An off-the-wall classic, part war thriller, part philosophical enquiry, written by a Polish emigre living in Argentina in 1960 who had arrrived on a cruise ship 20 years earlier and when the Second World War broke out decided not to go back, Pornografia has a deliciously unreal element to it. From the first page (one of the most arresting in literature) this is theatrical, but with the atmosphere and three dimensions that only a novel can supply. The plot is bizarre: two ageing intellectuals (one of them Gombrowicz) are on a country retreat at a friend's (or is it a business associate's?) manor in the Polish countryside. Strange things are afoot: the forests seem to exhale a whiff of intrigue. The two men are picked up at the station by a handsome young farmboy in a carriage, and from then on all else is secondary to their delight in this young boy and in a young girl (their host's daughter? - it's a while since I've read it) with whom he seems perfectly-matched. The book revolves around their attempts to trigger the seduction of one child by the other. No matter that a Polish soldier has come to stay, that the war has stepped foot into the very house where they play this game...

As I say, it's a while since I've read it, but in my twenties this was a big book for me. The paperback edition, by Marion Boyars, is also beautiful. The writing is brilliant, unique. Sentences stop in mid-flow with three dots, the prose accelerates - we seem to be right beside Gombrowicz as he pounds at the typewriter. Only in Hubert Selby have I read an author who so made me imagine his typewriter, but in Selby's case it detracted; here it is almost magical - so this is what's possible!

In the fifties in Paris Gombrowicz was known for his diary. In his youth in Warsaw in the thirties he was infamous for the satirical Ferdydurke, a novel which which was no doubt ahead of its time but which I will admit I have been unable to finish. For me, Gombrowicz will always be the author of Pornografia. An all-time favourite, a one-of-a-kind masterpiece.

(FOOTNOTE, a few months later... I can't believe I didn't realise: this edition was translated from the French translation, and a direct Polish-English translation was published for the first time (by Grove Press, with the same cover) in 2009! I mean, wow! Nigh on fifty years to publish a proper translation?! This goes on my must-read list immediately.)