The Possessed

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 Ocholowska, 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.

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'One of the great novelists of our century.' 

- Milan Kundera

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'A master of verbal burlesque, a connoisseur of psychological blackmail, Gombrowicz is one of the profoundest of late moderns, with one of the lightest touches.'

- John Updike

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'Gombrowicz is one of the super-arguers of the twentieth century.... The relentless intelligence and energy of his observations on cultural and artistic matters, the pertinence of his challenge to Polish pieties, his bravura contentiousness, ended by making him the most influential prose writer of the past half century in his native country.'

- Susan Sontag

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'There are also novels of another genre, false novels like Gombrowicz's, that are kinds of infernal machines.'

- Jean-Paul Sartre

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'What we have here is an unusual manifestation of a writing talent.'

- Bruno Schulz

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Witold Gombrowicz (1904-69) is one of the twentieth century's most enduring avant-garde writers. He wrote novels, short stories, plays, and his remarkable Diary; and - after returning to Europe from Argentina in 1963 - was awarded the 1967 Prix Formentor/International for Cosmos.

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