Anybody read the book?

I just finished reading the book in its marvellous French translation before watching this "film", and I must say that Zulawski has a radically different take on the source material. It's much less an adaptation of the novel per se than a divergent exploration using the elements of its narrative. The main concern of the novel--the problematic construction of meaning in an ever unfathomable, shifting reality--is completely eschew in favour of... something else entirely, which I'm not sure to have grasped, quite honestly.

Gombrowicz's Cosmos is an expressionistic foray into a troubled, fevered mind's quest to understanding reality as it presents itself to his senses and his intellect, all wrapped up in a burlesque farce. As such, it is by no means an easy read, yet it's nonetheless engaging in its peculiar way.

Zulawski's "adaptation", however, retains the farcical and skims over the metaphysical; it tries--and ultimately fails--to translate into cinema what literature so artfully and potently does. It blatantly shows where the novel merely infers or suggests (in a meaningful way).

To conclude, please don't judge Gombrowicz poorly on the grounds of this misleading production. Cosmos is his last, and most difficult, book. If one were so inclined to read him, I would strongly recommend starting with Ferdydurke, his first and most popular novel. The former is clearly--well, for those like me who've read most of his output--the culmination of his artistic development, but it makes it a tad harder to digest, whereas the latter is more blatantly ingenious, funny, philosophical and surprising.