Highcastle: A Remembrance [Hardcover]

Stanislaw Lem (Author), Michael Kandel (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1995

The author describes his innocent childhood as the son of a doctor in Lvov between the two world wars, during which his most vivid memories include episodes with his gossipy French tutor, the view from a confectionary store, and halvah stands.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Growing up in Lvov, Poland (now in Ukraine), in the 1920s and '30s, science fiction writer Lem shared a six-room apartment with his parents yet had no room of his own and often slept in the bed in which his grandparents had died. As this remarkably candid memoir/meditation reveals, Lem became a resentful, lonely child, terrorizing aunts or playmates and destroying toys and gramophones. He feared insects, avoided stepping on sidewalk cracks and obsessed over food, the ceiling, an iron chest left by his grandfather. Lem revered and feared his father, an otolaryngologist, and stealthily pored over his anatomy texts and naughty illustrated French novels. In the author's science fiction, machines are lifelike; significantly, as a boy he believed he could mentally interact with inanimate objects, causing a penknife, for instance, to reproduce. This reminiscence, which closes with his first year of medical school, in 1940, is interlaced with soaring reflections on art, memory, innocence, faith and myth.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

The author of Peace on Earth (LJ 8/94) and many other works of science fiction reflects on his childhood in Lvov between the two world wars. Characteristically, Lem focuses more on objects than on people?his toys (and his destructive impulses toward them), the sights of the town, its sweet shops, his classes and teachers, and Highcastle (the part of town where the children luxuriated in their freedom when classes were canceled). The memoir takes a fascinating, unexpected direction when Lem meditates on the first manifestations of his artistic impulses and the nature of art (especially modern): his creation of many false passports, identification papers, and other bureaucratic documents ("a kingdom of universal permission"), and his building of many pseudo radio apparatuses. These thoughts are counterbalanced by bittersweet descriptions of the meticulous (and useless) military training the young men were given in the last years of the gymnasium. An intelligent, evocative examination of youth and memory; for literary collections.
-?Richard Kuczkowski, Dominican Coll., Blauvelt,
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 146 pages
• Publisher: Harcourt; First Edition edition (September 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151402183
• ISBN-13: 978-0151402182
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,892,903 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Stanislaw Lem is the most widely translated and best known science fiction author writing outside of the English language. Winner of the Kafka Prize, he is a contributor to many magazines, including the New Yorker, and he is the author of numerous works, including Solaris.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A favorite for the bedside, November 28, 2000

By 

Phoebus Franca "thebuffer" (San Francisco Bay Area, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Highcastle: A Remembrance (Hardcover)

Stanislaw Lem's writing is beautiful in this brief work. Fans of his science fiction will surely want to read this to get behind the artifice and learn about the writer. But those who are not familiar with his work will also enjoy this as a meditation on memory, growing up in Poland, and this writer's power to evoke meaning. I read it mostly before falling asleep and it gave me wonderful dreams.