Deleuze recommended Witold Gombrowicz's strange avant-garde novel in several places, so I decided to finally give it a shot. It was actually fairly entertaining ... for an avant-garde novel. But it is definitely not going to be everyone's cup of tea. To wit, I think I remember seeing one Amazon review that classified it as "unreadable". I didn't find it to be that exactly, though you will be sorely disappointed if you're looking for a page-turning story. While the novel does have an identifiable plot of sorts, and isn't merely a series of language games or meta-references like some experimental novels, it can at times be a repetitive and frustrating experience. So a lot like life in general, and in particular like being fully present inside our own everyday insanity. Ultimately, that's what the novel is about -- the way we construct a 'meaningful' cosmos out of a thousand tiny and unrelated details by welding together correspondences that serve our desires. In the end, it seems clear that Gombrowicz feels the cosmos lacks any innate meaning and is simply a chaos of constellations we squint into form. Though, given that we are also part of the cosmos, perhaps this squinting already is an innate meaning.
