Solaris by Stanisław Lem (1961)

This is a placeholder mini-review, since it requires a second read.

Its reputation precedes it, and based on what I’d heard and read I was expecting something quite different. I was expecting it to deal primarily in existentialism, personal identity, love, the place of an individual in an indifferent cosmos — but it was more interesting than that.

Instead, Solaris is a work of epistemological pessimism. It’s about the human effort to make sense of the unfamiliar, and a bitter satire on the fantasy of ever-increasing knowledge and civilizational progress. I was much more interested in the passages that detail the history of “Solaristics” — the doomed multi-disciplinary scientific study of the planet Solaris — and in the descriptions of the ocean’s unfathomable phenomena, than I was in Kris Kelvin’s troubled relationship with the ghost, or “G-formation,” of his ex-girlfriend (although “G-formation” is a brilliant neologism). It’s quite an odd split between personal drama and social philosophy, and I’m not sure if it holds together well as a novel. What was Lem thinking? Is the work some kind of interpolated fixup?

The first few chapters are routine and irritating, and I struggled with the prose. I don’t know if that’s Lem’s fault, the translator’s (I read the newer translation by Bill Johnston), or my own. Only in the abstract, expository passages did the book come alive for me. In particular, I began to enjoy it in the chapter entitled “Monsters,” in which Lem describes the planet’s mysterious phenomena and the history of their discovery, investigation, and theorization by human beings.

I have not read anything like it, and I struggled to get on Lem’s wavelength, which is why I feel I need to read it again.