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Highcastle: A Remembrance

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Highcastle: A Remembrance

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Overview

A playful, witty, reflective memoir of childhood by the science fiction master Stanisław Lem.

With Highcastle, Stanisław Lem offers a memoir of his childhood and youth in prewar Lvov. Reflective, artful, witty, playful—“I was a monster,” he observes ruefully—this lively and charming book describes a youth spent reading voraciously (he was especially interested in medical texts and French novels), smashing toys, eating pastries, and being terrorized by insects. Often lonely, the young Lem believed that he could communicate with household objects—perhaps anticipating the sentient machines in the adult Lem's novels. Lem reveals his younger self to be a dreamer, driven by an unbridled imagination and boundless curiosity.

In the course of his reminiscing, Lem also ponders the nature of memory, innocence, and the imagination. Highcastle (the title refers to a nearby ruin) offers the portrait of a writer in his formative years.

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About the Author

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262357661
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	02/18/2020
Series:	The MIT Press
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	152
File size:	239 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Stanisław Lem (1921–2006), a writer called “worthy of the Nobel Prize” by the New York Times, was an internationally renowned author of novels, short stories, literary criticism, and philosophical essays. His books have been translated into forty-four languages and have sold more than thirty million copies.

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Editorial Reviews

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. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

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. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/95.]-Richard Kuczkowski, Dominican Coll., Blauvelt, N.Y.

Library Journal

The great Polish science fiction writer recollects his childhood, and it is how the world looked to him and why he did what he did rather than what precisely happened that he strives to describe. His wasn't an eventful youth, after all, and his reigning boyish passions--at first, to disassemble and thereby destroy his toys and anything else that could be taken apart; later, to create documents of a universal bureaucracy of which he was the sole real-life functionary--are what, far more than any public occurrence of the middle European 1920s and 1930s in which he grew up, give his memoir its fascination. Finally, Lem confesses, he fails in his attempt to understand himself as a child, except by calling his peculiar boyish habits those of an unconscious artist. Meanwhile, he has made a small gem of the literary autobiographer's art.

Ray Olson

"An entire vanished world has been lovingly and quirkily recalled in this pages."
--New York Times
"Remarkably candid....interlaced with soaring reflections on art, memory, innocence, faith and myth."
--Publishers Weekly
"A charming, effervescent memoir from a writer who consistently transcends genre."
--Kirkus Reviews
"Reading classic SF can put current conversations in the book world in an interesting new perspective, and MIT Press' commitment to publishing the works of Stanislaw Lem brings the classics back in a neatly packaged format. Highcastle in particular may be interesting to newcomers or classic fans who want to learn about the famous author's influences."
--Den of Geek
"The release of these new volumes seems to expand the possibilities of what a university publisher can do."
--LitHub
"Fourteen years after his death, the universe is still struggling to catch up with the vast creative force that was Stanislaw Lem. And for my money, it won't be surpassing him anytime soon...Enjoying the genius of Lem requires readerly dexterity and a willingness to go wherever the author takes you...These marvelous, absorbing and often hilarious books make our weary universe seem pale and undistinguished by comparison."
--The Washington Post
"In Highcastle, Lem describes himself as a 'monster' who tore apart his toys. He recalls sneaking looks at his father's anatomy textbooks and poking through items removed from patients' tracheae: coins, safety pins, sprouted beans. He loved to create imaginary bureaucracies, manufacturing identity papers for nonexistent sovereigns and deeds to distant empires."
--The New Yorker

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