I reread this collection of Gombrowicz's early stories, which I rated at three stars several years ago. His perennial theme is how we contort the world so that its facts fit our preconceived notions, and its already in place in the best of the stories. My favorite stories were "Adventures," with its account of floating glass eggs and cannibalistic lepers, and "A Premeditated Crime," about a magistrate who tortures a grieving family by insisting that their father was murdered.
As is always a danger with experimental writers, most of the stories failed to engage me, which converted their oddness into tedium. Not even Gombrowicz's great use of metaphor was able to rope me back in.
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