Jon's Book: Stanislaw Lem, Hospital of the Transfiguration

Stanislaw Lem, I think, thrives under the rubric of science fiction. He has a fairly morbid picture of the universe as a place which is not only mysterious, but almost insultingly intangible to human understanding, which is, perhaps tellingly, best explicated in the context of some incomprehensible, monolithic alien thing of one kind or another. In other words, what he is trying to communicate to the reader is best exemplified by the sorts of things which you almost have to struggle to keep out of science fiction. Its this collusion of context and concept¹ which makes my personal favorite novel by Lem, Solaris, so compelling, and it is its the absence which makes The Hospital of the Transfiguration so strange.



The Hospital of the Transfiguration focuses on the experiences of a Polish doctor working at a rural insane asylum from the months just before the German Occupation of World War 2 to its immediate aftermath. The dehumanizing Nazi war machine is as alien and monolithic as any fictional creation Lem has ever crafted, and it also has the eerie similarity to what we will simply refer to as "human" psychology which is frequently also an element of Lem's fictional monsters. The focus, though, overwhelmingly², is on minutiae, such as the turning of the seasons, or the strange character of an elderly and mysterious member of the Polish resistance with whom Stefan, the protagonist, has occasional, innocuous conversations. The effect is to highlight the strangeness of living in the shadow of a beast rather than having a direct confrontation with it. Even the climax of the story, which most readers will readily be able to predict, comes off as mundane, as if the only possible reaction that Stefan, or indeed, the world, can muster to the insanity and inevitability of the Nazi's is a kind of defensive indifference.

As is the case in Solaris, romantic love of a sort also appears, but its emotional nature, like everything else, is blunted and clinical, and its presence is difficult to interpret. It is not clear that Lem is making the trite statement that even in the most horrific of situations that hope and love are present, and that they offer a kind of redemption. Indeed, the act of love seems to be carried out only mechanically or out of pity or some other, difficult to understand, fairly feminine motivation, in a scene, now that I think about it, somewhat reminiscent of the end of The Grapes of Wrath

All and all the effect is to create a surreal, and perhaps severely understated novel.

Rating: 9/10
Shall I Keep It: Yes.

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¹ Or percept?

² Or underwhelming, as the case may be.

Jon_, JonBook_