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Memoirs Found in a Bathtub
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The absurdly brilliant far-future satire from “the Borges of scientific culture” (Time).
The year is 3149, and a vast paper destroying blight—papyralysis—has obliterated much of the planet’s written history. Fortunately, these rare memoirs, preserved for centuries in a volcanic rock, record the strange life of a man trapped in a hermetically sealed underground community . . .
From the Kafka Prize–winning author of Solaris, this is an entertaining and thought-provoking blend of politics, philosophy, humor, and science fiction.
Translated by Michael Kandel and Christine Rose
The year is 3149, and a vast paper destroying blight—papyralysis—has obliterated much of the planet’s written history. Fortunately, these rare memoirs, preserved for centuries in a volcanic rock, record the strange life of a man trapped in a hermetically sealed underground community . . .
From the Kafka Prize–winning author of Solaris, this is an entertaining and thought-provoking blend of politics, philosophy, humor, and science fiction.
Translated by Michael Kandel and Christine Rose
Actions du livre
Commencer à lireInformations sur le livre
Memoirs Found in a Bathtub
Description
The absurdly brilliant far-future satire from “the Borges of scientific culture” (Time).
The year is 3149, and a vast paper destroying blight—papyralysis—has obliterated much of the planet’s written history. Fortunately, these rare memoirs, preserved for centuries in a volcanic rock, record the strange life of a man trapped in a hermetically sealed underground community . . .
From the Kafka Prize–winning author of Solaris, this is an entertaining and thought-provoking blend of politics, philosophy, humor, and science fiction.
Translated by Michael Kandel and Christine Rose
The year is 3149, and a vast paper destroying blight—papyralysis—has obliterated much of the planet’s written history. Fortunately, these rare memoirs, preserved for centuries in a volcanic rock, record the strange life of a man trapped in a hermetically sealed underground community . . .
From the Kafka Prize–winning author of Solaris, this is an entertaining and thought-provoking blend of politics, philosophy, humor, and science fiction.
Translated by Michael Kandel and Christine Rose
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Avis
Interesting concept but ultimately disappointing novel. An unnamed spy is given a mission so secret that he cannot be told the details. He spends the entirety of the book trying to find out what his mission is and getting dragged into intrigues involving double agents that turn out to be triple agents who may be quadruple agents, etc. etc. Unfortunately the writing is pedestrian and the ending unsatisfying.
This is my favorite Lem novel. It is about a man who is stuck in a world of espionage and bureaucracy. He is summoned to the Building and given a mysterious mission. He wanders through the Building where he meets strange people doing bazaar things. He is trapped in a place that is out dated and serves no purpose. This is a place where the spies and bureaucrats need a pawn to keep the wheels turning. I can see Terry Gilliam making a Brazil like movie from this novel.
Say what you will about Stanislaw Lem, he certainly demonstrates an amazing variety as an author; this is my sixth Lem novel, and every one of them has been completely different. Memoirs Found in a Bathtub is patently Kafkaesque. A nameless protagonist labors within a massive underground bureaucracy, trying to desperately to figure out what his Mission is, but no one will tell him. Everyone appears to be a double or triple or quadruple agent (and people theorize about higher orders of turncoats), and nothing is taken at face value. The book does display some of Lem's whimsical humor and love of wordplay, but I suspect that there may well have been more of this than made it through the translation. The introduction of the book provides both an intriguing setting for the novel's action (the world has been struck by an alien substance that is rapidly destroying all paper--and with it all of the knowledge which resides thereon--with disastrous consequences), and a suggestion that the excesses described in The Building are a dig at America (which frankly I found largely misguided). As a novel I found this more interesting than entertaining; I wouldn't place it at the top of Lem's novels, but it certainly did nothing to change my opinion that he is one of the most interesting and important of recent science fiction authors.
don't worry- everyone in the enemy building works for us... and everyone in our building works for them.
Yeah I get it, Catch 22 in a dystopic post apocalyptic bunker. I still did not enjoy reading it at all. His Master's Voice is 1000x better for Lem.
Yeah I get it, Catch 22 in a dystopic post apocalyptic bunker. I still did not enjoy reading it at all. His Master's Voice is 1000x better for Lem.
I thought that the most memorable bit of "Memoirs found in a Bathtub" was the stuff at the very beginning. Lem sets up a framing device in which an anthropological journal of the far future evaluates a text -- the eponymous memoirs -- that was found in the ruins of a subterranean capitalist-survivalist society that established itself under the Rocky Mountains after capitalism's eventual collapse. It's always delightful to read the past's future, but it's the studiously academic-yet-breezy tone here that gives this description its ironic bite. The rest of the book, which purports to be the memoirs themselves, is something quite different: a critique of bureaucratic totalitarian systems, a cold war allegory, a mystery, and a farce all at once. It's got a lot to do with Kafka, with Orwell's "1984," and maybe with Koestler's "Darkness at Noon." As you can imagine, it's a somewhat claustrophobic, paranoid read, a narrative that constantly doubles back on itself as its protagonists' mental state deteriorates. I imagine that the political repression that Lem was writing under kept him from including too many specifics and this text, in the end, works against the book, I think: the work comes off as a bit more abstract and theoretical than it otherwise might have. Still, it might, I think, contain some sly criticism of mid-century American corporate culture: the book's filled with clean, well-lighted corridors, coffee cups, and paperwork. Of course, the massive, intractable bureaucracy described in "Memoirs" might as well describe some Soviet government department...but, well, it's hard to know. Still, even as it moves toward its inevitable end, the book manages to be, in places, weird, poignant, tricky and thoughtful. It's put Lem on my list of authors to track down.
With Lem, you never know what you're going to get- you sit down with what sounds like a science fiction book, but will it actually be one of those, or something completely different? Make no mistake, besides the frame narrative this isn't so much a work of science fiction as it is Lem's take on Kafka.
It's a shame too, for two reasons: first, I was looking for a science fiction book and not Kafkaesque metafiction, and Second, the frame narrative sets up a very intriguing setting. Besides establishing the loss of the written word and the resulting dark ages, which don't end up mattering much going forward, the frame narrative also depicts a United States that lost the cold war, and the final bastion of the U.S. government sealed away in a vast underground base. Unfortunately (in my opinion), the rest of the book fails to capitalize on this setting.
Enter the narrative proper, a memoir of one of the inhabitants of this underground base written by a civilian agent assigned to carry out a mission of which he has not been informed of the details. But is there a mission at all? His journey takes him through incident after incident that leave him more and more confused about what is going on, both with himself and with the building. Is he being tested? Has the building been infiltrated by enemy agents? Is there any rhyme or reason to any of this at all? As is typical of books that take after Kafka, don't expect there to be any answers here. But is there meaning? Though the book is replete with religious symbols, I couldn't uncover anything about religion that the book was trying to say. Neither was there any political message here either, besides Cold War-paranoia writ-large and cranked up to eleven. The events themselves are barely connected, so there's no real story here besides the narrator's growing desperation. Eventually, after a certain number of incidents, it ends. After having finished, I don't consider the theme of invented meanings, narrative self-references, and omnipresent paranoia to be anything more than gimmicks.
I don't much care for Lem's take on Kafka, or his more experimental books in general (A Perfect Vacuum, for instance). If I wanted something of that sort I'd read Kafka himself, or Borges, or Dino Buzzati, or Michal Ajvaz, or Leo Perutz, or other writers who I think do that type of thing better than Lem does. Instead, I like Lem's more standard Science Fiction stories. That's what I expected to get out of this book, and was disappointed when I didn't. Even putting my personal expectations aside, however, I still don't think Memoirs Found in a Bathtub does Cold War Kafka particularly well, or says anything interesting with it. If you want Kafka with some very light science-fiction elements, I guess this could work for you, otherwise read one of the authors I've listed herein.
It's a shame too, for two reasons: first, I was looking for a science fiction book and not Kafkaesque metafiction, and Second, the frame narrative sets up a very intriguing setting. Besides establishing the loss of the written word and the resulting dark ages, which don't end up mattering much going forward, the frame narrative also depicts a United States that lost the cold war, and the final bastion of the U.S. government sealed away in a vast underground base. Unfortunately (in my opinion), the rest of the book fails to capitalize on this setting.
Enter the narrative proper, a memoir of one of the inhabitants of this underground base written by a civilian agent assigned to carry out a mission of which he has not been informed of the details. But is there a mission at all? His journey takes him through incident after incident that leave him more and more confused about what is going on, both with himself and with the building. Is he being tested? Has the building been infiltrated by enemy agents? Is there any rhyme or reason to any of this at all? As is typical of books that take after Kafka, don't expect there to be any answers here. But is there meaning? Though the book is replete with religious symbols, I couldn't uncover anything about religion that the book was trying to say. Neither was there any political message here either, besides Cold War-paranoia writ-large and cranked up to eleven. The events themselves are barely connected, so there's no real story here besides the narrator's growing desperation. Eventually, after a certain number of incidents, it ends. After having finished, I don't consider the theme of invented meanings, narrative self-references, and omnipresent paranoia to be anything more than gimmicks.
I don't much care for Lem's take on Kafka, or his more experimental books in general (A Perfect Vacuum, for instance). If I wanted something of that sort I'd read Kafka himself, or Borges, or Dino Buzzati, or Michal Ajvaz, or Leo Perutz, or other writers who I think do that type of thing better than Lem does. Instead, I like Lem's more standard Science Fiction stories. That's what I expected to get out of this book, and was disappointed when I didn't. Even putting my personal expectations aside, however, I still don't think Memoirs Found in a Bathtub does Cold War Kafka particularly well, or says anything interesting with it. If you want Kafka with some very light science-fiction elements, I guess this could work for you, otherwise read one of the authors I've listed herein.
A labyrinth of a book, a twisted gnarl of agents, double agents, codes and flies in the coffee. A look at the paranoia of a bygone age.
A derivative, not very original retake on Kafka and Orwell.Note also that the Kindle edition is poorly edited. It was obviously produced from OCR (optical character recognition) software and not well proof-read.
Memoirs Found in a Bathtub caught my eye simply for the novelty of the title and that bizarre cover. This book is difficult to sum up or even to rate as it truly has no discernible plot. Lest you dismiss it immediately because of this fact, let me assure you that there's much to recommend this title. The word play and circuitous path of our main character (who remains nameless) is satire at its finest. Espionage, counterespionage, and counter-counterespionage abound in The Building where our character has been given a very important Mission...if only he knew what it was. He is continually beset by obstacles in the form of bureaucrats, winding halls with nondescript doors, and instructions that keep vanishing. What would happen if humanity was forced to abandon its cities and move into an underground bunker? Would society, culture, and technology survive and continue to advance? Lem weaves a provocative tale of paranoia, confusion, and ultimately betrayal. 5/10 but would have been higher had there been a plot to follow.