Do you have any great book to recommend?
Thank you very much!
I advise you all to read Witold Gombrowicz's diary (1953-1969).
It is the most essential reading for literate people. It can help your little self have a mature/lucidly immature relationship with the huge World of Culture...and thus become really intelligent, instead of just pretending. It will help you become more...true. And more aware of the fight to create a true you, the fight which pits you against yourself/others/society continuously making it complicated for you to create a form (of yourself) that faithfully expresses who you feel you really are.
From a review of one of his books on Amazon:
Perhaps the most instructive part of the memoir is his writing about the background to what is regarded as his masterpiece 'Ferdyduke'.
This is what he quotes Bruno Schultz as saying about 'Ferdyduke'."This means that in 'Ferdyduke a shameful inner world is revealed which can only be confessed to and formulated with the greatest difficulty.Yet the world is not the Freudian world of instinct and the subconscious. It is the result of the following process: in our relations with other people we want to be cultivated, superior mature, so we use the language of maturity and we talk about, for instance, Beauty, Goodness, Truth.. But within our own confidential , intimate reality , we feel nothing but inadequacy, immaturity: and then our private ideals collapse, and we create a private mythology for ourselves, which is also basically a culture, but a shabby, inferior, culture, degraded to the level of our own inadequacy. "
In the end Gombrowicz summarizes. "I am almost ashamed of myself. Where have my assaults on Form got me? To Form. I broke it so much and so often that I became the writer whose subject is Form. That is my form and my definition. And today I, a living individual am the servant of that official Gombrowicz whom I built with my own hands. I can only add to him. My former impulses, my gaffes, my dissonances, all this trying immaturity.. where has all that gone? In my old age life has become easier for me. I sail confidently between my contradictions and people listen to what I have to say Yes, yes.I've dug my hole. I've played my part. I am a servant. Whose? Gombrowicz's."
Gombrowicz spent most of his mature adult life in exile in Argentina (his country, Poland, was invaded by Nazis, then by Stalinists), forgotten, far from the heart of the intellectual World, then returned to Europe where, upon starting to be recognized as a genius (he finished number 2 for the Nobel Prize the first time other European intellectuals presented his candidacy, and "only" received the International Publishers Association's Prize), he died. Most writers who got a Nobel prize had to try hard for many years after being recognized as major writers to eventually receive this honor. As a result, he is the least known of the greatest geniuses in history.
His diary is also full of his confrontations with the greatest books of the twentieth century. You will also see how he relates freely and truly with the world of painting and the world of poetry. It is so refreshing. And stunning!
English:
http://www.amazon.com/Diary-1-Witold.../dp/0810107155
French::
http://www.amazon.fr/Journal-1-1953-.../dp/2070389308
Italian:
http://www.liberonweb.com/asp/libro.asp?ISBN=8807530139
German:
http://www.amazon.de/Tagebuch-1953-1...dp/3596164370/
Spanish:
http://www.amazon.com/Diario-Argenti.../dp/9879396618