Interests of the Week

Stanislaw Lem - Memoirs Found in a Bathtub: After reading Solaris and His Master's Voice, I pretty much decided to try and read every Lem book available translated in English. That said, Lem is usually a slow read for me. There is rarely a sentence in his tales that doesn't contain meaning, and often that meaning is buried under philosophy, politics, sarcasm, or some combination of the three.

Bathtub started with a similar crawl for me, but quickly became much more accessible than I expected. Perhaps my ease of comprehension came from having recently read Kafka's The Trial and Metamorphosis, of which Bathtub has some significant similarities. A dark tale, Lem captures paranoia and self-preservation as the only two conflicting human traits of politicians, military, and out-of-place civilians in a crumbling society. Like The Trial, the lead character in Bathtub pursues a fruitless mission to answer an unanswerable question, lost in an ever-confusing world established by those who only pretend to have control of their lives and the situation in which they live.

I don't think I'd rank this effort over Solaris or His Master's Voice, but Lem exposes his ability to identify with the worst in our Governments if they will allow this dark side to surface. In other words, it only requires a small stretch of the imagination.