He describes his endless search for confectionery treats in his bourgeois parents' sprawling Lvov apartment; his father's anatomy books and hidden French pornography; his after-school life as an aspiring inventor; the mandatory “game” of schoolyard military maneuvers on the threshold of World War II; and the innocence that fell away when the Germans invaded Poland in 1939. With the teasing wit his fans have come to expect, Lem pens a memorable portrait of the artist as a bright, insatiably inquisitive, gluttonous young man.
“An entire vanished world has been lovingly and quirkily recalled in these pages.” — New York Times Book Review
“I wanted to have my memory (and not me) give testimony,” Lem offers in a prologue. “This book, then, was to have been an experiment.” The resulting stream-of-consciousness rendering is at once engagingly offbeat and stunningly evocative.
Stanislaw Lem, called by a reviewer “one of the jewels of twentieth-century literature,” is the internationally renowned author of novels, short stories, literary criticism, and screenplays. He was born in Lvov Poland, and lives in Krakow.
