Highcastle

"In this charming memoir of his childhood between world wars, Lem investigates the nature of memory and the impossibility of a 'pure' remembrance. Witty, playful and self-deprecating, Lem recalls his 'monstrous' younger self, his early passion for pointless destruction, and his fascination with his father's medical books and instruments. Born into a comfortable upper-middle class Jewish household in provincial Lvov (at that time in Poland, now a part of Ukraine), Lem was an odd child, a voracious reader of books and eater of sweets. The part of the book that will particularly interest readers of Lem's fiction is his recounting of how he created, in painstaking and laborious detail, multitudes of 'official' identities, passports, treaties, and trade agreements that formed documentation of wholly fictional society. Lem's invented world, created entirley for his own pleasure, was driven not by history or narrative or even characters, but almost completely by bureaucratic structures and relationships. The book ends with Lem's graduation from high school in 1939. Although the war is never mentioned, it overshadows the end of the book"--