A Perfect Vacuum

Laugh-out-loud hilarious. It feels like a funny Borges. Loved the stories. The last one is for physicists, and I wasn't as able to keep focused. But the ones about literary genre- make your own book, or angrilly addressing the reader, they were pure genius. There was also plenty of frustratingly relevant social criticism, and discussion of the role of AI and other new technologies.

Jeepers, this is fun. Lem dances the Borges (and acknowledges that he's doing so) and gives it his inimitable, vigorously mentated spin-dizzy. *A Perfect Vacuum* consists of "reviews" of books that don't actually exist. The reader -- at least this one -- can't help but wish some of them *did* exist (especially *Gigamesh* since I'm one of those weirdos who loves *Finnegans Wake*).

It helps that Lem has/had a wonderful translator in Michael Kandel -- I can't vouch for the accuracy of his translations since I don't know Polish, but I can certainly vouch for how well they read, and the two or three I've read read brilliantly.

This isn't the first book of "reviews of books that don't exist" that I've read from Lem, but the other one seemed to veer off track and include a really long story that I didn't finish. This one was much better. These are really heavy ideas, not easy reading at all. I often found them entertaining, but sometimes they were just too much for me and dragged on. So if you're into big ideas and tough reads, then I would definitely say give it a read.

This may seem strange but while I was reading this, I kept thinking, "You know who would probably love this book? China Mieville, Umberto Eco and Salman Rushdie." I kept feeling like it could have been written by any of those 3 authors.

I'm not really impressed. Lem is a lousy reviewer, and a review of a non-existent book should if nothing else be an excellent review. A Perfect Vacuum starts out on a high note; the review of the partially fictional A Perfect Vacuum (heavily focused on the non-existent Introduction) is a good review, that, instead of being a mere plot summary, actually has the reviewer engage the author and the issues behind the book. "Being Inc.", on the other hand, is a limp science fiction plot summary; perhaps as Lem claims in back cover copy, he "capture[d] what was cognitively essential about [this] unwritten book", but he failed to capture what was artistically essential about the book. Plot summaries don't make good fiction, nor do they make show more good reviews. "U-Write-It" and "Toi" not only set up straw men to knock down, I have little idea of what they were straw men of. I bailed out a little more than half the book in page count, and 13 out of 16 reviews. The end of the book is lengthy philosophical essays (again, not reviews in any real sense), and it's content I'm not interested in wading through.

I know that I'm not exactly the intended audience; the back cover claims that he tackles "the French new novel, James Joyce, pornography, authorless writing and Dostoevsky", and I'm really only familiar with one of those. Two of the reviews definitely seem to be frontal attacks on James Joyce's Ulysses and Dostoevsky's The Idiot, respectively, so familiarity with those works may help. In the end, only two or three of these sections can honestly be called reviews, and the plot summaries and essays that fill the book don't make for good reading. show less

Reviews of nonexistent books. One is a book entitled “U Write It”, which is a literary erector set. Another is “Sexplosion”, in which three giant corporations sort of have sex and meet ruin. In “The New Cosmogony”, a purported Nobel winner provides an address which is nonsense, but sounds like erudition. And of course, there is “Rien du tout, ou la consequence”.

Stanislaw Lem shines a mirror upon the dark world of hypocrisy. He brings a kind of understanding to human idiocy.

DNF at 50%

I expected something different - Lemian versions of M. John Harrison's great fictional short reviews in 'You Should Come With Me Now'. What we get instead often has more to do with the canon of literature (think Crusoe, Dostoevsky, etc.) than actual science fiction. The fictional reviews are dense, longwinded and have a lot of meta-literary stuff - and there're more tedious synopses than actual reviews, by the way.

'Pericalypse' and the introductione were great though, and there might still be gems in the second half of the book, but I lacked the stamina to hunt for them.

Weighing A Pig Doesn't Fatten It

A collection of reviews of imaginary books, many of which make Ulysses seem devoid of ambition.