A thirty-year-old man is seized by a schoolmaster and dragged back into adolescence, forced into the desk and the gymnasium and the unbearable tyranny of immaturity. Witold Gombrowicz's 1937 novel is a philosophical farce of the highest order, a work that dismantles the very notion of the autonomous self by showing how relentlessly others impose form upon us. Every encounter is a battle of faces, poses, gestures. The prose lunges and retreats, mocking its own seriousness, subverting every convention it touches. Written in a Poland hurtling toward catastrophe, it insists that we are never who we claim to be, that maturity is the most elaborate fiction of all, and that the struggle against being shaped by the world is the one war no one wins.