As Pimko talks to him, Kowalski begins to shrink, to become ""a little persona"" his oeuvre becomes a ""little oeuvre."" Pimko, in turn, grows larger and larger. When the ghost is gone, Kowalski is driven to write, to create his own ""oeuvre,"" to be ""free to expound own views."" A visitor arrives, a doctor of philosophy named Pimko. He orders the ghost, whose face ""was all someone else's-and yet it was I,"" to leave. Joey awakens one morning gripped by fear when he perceives a ghost of himself standing in the corner of his room. Joey Kowalski narrates the story of his transformation from a 30-year-old man into a teenage boy. First the Second World War, then Russian domination of Gombrowicz's Poland and the author's decades of exile in Argentina all but expunged public awareness of a novel that remains a singularly strange exploration of identity, cultural and political mores, and eros. This masterpiece of European modernism was first published in 1937, and so arrived on the literary scene at an inopportune moment.
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