A Perfect Vacuum by Stanisław Lem
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"[...] And the only subterfuge the evasive Lem might still avail himself of would be a counterattack: in the assertion that it was not I, the critic, but he himself, the author, who wrote the present review and added it to - and made it part of -'A Perfect Vacuum.'"

Whenever I begin a re-read of a Stanislaw Lem's book I am afraid of disappointment. Lem was by far the most favorite author of my youth, some 35 to 55 years ago, and I have been worrying that in re-reading his works my enthusiasm may diminish for the Polish philosopher and futurologist who is best known for his incomparable science fiction books, such as Solaris. I am happy to report there have been no disappointments so far and A Perfect Vacuum (originally published in 1971) is one of the best books I have recently read, maybe even better than Lem's His Master's Voice which I rated with almost five stars.

A full review would take too much space so let me just offer a few remarks about this impressive work. A Perfect Vacuum is set up as an exercise in metafiction where Lem offers a collection of reviews of non-existent books. In the author's stroke of genius, the collection even includes a review of the book that contains the review - how's that for advanced self-referentiality? On a similar note, in the review of (fictitious) Gigamesh Lem provides delicious satire on literary criticism that indulges in looking for non-existent references: after all, it is true that any reference to anything can be found anywhere if one looks hard enough.

Lem creates the author of Gruppenführer Louis XVI who writes about artificial reality of 17th century French royal court created in Argentina by SS officers who escaped Germany. Any older Polish reader will immediately recognize this as satire on the so-called communist government in Poland that created an artificial reality for the citizens. A contemporary reader, on the other hand, may easily make a connection to the current situation when it seems that about half of all people are unable to distinguish the artificial reality of TV shows from the actual reality. Another fictitious book under review, Rien du tout, ou la conséquence, pushes the meta-literature to the extreme positions: narration is eliminated to the extent that only pure language remains. The piece also contains a hilarious passage about an author who wrote Don Quixote from the scratch and obtained exactly the same text as the one produced by Cervantes.

Now about my three favorite pieces. The review of De Impossibilitate Vitae, a fictitious work halfway between mathematics and total lunacy, is a playful take on probability theory (the subject that I teach, by the way). Lem presents the author's clear and convincing explanation that his existence is a result of chains of events so improbable that it is not at all possible for him to exist. Neither is it for any other person (De Selby's observations presented in The Third Policeman come to mind).

Non Serviam, perhaps the deepest piece in the set, reviews a book about personetics - science and technology that enabled people to create personoids, sentient beings that exist as executing programs, computer models implemented in software. Nevertheless they are completely real to themselves; they build their culture, philosophy and even religion that seeks to embrace the Creator of their Universe. Lem, as the reviewer, emphasizes the monumental moral and ethical dilemmas of those sentient creatures' creators. Alas he takes an easy way out and only glides over the crucial issue of the origin of self-awareness.

Finally, in New Cosmogony Lem quotes the Nobel Prize acceptance speech of a physicist and philosopher who is one of the pioneers of a new model of cosmology - Universe as a Game - where the oldest civilizations are the players who apply minimax strategies to construct the "laws of nature." It is also here that Lem, through the fictitious physicist's words, states the audacious yet utterly brilliant thesis that the expanding Universe serves the purpose of keeping the distance between new civilizations and the existing ones, which would cleanly account for the so-called Silentium Universi. Physics of the Universe as a by-product of sociology - it is not possible not to admire the author's (and the author's author's) cheek!

Despite Lem's usual hang-ups about sex, the piece Sexplosion exudes sheer hilarity with its memorable mentions of unchastity belts, sodomobiles, cybordellics, gomorcades (my own translations as I read the book in its original Polish version), and many, many other vehicles of pleasure. Perycalipsis is also a hoot with its spiritual masturbation, that is getting off on promises rather than releases. Phenomenal stuff!

Great book: funny yet deep and thought-provoking. In fact, now I love it more than 45 years ago. Despite my stinginess with top ratings here's the second one in just one week! Maybe I am getting soft in the head faster than I think.

Fours and three quarter stars.


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The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"[...] the savant spent several months trying to discover a satisfactory method of 'diluting' water, holding that it was 'too strong' [...]"

At my age there exists no greater pleasure in life - other than eating chocolate, of course - than finding a book that is so stunning in its arrogant and confident uniqueness that it takes one's breath away with its sheer audacity. And as a matter of fact the pleasure of finding a book that totally defies expectations lasts longer than chocolate, not to mention the fewer calories it packs. I have just found such an epitome of literary surprise in Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman (written in 1940, but not published until 1976). This is also the second funniest book I have devoured in the 60 years of my reading adventures. Only Śledź Otrembus Podgrobelski's Introduction to Imaginescopy, which has not yet been translated from Polish to English - and is most likely untranslatable - might be more hilarious.

In fact the two works do share some similarities: while Śledź's book is a scientific treatise on imaginescopes, devices that consist of a hole enclosed by any substance and used to expand human imagination, Policeman - in addition to the narrative layer - is an exposition of theories of a certain De Selby. Among other findings De Selby demonstrates that there is no such thing as motion (which can easily be proved by looking at any photograph), posits that nights are just concentrations of "dark air" that possibly could be bottled and stored for later use, and that the earth is sausage-shaped. (Here I must disagree: after years of working the math - the subject that I teach on university level - I had shown that the earth is a torus, a donut-shaped object. Alas, because of senility, I have forgotten my clever proof.) Yet De Selby's most comforting discovery is that death does not exist and is just an illusion. Of course, each comfort has its price: De Selby proves that life does not exist either but one has to agree that non-existence is a reasonable price to pay for immortality.

The plot is deliciously and totally demented as well: the nameless narrator (his soul is called Joe, though), orphaned early and raised in a boarding school, gets hold of one of De Selby's books. He acquires an obsession to commentate all works by the author and produce a definitive De Selby Index. Lacking financial means for the research he murders a wealthy man to steal his money. However, the dead man's money is not that easy to find and the narrator attempts to enlist the police to help him find the hidden cash. The policemen, though, are not your usual cops: they are only interested in human-bicycle relationships and in fact function under the assumption that bicycles and people contain interchangeable parts, which eventually allows them to merge into one entity.

This is just the beginning of strange occurrences - I will not take away the reader's pleasure to discover the demented things that happen next. Let me just mention that we have a tactfully depicted sex scene between a man and a female bicycle. We also meet a box-making craftsman who - having perfected his manual skills so much that he builds boxes small enough to be invisible even under a microscope - eventually manages to build a box half as small. Can you imagine that? Half as small! And what about the posse of fourteen one-legged men who tie themselves in pairs?

While not all passages in the novel are equally riveting I can reiterate with full confidence that this is the funniest book in English language that I have ever read. I hypothesize that it might be the funniest book in English ever written, at least until I read the same author's At Swim-Two-Birds.

Four-and-a-half stars and - gasp! - I am rounding my rating up! My first five-star book in almost half a year and 50 books.


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