Author(s): Witold Gombrowicz; Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Novel | Translated fiction | Poland | Fitzcarraldo Editions

From a "master of verbal burlesque and a connoisseur of psychological blackmail" (John Updike), Witold Gombrowicz's harrowing and hilarious pastiche of the Gothic novel, now in a new, authoritative English translation.

Witold Gombrowicz is considered by many to be Poland's greatest modernist, and in The Possessed, he demonstrates his playful brilliance and astonishing range by using the familiar tropes of the Gothic novel to produce a darkly funny and lively subversion ofthe form. With dreams of escaping his small-town existence and the limitations of his class, a young tennis coach travels to the heart of the Polishcountryside to train Maja Ochołowska, a beautiful and promising player whose bourgeois family has fallen upon difficult circumstances. Yet as Maja and theyoung man are alternately drawn to and repulsed by the other, they find themselves embroiled in the fantastic happenings taking place at the dilapidated castle nearby, where a mad prince haunts the halls, and bewitched towels, conniving secretaries, famous clairvoyants, and uncanny doubles conspire to determine the fate of the lovers. Serialized first in Poland in the dayspreceding the Nazi invasion, and now translated directly into English for the first time by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, The Possessed is a comic jewel, a hair-raising thriller, and a provocative early masterpiece from the acclaimed author of classics like Pornografia and Cosmos. 

'One of the great novelists of our century.'
- Milan Kundera

'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

'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

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

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

'Gombrowicz's art cannot be measured with the passing of decades. It is a monument of Polish prose.'
- Czeslaw Milosz

‘Despite his anxiety about genre fiction, Gombrowicz acquits himself masterfully, moving deftly between horror, romance and crime. The web of dark motivations and interdependencies that links the characters is intricately and compellingly drawn, and the plot moves at an impressive speed…The novel’s shifts in tone and texture are handled expertly by translator Antonia Lloyd-Jones, who shows a keen sensitively not only to the language of the period but also to the genres being parodied, the translation interlaces passages of prose worthy of Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and P G Wodehouse, expertly re-creating the original’s tonal palette for the anglophone reader.’