Memoirs Found in a Bathtub

I first read Stanislaw Lem's Memoirs Found in a Bathtub in the late 1970's - either 1977 or 1978. I don't recall, however, just how I came to discover the novel. I imagine that I must have read a review of the book in a magazine. 

This was long before the Internet and Amazon.com. - the local bookstore was not the sort to have that book in stock - so I'm not at all certain how the book came into my possession. I may have ordered the book thru the public library - we could do that in those days.

I do remember portions of the book and I recall being impressed with what I read at the time. It's been at least 43 years since then, and I have no clue as to what may have happened to my original hard bound copy.

I have been meaning to re-read the book, and was able to locate an e book online recently. I've just finished with this second reading. 

Although the novel is not included among Dr. Jordan Peterson's list of Great Novels, I would rate the book as high - or higher - than some books that made the cut. Some might argue as to whether the book belongs on the same list as Crime and Punishment, Anna Karenina or even The Master and Margarita but it certainly equals 1984 or A Brave New World . There's no question in my mind that Memoirs Found in a Bathtub is far superior to the three Hemingway novels which made Dr. Peterson's list, not to mention The Maltese Falcon or Stendhal's The Red and the Black. If you can imagine George Orwell having spent more time reading Franz Kafka, then you'd have Lem's novel.

The novel takes place in two time periods - the "introduction", written thousands of years in the future - and the larger portions of the novel, written in the, so-called, "Late Neogene" era, corresponding roughly with our time period. The introduction explains to the reader, the Neogene era's dependence on paper (papyr) and how a papyralysis epidemic brought to the planet from space, destroyed all paper on Earth and brought about the Great Collapse of civilization.

The "Notes of the Neogene" (the memoirs found in the bathtub) were discovered in a building that had been preserved in volcanic lava.

The Neogene section takes place in an area called Ammer-Ka. The people of that time and place were believed to worship the god, Kap-Eh-Taahl.

The novel was written during the early 1960's in Poland. Although the story might have been based on a Soviet-style bureaucracy, I imagine placing the story in America allowed Lem to have the novel published behind the Iron Curtain.

The only weakness the novel may have in regard to it's being predictive of the future, is Lem's not foreseeing the wide spread use of computers and the Internet in the time when the destruction of paper was to take place. Imagining a civilization destroyed by a papyralysis epidemic seemed likely to those of us who came upon the book when it was first translated into English.

Fortunately, the loss of paper doesn't really play such an important part of the story after the introduction. The "memoirs" section of the novel works fine - even read today.