Murder, mayhem, mystery – and a quivering towel????? #thepossessed

Online recommendations continue to influence my reading (as I mentioned in my review of “Madonna in a Fur Coat” recently), and today’s book is another fine example of that! Many of the reels I’ve come across recommending Autumn reading featured “The Possessed” by Witold Gombrowicz, and I confess I was intrigued. A blue cover Fitzcarraldo, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones and issued in 2023, it had somehow passed me by until now; but I quite liked the sound of it, and as Fitzcarraldo were having a 40% off sale at the time, it would have been rude not to take advantage of that! However, the book was not exactly what I had expected… The online pitch was of some kind of Gothic story set in the Polish countryside. First published in 1973, parts of Gombrowicz’s book were apparently initially serialised in a newspaper in 1939; and as it opens we encounter a young tennis coach, Marian Walczak (later Leszczuk), who’s travelling by train to a declining country house Polyka where he’s taking up…