Ferdydurke (1961)

Ferdydurke is for readers who like their comedy unhinged. A thirty-year-old writer wakes up to find himself turned back into a schoolboy and marched off to class, and from there Gombrowicz runs wild with the ways adults, teachers and polite society squeeze people into roles they never chose. It is absurd, aggressive and sometimes baffling, closer to Monty Python than to a gentle satire. Read Danuta Borchardt's 2000 translation for Yale: earlier versions came at the book through other translations, while hers was the first taken directly from the Polish, and it won the National Translation Award.