Gombrowicz, Borges, and the Fictional Cosmos

"Gombrowicz and Borges come alive for a new generation of readers in Ubelaker Andrade's learned and astute book. A true delight!" - Alicia Borinsky, author of One-Way Tickets: Writers and the Culture of Exile

"Borges and Gombrowicz famously did not get along during the latter's quarter-century in Buenos Aires, but in this book Ubelaker Andrade shows that there is a secret dialogue with Borges in Gombrowicz's Cosmos, written near the end of the Polish writer's long sojourn in the Argentine capital. He argues that in 1960, when Gombrowicz finally read Ficciones, he then wrote the last of his novels in which he provides a belated response to Borges, one that is quite different from the caricature of him in the earlier Trans-Atlantyk. With attention to Gombrowicz's Argentine diaries and the works he wrote there, Ubelaker Andrade argues that the two writers shared concerns and played with similar topoi (maps, libraries, relationships, rumor). Their ideas and strategies were very different or, as Gombrowicz says late in his life, 'at opposite poles,' but there was a common ground between them. A rich and fascinating book." - Daniel Balderston, author of How Borges Wrote