Memoirs Found in a Bathtub by Stanisław Lem
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"[...] there's your Splanchology, Innardry, Disemboweling and Reembowelment, Viscerators and Eviscerators. [...] here's flaying alive, there's playing dead, hamstringing, stringing up, tests of personal endurance [...] Bruises on the left, and on the right, Juices. [...] Empaling. Mahagony, birch, oak, ash."

Memoirs Found in a Bathtub (1961) is perhaps the most cryptic and unclassifiable work in Stanislaw Lem's entire opus. Lem began in the late 1940s as a science fiction writer. When in the 1970s he achieved the distinction of the world's most famous sci-fi author, he had already moved forward and became a philosopher of science and technology and a futurologist who widely published about the directions and dangers of the evolution of human civilization. Lem was by far the most favorite writer of my entire youth and early middle age, and I believe I have read virtually every word he had ever published.

The novel is framed as a fragment of a manuscript from distant past, from the times of the Late Neogene civilization (roughly, mid-20th century), that was discovered during archeological excavations conducted in 3146. This was a precious find because (as explained in the Introduction) it came from the period before papyralysis a civilization disaster that had destroyed all papyr, which was the only mass medium of storing information. The document is narrated by an unnamed agent who reports to the Commander in Chief to receive his special mission assignment. However it seems the mission is so top secret that its nature cannot be revealed to anyone, even to the person who is supposed to carry it out.

The entire plot takes place in an immensely huge, labyrinth-like building ('Gmach' in the original Polish) and the narrator wanders through the maze of offices, corridors, and other spaces in search of his instructions, meeting various people, witnessing and often causing strange events. On the very surface Memoirs may remind the reader of Kafka and his nightmarish worlds of existential anxiety and surrealistically depicted alienation of a human being from the society (Kafka was born and spent most of his life in Prague, which is only a short hop away from Krakow, where Lem lived almost his entire life).

However, while the overall mood may indeed be termed a bit kafkaesque, Lem seems to be more interested in posing deep philosophical questions. What is truth? What is the meaning of meaning? The Building may be viewed as metaphor for the world and the search for instructions is akin to looking for life's meaning. A reader who likes political readings of literature may find the Building and the presumed Anti-Building a metaphor for the 1960s-period of two superpowers locked in a deadly embrace.

I have re-read the novel (after the first read, roughly 55 years ago) through the prism of one of the most important themes in Lem's opus: randomness and chance as the forces governing the Universe (I still hope to re-read Lem's main work (in my opinion), The Philosophy of Chance). At some point the narrator begins to believe that his every move so far had been plotted out, planned in advance, including the moment that he realizes that his every move had been plotted out, planned in advance. The plot oscillates between pure randomness and complete predetermination.

In my uninformed view, Lem might have been influenced by the so-called multiple-universes theory, where different histories happen simultaneously. I find the reference clear in the passage where the narrator finds a man lying alongside the tub (the fourth paragraph of Chapter 8). To me, the man is the narrator himself, from a different thread of the time-space. Another bit to support my "theory" is a fragment where the narrator sees people working on drying and combining the torn scraps of paper that have been flushed down the toilet. Soon, the narrator will tear some papers into these scraps and flush them down the toilet.

Now my main point: the prose. Lem's writing, as in most of his books, is a tour-de-force of language, a celebration of exquisitely crafted prose. Memoirs like many other Lem's work is a triumph of the author creating words that do not exist (many of them should!), all kinds of wordplays and puns. I have been asked by my Goodreads friend Jerry (whom I also know personally from way back) to compare the translation with the Polish original. So I have read the two texts side-by-side. I have been deeply surprised by two things. First, the translation by Michael Kandel and Christine Rose is excellent. Obviously, the language in the Polish original is richer, more colorful and stylish (as well as masterfully stylized to sound a little archaic). But the translation conveys the general feel and mood of the prose very well.

My second surprise as to the translation is how loose it is. Naturally, almost the entire text is translated literally, wherever possible. Yet I was surprised at the number of deviations from the original text in places where the deviations are not needed or justified. Let me quote just one example. In the already mentioned passage where the narrator finds a man lying alongside the bathtub the translators omitted the entire phrase that the man was lying in almost the same place where he had been lying before.

Four-and-a-half stars.


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