Solaris
by Stanislaw Lem, Joanna Kilmartin, Steve Cox
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Book Summary Information
Author: Joanna Kilmartin, Stanislaw Lem, Steve CoxEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2002-11-20
ISBN: 0156027607
Number of pages: 224
Publisher: Mariner Books
Book Reviews of Solaris
Book Review: Classic Stanislaw Lem
Summary: 5 Stars
This amazing book explores our hearts and minds through the metaphor of an alien planet. When psychologist Kris Kelvin arrives on Solaris, he finds himself confronting a painful memory of his past lover, embodied in a real entity. He speculates that the vast ocean of Solaris functions as a massive neural center creating the embodiment of his (and other crew member's) repressed memories. Lem explores our beliefs and ability to understand our universe through inner exploration. Intelligently and sparingly written.
In response to his friend's plea, a depressed psychologist with the ironic name of Kris Kelvin (played with quiet depth by George Clooney), sets out on a mission to bring home the disfunctional crew of a research space station orbitting the distant planet, Solaris. Kelvin arrives at the space station, Prometheus, to find his friend, Gibarian, dead (by suicide) and a paranoid and disturbed crew, who are obviously withholding a terrible secret from him. It is not long before he learns the secret first hand: some unknown power (apparently the planet itself) taps into his mind and produces a solid corporeal version of his tortured longing: his beloved wife, Rheya (played sensitively by Natascha McElhone) who'd committed suicide years ago. Faced with a solid reminder, Kelvin yearns to reconcile with his guilt in his wife's death and struggles to understand the alien force manifested in the form of his wife. He learns that the other crew are equally influenced by Solaris and have been grappling, each in their own way, with their "demons," psychologically trapping them there.
Ironically, our hero's epic journey of great distance has only led him back to himself. The alien force defies Kelvin's efforts to understand its motives; whether it is benign, hostile, or even sentient. Kelvin has no common frame of reference to judge and therefore to react. This leaves him with what he thinks he does understand: that Rheya is a product of his own mind, his memories of her, and therefore a mirror of his deepest guilt ¯ but perhaps also an opportunity to redeem himself.
Lem packs each page of his slim 204 page book with a wealth of intellectual introspection. Through first person narrative, he intimately unveils the complicated influence of this arcane force on Kelvin. Lem explains it this way: "I wanted to create a vision of a human encounter with something that certainly exists, in a mighty manner perhaps, but cannot be reduced to human concepts, ideas or images."
Such an incomprehensible entity would serve as a giant mirror for our own motives, yearnings and versions of reality. For me the contrast presented by such an arcane alien force emphatically -- but also ironically -- defines what it is to be human. It is only when faced with what we are not that we discover what we are. Later in the book, Kelvin cynically observes: "Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labrynth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed." In the film Gibarian sadly proclaims of the Solaris mission: "We don't want other worlds - we want mirrors."
Lem's existentialist leaning is provided throughout the book and even alluded to in the name he chose for the space station: Prometheus. In Greek mythology, Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to humankind for which Zeus chained him to a rock and sent an eagle to eat his liver (which grew back daily). It is interesting that Soderbergh chose to send Prometheus to a fiery crash and named Kelvin's dead wife, Rheya, after the Greek goddess, mother of Zeus and all Olympian gods. In a late passage of Lem's book, a devastated and sorrowful Kelvin formulates a personal theory of an imperfect god, "a god who has created clocks, but not the time they measure . . . a god whose passion is not a redemption, who saves nothing, fulfills no purpose ¯ a god who simply is."
Reviewer, Rick Kisonak, asserted that Lem's "novel is an icy meditation on man's place in the universe and the mystery of God. It poses countless metaphysical questions and makes a point of answering none of them. While I agree with some of Kisonak's reasoning, I think he has missed the point of Lem's book. If one continues to read from the passage Kisonak quoted above ¯ as Kris Kelvin transcends from what he "thinks" in his intellect to what he feels and "knows" in his heart, to accept his (and humanity's) destiny with humble fatalism: life ends but not love.
In matters of faith and love, here is what Kris has to say in the book: "Must I go on living here then, among the objects we both had touched, in the air she had breathed? . . . In the hope of her return? I hoped for nothing. And yet I lived in expectation . . . I did not know what achievements, what mockery, even what tortures still awaited me. I knew nothing, and I persisted in the faith that the time of cruel miracles was not past." In the end of both movie and book, Kris Kelvin lets go of his fears and lets his spirit rise in wonder at what astonishing things Solaris (and the universe) will offer next.
Lem's complex tapestry of multi-level prose challenges us by refusing to impose his personal views; yet comes to the conclusion about the ethereal, mysterious and eternal nature of love. On the one hand, love may connect us within a fractal autopoietic network to the infinity of the inner and outer universe, uniting us with God and His purpose in a collaboration of faith. On the other hand, love may empower us to accept our place in a vast unknowable and amoral universe to form an island of hope in a purposeless sea of indifference.
Whether love mends our souls to the fabric of our destiny; enslaves us on an impossible journey of desperate yearning; or seizes us in a strangling embrace of unspeakable terror at what lurks within ¯ surely, then, love IS God, in all its possible manifestations. This is unquestionably the message of the book. And it is one worth proclaiming.
Summary of Solaris
A classic work of science fiction by renowned Polish novelist and satirist Stanislaw Lem
When Kris Kelvin arrives at the planet Solaris to study the ocean that covers its surface, he finds a painful, hitherto unconscious memory embodied in the living physical likeness of a long-dead lover. Others examining the planet, Kelvin learns, are plagued with their own repressed and newly corporeal memories. The Solaris ocean may be a massive brain that creates these incarnate memories, though its purpose in doing so is unknown, forcing the scientists to shift the focus of their quest and wonder if they can truly understand the universe without first understanding what lies within their hearts.
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