Cosmos

Starred review from September 15, 2005
This dark, surreal tale of two holiday boarders in a Polish country house explores the bizarre lengths to which people at loose ends will go to create meaning in their lives. As one boarder puts it, "When you're bored, God only knows what you might imagine!" The two young men, who meet on the road, are drawn to a particular rooming house because a sparrow has been hanged nearby on a piece of wire hooked over a branch. Upon this avian crime scene, the men soon build great nests of conspiracy and obsession, following arrows they perceive in ceiling stains and rifling through other people's rooms for such clues as a nail pounded partway into a wall just above the floor. But while they might not solve their mystery, the boarders do manage to pierce the emotional lives of their host family and uncover the odd ways they deal with their own existential predicaments. Narrated by one of the boarders in a rambling, repetitive, stream-of-consciousness, sometimes bleakly comic style that heightens the tension as the man becomes more and more unglued by and enmeshed in his mad investigation, this 1965 novel--one of four the Nobel-nominated Gombrowicz wrote before his death in 1969--will hold special appeal for fans of Camus' " The Stranger." In this deft new translation, " Cosmos," appearing in the U.S. for the first time, reveals itself as a challenging but important work.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)