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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 891.8537
EAN num: 9780156585859
ISBN number: 0156585855
Label: Harvest Books
Manufacturer: Harvest Books
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 204
Printing Date: July 23, 1986
Publishing house: Harvest Books
Sale Popularity Level: 97052
Studio: Harvest Books
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Product Description:
The year is 3149, and a vast paper destroying blight-papyralysis-has obliterated much of the planet's written history. However, these rare memoirs, preserved for centuries in a volcanic rock, record the strange life of a man trapped in a hermetically sealed underground community. Translated by Michael Kandel and Christine Rose.
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Rated by buyers 
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My very first thought on the book is for a reader to wait until the end of the book to read the introduction. This book is not for the intellectually weak. The allagorical and symbolic meanings of this book are not easily analyzed nor determined and it takes a few readings just to get the plot straight. Dispite these negative characteristics, "Memoirs Found in a Bathtub" is a great story, dedicated to satirizing the flaws of a buearocratic society, among many other issues. For English majors looking to analyze this as a part of course study, not much has been written on this particular work, and the articles I have found negate their arguments within the very first 200 words. I recommend this book for people who liked the following books, but are looking for something a little more difficult: Nineteen Eighty-Four The Giver or any other dystopian piece of literature.
Rated by buyers -
Memoirs Found in a Bathtub by Stanslaw Lem follows the adventures of an agent-in-training as he wanders in search of a mission through the vast bureaucracy of a purposeless intelligence agency.
The agent is anonymous. But we can call him K - because the story, the style, and the absurdist message are drawn directly from Kafka (esp. The castle]. K is an everyman, and his agency is an allegory for society. Ostensibly, the agency is the post-apocalyptic remnant of America, but it feels entirely European.
The theme of the Memoirs is that one's search for individual identity (i.e. the mission) is distracted by reflections of the self in other people. Social interaction discloses layer upon layer of identity (like the numberless floors of the agency's building) but no essential purpose. Such a search wraps the individual tighter and tighter in a web of conformity.
In the end, K can no longer imagine leaving the building. He becomes incapable of even attempting a mission, should he ever find one. Even his human rebelliousness turns into tragically reflexive conformity.
Lem's narrative style conveys serious ideas using a simple narrative prose and pervasive, but understated humor. In this respect, Lem writes like Kafka on Prozac - with clearer ideas, faster pace, and more fun. For me, this is the best aspect of the book.
The worst aspect of the book is the introduction. I advise the reader to skip it; with the intro included, my recommendation drops by at least one star. It places the Memoirs in a sophomoric (and entirely unnecessary) SciFi context and draws the connection with America. I speculate that the introduction was added to satisfy censors in 1961 Poland.
Rated by buyers -
Hilarious bureaucratic master-work reduces every paranoid cliche to the realm of the absurd. After a brief prologue (explaining the current state of the world), the memoirs take over the book and create an environment both instantly insane and memorabley accurate. Lem was always the funniest of the sci fi writers- he makes you think, the same time he causes you to laugh out loud. (it's like Kafka mixed with the Marx Brothers.) The un-named narrator will have you rooting for him from the very first sentence. Even the final stark scene is somehow uncomfortabley amusing.
Rated by buyers 
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These memoirs are presented in the foreword as the last remnant of a dead civilization, and its twisted hierarchical organization and jargon justify the archaeologist of the future in thinking that this is the artifact of a bizarre religion. As such, it is a religion that radically cut itself from transcendence: its Temple is a shadowy museum of illusions and deceptions, with no hope whatsoever of receiving the light of order; pseudo-heresies are created by their unknowing priests, revelations are elaborated at will only to be contradicted soon after. This is the world that the book's nameless hero must brave - he experiences several 'signification crisises', going back-and-forth between allegory as a universal rule and a complete negation of sense. The Building in which all the events take place is a sort of fiction-generating machine (like Lem's book itself), perpetually spinning tales, intrigues and conflicts. What makes the book powerful is that Lem equates his reader with the main character, both sharing an elusive mission; the work starts smoothly, until reader and agent are completely immersed in this world of mirrors, crypted informations and thwarted enigmas. The desire to understand remains, but there is nothing to understand as the personal quest (the agent's and the reader's) becomes more and more convoluted and drowned into a complex string of half-truths. A maze of a novel.
Rated by buyers 
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I'm a big fan of Lem but I have to admidt he has churned out some bad books. I have read all but two all of Lem's books and this is among his worst (along with Chain of Chance, Eden, the Investigation). Its boring, short, and no way worth [that much money] Instead start out with one of his 5-star books: His Master's Voice, Star Diaries, Fiasco, or Pirx the Pilot.
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