I actually finished reading this last night, but was simply too tired to post about it. I originally picked this book up because of Stephen Soderbergh’s adaptation, which I very much enjoyed, although I know I am in the minority on that score. I haven’t yet seen Tarkovsky’s 1972 film, but I plan to rent it on the weekend. Soderbergh’s adaptation wasn’t quite true to the novel in terms of plot, but I find that it did manage to distill a lot of the atmosphere and thematic thrust of the novel.
The novel itself was as advertised: depressing as hell. Reading about a man dealing with the re-incarnation of his dead wife triggered some painful memories from my own life, but ultimately it was an incredible experience to read about a man being destroyed, essentially, with a direct, physical encounter with the deeper layers of his own mind. The book is slow, quiet, and disturbing. I’m not sure if it was a function of the translation or of Lem’s original prose, but the dialogue was a bit off-putting at times. It was the only thing that fell into the science fiction stereotype (in that it was stiff, melodramatic, and bore no relation at all to the rhythms of actual human speech), but it wasn’t so bad that it disrupted the stately self-destructive flow of the novel. If anything it added a kind of heightened tension. Normally when we think of tension in a novel, and especially in genre fiction (with the possible exception of Phillip K. Dick’s unrelenting paranoia) we tend to think in terms of violence or the threat of violence, and we think of fast-paced action, or at the very least discreet events inside a brief time frame rather than spread out across a long, essentially uneventful period of time. Solaris has just that; for entire chapters nothing really happens except a few banal conversations and a lot of sleep, but the tension eventually builds to the point where it becomes oppressive. I will say that I was a little disappointed in how this novel ended; it seemed abrupt and not entirely in keeping with the sense of desperation that had pervaded pretty much every single page up until the final chapter.
Coming soon: Terry Pratchett’s The Color of Magic.
That’s going to be quite a sharp genre change, leaping from Lem to Pratchett. The latter may seem like a bit of a pointless frivolity after enduring the glacial implosion of misery that is Solaris.
Nice blog, by the way.
Thanks!
I like that phrase, “glacial implosion of misery.”
I chose to switch from Lem to Prachett for exactly that reason. I knew that Solaris would give me a pretty heavy psychological knock, and I wanted something light as a kind “recovery book” before I went back to more serious fare.