Stanisław Lem Critical Essay | Critical Review by Wanda Urbanska

Critical Review by Wanda Urbanska

SOURCE: “An Insane Asylum Serves as Setting for the Early Lem,” in Chicago Tribune Books, October 23, 1988, p. 7.

In the following review of Hospital of the Transfiguration, Urbanska commends Lem's “acute powers of observation,” but finds shortcomings in the novel's disengaged characters.

There are certain novels, written early in a career, that are published only after the writer has staked a place on the literary map. Camus’ A Happy Death comes to mind. Often these works demonstrate youthful talent not fully realized, and their interest lies mainly in how they foreshadow subsequent material. Hospital of the Transfiguration—the first novel of Stanislaw Lem, the world-renowned, Polish, science-fiction master, written in 1948 when Lem was 27—is such a book.

Hospital is a bildungsroman in which Stefan—a young doctor and the apparent alter ego of the author, who studied medicine in Krakow—comes of age in Poland during the first year of...
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