a middle-aged writer who bears the author's name, and Fryderyk, a strange and refined man met in Warsaw, are invited by Hipolit to his country estate. Hipolit is about to marry off his daughter Henia to an older lawyer. Struck by this ill-matched couple, the two visitors notice Karol, a boy of Henia's age, and set about pushing the two adolescents towards each other, arranging gestures and meetings so as to savour the spectacle.
Context
Completed in 1958, the novel appeared in June 1960 from Jerzy Giedroyc's Literary Institute, at Maisons-Laffitte, near Paris. In Poland it was officially published only in 1986, in the complete works issued in Kraków. That the author, absent from the country during the war, touched on the Occupation and the resistance was received as a provocation by many of his Polish readers. Georges Lisowski translated it into French in 1962 for Julliard, with a preface by the author; some first foreign editions were titled, with his agreement, La Séduction. The first English version, in 1966, was translated from the French.
Who it is for
A novel of a little over two hundred pages in translation; the narrator is a double of the writer, and the narrative attends to gestures more than to events.
Prizes and reception
Translated notably into English, Japanese, Chinese and Turkish; adapted for the cinema by Jan Jakub Kolski in 2003.
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