The narrative revolves around two middle-aged Warsawian intellectuals, who during a trip to the countryside during World War II construct a scheme to entice two teenagers in a scheme to disturb the young girl's fiancé and, later, to have the youngsters enact the murder of a leader in the Polish resistance.

[1] Upon the 2009 American release, Michael Dirda wrote in The Washington Post that Pornografia "seems as sick, as pathologically creepy a novel as one is ever likely to read.

In some ways, it resembles a rather more polymorphously perverse version of Les Liaisons Dangereuses or one of those disturbing fictions by European intellectuals that blend the philosophical with the erotic: Think of Georges Bataille's The Story of the Eye or Pierre Klossowski's Roberte Ce Soir.

Through its sado-masochistic material and its almost Henry Jamesian analyses of human motives, Pornografia underscores Gombrowicz's lifelong philosophical obsession: the quest for authenticity."

Dirda continued: "Certainly, most readers will find Pornografia perturbing, or worse: repulsive, confusing, ugly.