Anyway

Jerzy Kos­in­ski’s Being There was a reas­on­ably pop­u­lar book­club book, at least in part because it’s short and thus most people could read it in full (and some even read it twice!). Sev­er­al of us had also seen the film (screen­play also by Jerzy Kos­in­ski). Reac­tions to the book at book­club var­ied, from those who found it deeply pro­found to those (includ­ing me) who did­n’t quite get it and wer­en’t sure what they were meant to “get” either.

A brief syn­op­sis: Chance is a sim­pleton who works as a garden­er for an old man (rela­tion­ship unspe­cified) and spends his spare time watch­ing tele­vi­sion. His exist­ence is com­pletely unknown out­side of the house and garden where he lives and works (no birth cer­ti­fic­ate, no record of exist­ence any­where), and when the Old Man dies, the law­yers who take pos­ses­sion of the prop­erty evict him. Through luck, Chance is taken into the house of a rich, influ­en­tial couple, who assume he is someone of know­ledge and power because of his calmness and the high qual­ity of the hand-me-down clothes from the Old Man. His state­ments about life in the garden are assumed to be deeply mean­ing­ful alleg­or­ies; his know­ledge of human beha­viour as shown on tele­vi­sion meshes with the expect­a­tions of those around him, and he is feted by both report­ers and politicians.

Reviews on Amazon talk about the bit­ing satire evid­enced in the book; the book­club mem­bers spent more time talk­ing about the meta­phors. Chance goes from being lit­er­ally nobody, with no iden­ti­fic­a­tion, and no real name, to some­body import­ant simply due to luck — an exag­ger­ated ver­sion of Andy War­hol’s 15 minutes of fame. People see in him what they wish to see — the wife of the busi­ness­man invents a romantic past for him, the Soviet Ambas­sad­or thinks he speaks Rus­si­an and under­stands Krylov, the US Pres­id­ent con­siders him as the next can­did­ate for Vice-Pres­id­ent — des­pite there being no actu­al basis for any of these assumptions. 

I found the book rather too over the top for my taste; the film was bet­ter and more detailed. Peter Sellers made Chance believ­able where the book shows the holes in the fable. Oth­er book­club mem­bers loved the book though and enjoyed fig­ur­ing out the meta­phors and won­der­ing which bits of the book were inspired by which parts of Jerzy Kos­in­ski’s life. We spent a bit of time dis­cuss­ing what changes would have been required in the book were it writ­ten today, rather than in 1971. Tele­vi­sion is a lot less coy now and Chance’s reac­tions to the attemp­ted seduc­tions might be dif­fer­ent. All in all, I’d rather see the film again than read the book again.

Sol­ar­is by Stan­islaw Lem is sci­ence fic­tion more in keep­ing with “2001: A Space Odys­sey” than with most oth­er types of sci­ence fic­tion. It’s more con­cerned with explor­ing bound­ar­ies of thought and ima­gin­a­tion than with pla­cing humans in con­tact with ali­ens who speak an under­stand­able lan­guage and act with under­stand­able motives. The ali­en body here is an entire plan­et which through­out the book acts with motives the humans can only guess at.

The cov­er of the book (which comes from the 2002 movie of the same name) would lead one to assume the book is a romance, which would be false. There is a little of the romantic in it, espe­cially towards the end, but it’s not a “love in the uni­verse” book. 

The book­club had mixed feel­ings about “Sol­ar­is”, at least in part because the book is unevenly writ­ten. The pages upon pages of descrip­tion of plan­et­ary form­a­tions could prob­ably have been edited down sub­stan­tially (and in fact, even those who enjoyed the book skipped over most of the geo­graph­ic­al descrip­tions), while much of the rest of the book leaves you won­der­ing due to lack of detail (which I assume was delib­er­ate). To make the most of “Sol­ar­is” you have to be pre­pared to con­cen­trate, so it’s not really suit­able for air­plane fod­der (unless you have good head­phones to block out the noise).

“Sol­ar­is” is about the unknown, and just how lim­ited human ima­gin­a­tion is in under­stand­ing truly ali­en spe­cies. One mem­ber of the book­club related that to how hard it is to truly know anoth­er per­son, and there’s quite a lot of that in the book as well; the “hero” does­n’t know what is hap­pen­ing to the oth­er humans on the space sta­tion and they have no inten­tion of telling him. The secrecy is intense and adds to the atmo­sphere of lack of under­stand­ing and lack of the cap­ab­il­ity to under­stand what is hap­pen­ing. The­or­ies abound as to the nature of the ali­en life­form, but none quite seem to fit. If you’re feel­ing in a philo­soph­ic­al mood, or look­ing for a spring­board to think about what it means to be human or even alive, you could do worse than read “Sol­ar­is”.

Sci­ence fic­tion writ­ten some time ago always runs into some prob­lems where the described future and the real present col­lide. The sec­tions where the hero is read­ing ref­er­ence books (yes, real bound books) on the space sta­tion, and com­plains about how they did­n’t have room for all the import­ant books, is notice­able to today’s read­er with exper­i­ence of effect­ively infin­ite elec­tron­ic stor­age space. And to me the com­plete lack of women as explorers in the giv­en his­tory of the plan­et Sol­ar­is, and the equally com­plete lack of women sci­ent­ists or research­ers, dates the book even more. One of the book­club mem­bers com­men­ted that these two factors togeth­er prove the author’s point, that many things are unima­gin­able. Even if they become com­mon­place 30 years later.

The book­club I belong to picked the books for the 2004–5 sea­son. It went a lot quick­er this year than last because two of the men had to rush off to their hockey game. We seem to have a some­what unusu­al book­club, in that there are men and women, and we try to read a wide selec­tion of types of books — some old, some new, and occa­sion­ally non-fic­tion. We mostly try for books that indi­vidu­als might not read without some incent­ive, or books that look like they’d lead to inter­est­ing discussions.

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