Reviews with content warning for Suicide - Solaris

Reviews tagging 'Suicide'

Solaris by Stanisław Lem

42 reviews

f18's review against another edition

mysterious reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? N/A
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Loss never truly heals, we carry it with us always.

This book is conceptually-driven, which is great for sci-fi and those sections really worked for me (What does it mean to make first contact with a being so vastly different from yourself that there is no consensus on whether it is alive much less has a conciousness? How would you even know?), but it is also inextricably anchored in human emotion. Maybe the characters and relationships are kept a bit blank purposefully so that you can overlay your own experiences, but I felt distanced instead. The emotional segments didn't feel fully impactful because I didn't feel like I knew enough of the history between Kelvin and Harey

or the development between Kelvin and Solaris!Harey.

Ultimately I felt the pain, isolation, melancholy, and regret... but faintly. I wanted to feel it more.

Every character is stuck inside their own heads, haunted by their own traumas, an impermeable wall between themselves and others that keeps them from healing, echoed by their isolation inside Solaris station... and ultimately echoing my reading experience being unable to connect with Kelvin. Fuck, is it genius after all?

Also, this feels nit-picky of me, because the passages were so brief when compared to the whole book, but the way women's bodies were described made me uncomfortable (racially stereotyped and objectifying). It felt unnecessary... the descriptions weren't sensual (not like the beautiful description of peach fuzz on a cheek) nor even sexual, just lurid in an otherwise quite chaste novel. I couldn’t see what those two passages

--one describing Gibarian's memory woman's breasts and buttocks, the other describing Harey's nipple seen through her dress--

contributed and felt the book would have been the same had they been left out.

Besides that, I loved the gorgeous visuals. Lem creates an alien landscape of colour and shape where the mind inescapably finds familiarity in the strange. Before reading I found the cover art with the ocean that mimics bedsheets rather strange, but it clicks for me now.

Curious to know how exactly this translation differs from the one translated from the french version, but I didn't love it enough that I want to read both.

Excited to watch the movie (movies? at least the Tarkovsky) now.

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the_duskyflycatcher's review

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dark mysterious slow-paced

4.0

The more I think about this book the more I appreciate it. This book is morphologically similar to blindsight but I felt blindsight did a better job with its cosmic horror philosophy sci-fi reveal. Blindsight also portrayed its females characters slightly more normally. Sightly.

I realize Solaris is a product of its time but the portrayal of the women characters was sometimes difficult to read. Removed one star.

I loved the horror and suspense at the beginning and was sad when it turned into exposition by the middle of the book.

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mhanson101's review

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adventurous challenging emotional mysterious reflective relaxing sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

It is an interesting book, and thought provoking to a certain extent. There are elements that have clearly influenced other scifi. It is mind altering in a similar "aliens could be weird beyond our common imagining" way as blindsight in my opinion. Not the specifics but the result.

I do think the hype around the book made me anticipate more, but definitely would recommend it. It is a great story, and journey as a reader, that I think does affect you in a fundamental way.

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nebuthegreat's review against another edition

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challenging dark mysterious reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

J’ai bien du mal à cerner ce roman de science-fiction, tout comme la communauté scientifique du roman a de la difficulté à comprendre l’océan vivant de Solaris.

Alors que je trouve le concept très intéressant, l’histoire se concentre sur les réflexions et les émotions du personnage principal, qui est à la fois stupide et détestable.

Il n’y aucune explication concernant les « visiteurs » ou sur la nature de l’océan.

J’ai trouvé l’écriture assez jolie, mais le rythme du récit est horrible. Il y a deux chapitres qui sont particulièrement lourdement chargés d’exposition sur les recherches solaristes précédentes.

Je crois qu’un esprit très scientifique pourrait apprécier ce roman, mais il serait rebuté par les décisions irréfléchies de Kris. J’ai un peu de difficultés à comprendre le statut de roman-culte de SF que possède ce livre.

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ketty_ryan's review

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emotional mysterious reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

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random19379's review

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dark mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

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csangell11's review against another edition

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dark mysterious reflective tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.25

Polaris starts with a tense and mysterious situation but gradually slows to a dismal crawl. The book reflects on how humankind deals with the inexplicable, and leaves much unexplained (even the more trivial mysteries are never resolved). The main character is stubborn, short tempered, and brooding, which reduced my enjoyment as well. Thankfully, the book is short, so I perservered to the end, and I actually quite enjoyed the final chapter.

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ru_th's review against another edition

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adventurous mysterious reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.5

Denk nur, wir haben alle Sterne und Planeten benannt, aber vielleicht hatten sie schon ihre Namen?

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astrangewind's review against another edition

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dark mysterious reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.25

Everyone who has written a science fiction book apparently considers themselves an armchair philosopher. It all has to be a metaphor, all the time, apparently; not just any metaphor, no, a metaphor that the author has to explain in excruciating detail because he doesn't trust his audience to pick up on his subtleties!

Solaris - the planet - is a truly fascinating concept. An ocean-planet with two suns, a planet that seemingly controls the environment around it, seemingly able to create.

And I do love an ending where the central mystery of the book isn't answered - and it's not. We never find out if the ocean is living, is a brain, or is just a bizarre geologic structure.

Unfortunately, Lem ruins all of it through Kelvin, who painstakingly infodumps about the physical, biological, and philosophical theories about the planet that literally only exist in his made-up universe. If I wanted to read a textbook, I would've read a textbook.

At times, I found myself engaged with Kelvin's and Rheya's dynamic: their desire for each other;

Kelvin's guilt over Rheya's suicide; Rheya's belief that she truly is Rheya, which turns into the reader's belief; the horror Kelvin feels when seeing Rheya's reappearance, or when she stole the tape recorder;

and all of that turning into a burning need to be with each other despite all logic. But at the end,

when Rheya dies,

Kelvin gets over it basically immediately. Even from the start, it's obvious to the reader that Rheya is a blank character, as most female characters are when written by men. There's nothing interesting about her except as Kelvin's dead wife. She's obedient and docile, but hysterically suicidal whenever Kelvin shows any apathy towards her whatsoever. Women, amirite?! *rolls eyes*

I can see the appeal of Solaris, and it was appealing to me, at times. But the characters are hollow and unlikable with no clear motivations, it's interspersed with long tirades about philosophy and science and religion that have nothing to do with the plot at hand, and even the plot itself seems to be serving that singular purpose as a playground for Lem's own interest in such dense topics. Either he didn't have the decency or the skill to at least veil the metaphor in plot. In a word, it's boring.

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sunn_bleach's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging mysterious slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

A continuation of a small theme for me this year in which I read more Central and Eastern European literature, from "The Master & Margarita" to "Roadside Picnic" to "Satantango". There's a curiosity to pre-Moon landing science fiction that feels so different from anything that comes out past then. Space was a true frontier, and advances in spacecraft meant realization of early science fiction but also meaning any future books had to be more grounded in the realities of space travel.

With this in mind, "Solaris" is two books in one: the first, an intense psychological drama where group of earthling scientists come to the sentient planetwide ocean that is Solaris and start doing experiments - but what happens when Solaris does experiments on its own? The second, a deep love affair with mystery and the fantastic in which space seemed truly unbound by our earthy preconceptions of life and existence. While I felt the book mired itself a bit in its own fascination, it was worth ticking-off this highly influential progenitor to weird fiction.

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