Translated from the Polish by Danuta Borchardt
Publisher: Grove Press 2009
Hardback 221 pages
The Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz's last novel, Pornografia, is a manic, psychologically driven story of youth and desire, religion and power, death and sex. The novel is narrated by an older man named Witold, who, with his friend Fryderyk, fleas wartime Warsaw to a friend's country estate during WWII. Finding a respite from the German occupation, the narrator and his friend turn their attention onto uniting two local youths in an elicit affair. From the beginning we see that the affair means little to the youths, and any desire or sexuality expressed is only for the amusement of these older men.
The entire story takes a strange turn as the whole ensemble gets wrapped up in a murderous plot involving an expatriate of the Polish resistance movement. The ending is abrupt and out of pace with the rest of the novel. Until the very end the story is told in almost a stream of consciousness way, with the thoughts and actions of all the other players coming under intense scrutiny under the narrator's eye. The style of writing is at times seemingly burlesque in nature, jarring to read, yet fascinating all the same. It truly is a novel of the psychological, with Gombrowicz deftly illustrating sexual devastation and the perverseness of youthful desire, social maneuvering within a morally collapsed state and the struggle for power between intellect and religious piety.
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