Word: lem
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...style has much in common with the fantasy of Kafka, Borges, Stanislaw Lem and Gabriel Garcia Marquez; as in Kafka's The Castle and Lem's Memoir's Found in a Bathtub, Abe's new novel presents a protagonist thrust into an absurd, alien environment with a mission he must accomplish. In the former, a gentlemen K., claiming to be a land surveyor, sets out to reach the castle, while Lem's memoir-writer must wander through endless corridors to escape from a vast underground military complex. In Secret Rendezvous, the labyrinth is an enormous hospital, and the unnamed protagonist...
...format. In adopting the medium of fantasy, an author hopes to convince the reader not with the poignant accuracy of his images and characterizations, as in realistic fiction, but with the subtle, subliminal--but equally poignant--truth underlying the fabrication of plot and character. Kafka, Borges, Lem and Marquez succeed on this secondary level by treading a thin line between fantasy and realism--in The Castle, for example. Kafka's careful use of language preserves this ambiguity: the reader is never quite sure of what to accept as plausible, and what to reject as implausible, so that such a distinction...
Finding the diversion welcome, most of the world was watching as Neil Armstrong slowly descended the steps of the lunar module (LEM--remember?), hesitated for a moment on the final rung, then placed the first human bootprint on another world. ("The surface appears to be very, very fine-grained," Armstrong observed while his friend "Buzz" waited to join him, "it's almost sort of a powder.") It was bona fide Big Stuff. CBS and provided 31 hours of continued coverage; ABC naturally stopped after 30. "Save us a copy," the astronauts radioed back, when informed that the New York Times...
...Lem's earlier works, this novel parodies those institutions claiming to have achieved static perfection or ultimate knowledge. Like Lem's earlier protagonists, usually human scientists studying alien civilizations, John is struggling to discover truths inherently too complex or mysterious to be understood. The utter failure of man's scientific explorations in past novels manifests the author's conviction that man cannot apprehend the universe in a meaningful, objective...
...civilization which has become so complex as to be beyond his understanding. Yet John succeeds in uncovering the mystery, and the author's resolution appears to be cogent enough to leave us feeling smugly satisfied that we know the answer. Are we willing to believe Lem, or should we suspect that he is gulling us into accepting his artifice in order to satisfy our expectation of a final solution and our need for one as well? It is not at all clear, for the novel's realism is so intense that the conclusion is entirely unconvincing. We should suspect...