The book Memoirs Found in a Bathtub by Stanislaw Lem is shown on a butcher-block counter next to a glass of bourbon over ice.
A Book Review and Critical Analysis by Doctor Wyrm May 2025
WARNING: This book review contains spoilers. Indeed it would be very difficult to tell anyone about a Lem book without spoiling something in it. I have gone out of my way to mark them as such, whenever possible, but if you are the type of person who hates having the endings of things ruined in any way, then I suggest maybe you only read the first section to get the general idea of this read, and then go check it out for yourself. Come back later to see my critical analysis and whether we agree about themes, hidden meanings, and other stuff like that.
Secondly, books often explore difficult subjects. Good books tackle some of the most difficult ones. If you’re the type who is easily rattled, then Stanislaw Lem may not be the author for you. This review will bring up personal trauma, including harm to others and oneself. It may unmask your shadow-self and allow them to tie you to a chair, pull up a bright lamp bulb, a pile of tools, and get to work on torturing your soul in earnest. Consider yourself warned.
A Quick Note About Me, The Reader
First, there’s something I need to explain about the way I read printed books. (I feel in the age of audiobooks, I have to specify print media.) I know people who speed-read, my wife and some friends for example. For various reasons, I cannot do what they do. For starters, I don’t have the eyesight for it. Second, when I did learn to scan quickly, I found my fidelity in reading dropped a lot, and I didn’t like it. Unlike some, when I read, I have an internal monologue and every written book is like it is also playing for me on Audible at the same time. So, that’s about my reading speed – the speed of speech, or perhaps if I’m really on the ball it might be 2x. Who knows how fast my brain actually talks when it wants to?
However, for the time it takes me, I feel like it fully engages my mind at a level that other people don’t often experience. Conversations with other speed readers confirmed this, though there may be exceptions. My “memory” for a good story is almost eidetic. It’s like living a dream, almost as if I was there – or it happened to me personally. So, quite often not only do the details not leave me for a long time, but the whole experience of reading a book can substantially affect my personality, sometimes permanently – for better or worse. This is something I have learned to be more careful about since my younger years.
Anyway, enough about me. I just wanted to get that disclaimer out there before we begin.
Summary (Minor Spoilers Only)
Well, you know it would be almost impossible to explain most Stanislaw Lem stories without spoiling them totally, but I will try to confine myself to things that you can read in the Introduction and broad strokes about style that don’t give the plot or underlying theme away. Read on after this section if you’ve either already read it or never intend to read it.
Memoirs Found in a Bathtub is a farcical tale…
…of a man trapped in the Third Pentagon (the NORAD complex also called “Iron Mountain” that is built into Cheyenne mountain), many years after a major cataclysm destroys all the paper in the world and all the military people have locked themselves inside the underground fortress.
He wanders the halls of The Building, befuddled by the elaborate security theatre and bureaucracy. It is one part Frans Kafka and one part Catch 22 – a secret lost episode of The Prisoner that’s 3 hours long and just as crazy as all the rest.
Though it is quite surreal at times, I found this book to be among Lem’s better stories.
What is Memoirs Found In a Bathtub Really About (Big Spoilers)
I’m not so clever as to unmask every coded message or allegory in this story, for there are many. Anything could be a code, right? But here are the things I think I figured out, some of which I think I would not have seen as quickly or clearly if I had read this book in my 20s, instead of my 50s.
At this point in my life, I’ve lived many roles and held many identities: provider, hard-worker, parent, activist, caretaker, man — girl. In my younger years, I may not have easily made the connection about the search for identity and what it means, because I was often sure I understood at the time what life was all about. In middle-age, it somehow felt totally obvious.
At its heart, The Building is a metaphor for society and the world – not quite nature per se, but more like what it means to be a human living with other humans and oneself.
There’s a struggle to find one’s purpose. There are interactions with others, and not just one side but many sides – people changing sides. Some of this comes from the paranoia of living in the cold war and the age of high espionage and communism. But some of this is just life, because you never really know who your friends are, and sometimes that can change on a dime and without much valid reason.
We’re entering dangerous territory now. Can I count on you to be loyal? The enemy may approach you with a tempting offer. Perhaps they already made such an offer to me, and I am only trying to recruit you to our side. Oh – but I am kidding, friend!! Can you not take a joke?
Speaking of reason, he tries many times and visits many places looking for a reason.
He’s told flat-out at the start that everything in life has coded meanings, but nobody knows the key to decipher them.
He cannot find it in the church. He cannot find it in the military’s rigid authority.
Is this all a test? Is this a training mission?
But, the meaning of existence never comes. “There is no answer.”
Understanding the Ending (Extreme Spoilers)
You can’t read a word of what I am about to say without spoiling the book and possibly forever shading your view of its meaning. This information is of the utmost secrecy. It comes straight from the top – the highest levels. You seem like the dependable type, an undercover man. Yes, I trust we can count on you.
Finally, he meets the people in the lunatic asylum, who turn out to be the intellectuals in charge of everything (or so they claim) – and only in a drunken storm of a party is anything given any meaning. Why are we here? “Because we’re here.” Life has no inherent meaning. Life is basically a cosmic joke. The chances of any one of us existing is essentially nil, therefore we do not exist.
In the words of Dante from Clerks, “I’m not even supposed to be here!”
After the drunken party, our protagonist accepts the conspiracy with the priest begrudgingly, presumably because he feels that he has no purpose and accepting a purpose – even a bad one – is better than having none. With that decision and at that moment, all was lost.
The girl with the cream cheese sandwich, a fitful attempt at lust as a distraction from the real existential dilemma. Yet in the end, he cannot even find the will to simply rape her and go, loses interest, and moves on empty handed. Is this a way of saying that interest in sex will not solve this problem for you but is only a diversion? Who can say. This is a thing that Lem seems to enjoy putting into his stories (see my review of The Chain of Chance).
The museum of hands, a depiction of our attempt to find purpose through our works – through what we create with our hands – although we create many things both good and bad. The mirror… at the end of the day you only have yourself. You are the only thing that you experience. “Do you want to confess?”
You look for the tortured monster who is running the show, and damn it turned out that it was you the entire time.
I think for the protagonist, it was incredibly hard to accept that there is no Mission other than one you make up yourself. He came very close to realizing it, but I think the way the story ends the last chapter makes it pretty clear he did not.
Dear reader, this is your Commander In Chief calling. There’s just one more vital thing… It seems I forgot to tell you… It is absolutely imperative that you do not read the following message!
Does the razor symbolize a desperate need for clarity – as if cutting away everything that isn’t the Mission, maybe he would finally understand? Even so, there’d be nothing left to see, because the Mission was a phantom, his instructions were only his own voice screaming into the void.
What does the open exit represent? We can leave the Building any time we choose. We can walk away from human connection… but for some reason, we don’t. The thing is, you can probably leave the Building and come back any time you get tired of howling at the moon. Each and every one of us can take a break from civilization and each other any time.
And at the end of it all, having two choices about how to leave The Building – either through the open door or by the razor – what does our hero do? He takes the easy way out. Presumably, he recorded his entire story on paper and then commits suicide – though it’s impossible to say so for sure, other than by inference through his rage against the spy who did the same and his desire to take the razor for himself.
We’ll never know for certain, since the story remains unfinished, left for us to draw our own conclusions.
At the end of the day, perhaps we can no more leave The Building than we can walk out of our own bodies or minds. Maybe The Building is just the prison that we built around ourselves.
Doctor Wyrm
Doctor Wyrm (aka Doc Tomiko, or just Doc) is a professional tinkerer, futurist, writer, developmental editor, and self-appointed Director of odd projects. Tomiko has a habit of turning half-serious ideas into fully fledged experiments. Known for juggling too many servers, joining too many fandoms, and editing reality when nobody asked.
Michael Moorcock type evil albino. Hypo-manic reincarnation of bosudere Haruhi Suzemiya. Consider yourself warned.
