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language: Polish (English tr. Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox, from a French translation)
country: Poland
year: 1961
form: novel
genre(s): science fiction
dates read: 7.12.22-11.12.22
my opinion of Stanisław Lem’s Solaris (translated from the French translation, for some reason, by Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox, and the vicissitudes of intellectual property law are such that no-one is allowed to print a translation directly from Polish, although there exists an audiobook. love that) has vacillated wildly between “complete ambivalence” to “actually this is really good and I understand the hype” — and I mean that I go back and forth sometimes over the course of a single paragraph (the last paragraph of the novel, say). I’ve settled on 3.75 stars on Storygraph as a compromise.
the translation, as I’ve noted, is…adequate. not bad, but very obviously a translation from French. that’s not the main source of my ambivalence, though.
things I liked: I appreciated the outright rejection of anthropomorphism in science fiction. I REALLY liked Rheya. the last few sentences prefigure the end of A Stranger in Olondria and I love that. I was like 50-50 on the summaries of Solarist literature; I appreciate the thought but I wish it had been actual literature and not scientific literature. I really liked the extent to which the whole novel is an account of an encounter with something utterly strange and probably utterly unknowable.
things I did not like: the visitors being introduced by way of a “giant Negress” whom Kelvin immediately describes as a “monstrous Aphrodite”. not enough Rheya — even when she’s driving the plot she feels kind of like an afterthought. the psychological aspect of the novel feels underexplored — like Lem threw in “oh, yeah, the unconscious mind” but wasn’t actually interested in what he was writing. what was the point of Snow and Sartorius? when Snow tells Kelvin he’s only arguing with Snow to avoid arguing with himself it really just drove home how pointless the other scientists were, because…yeah, that’s exactly their role in the narrative.
basically I think it was a pretty good book but suffers from the fact that Kelvin is just not a very interesting protagonist — or, the book doesn’t seem particularly interested in him? it just kind of wanders. I don’t know. I didn’t love it, is the conclusion — parts of it are excellent and parts are kind of boring. I do think I’ll probably try other Lem at some point, though. I really wish Astronauci were available in translation, because I enjoyed Der schweigende Stern in all its propagandistic glory.
EDIT: also I think it’s very funny that of all the people they could have used to blurb this book they picked Anne McCaffrey for some reason, with a blurb that is essentially just a factual account of the point of the book — “A novel that makes you reevaluate the nature of intelligence itself.” like. yes, Anne, I guess you read it, because that is what it’s about. lol.
moods: mysterious, reflective