SOURCE: “Experimental Torture,” in Times Literary Supplement, March 3–9, 1989, p. 226.

In the following review, Clute offers a positive assessment of Hospital of the Transfiguration.

Written in 1948, but not published in any language until the 1980s, Hospital of the Transfiguration may come as something of a shock to the reader of Stanislaw Lem's mature work. Books such as Solaris and Fiasco do more than present intellectual arguments about the universe in an unmistakably Central European voice, angular and unrelenting; as science fiction of the highest order, and as examples of surreally barbed wit, they are very threatening texts indeed. They demand attentive reading, and they show contempt for those too lazy to pay heed. No such demands will confront the reader of Lem's first novel.

It is the autumn of 1939. Poland has fallen but the Germans have not yet taken over the more remote provinces, and Stefan Trzyniecki can attend...