Gigamesh

Borges invented the review of the imaginary book and then, being Borges, wrote the story instead. Lem took the other door and stayed in the review.

A Perfect Vacuum is a real volume of criticism. Every book it discusses is fake, including, in the opening piece, A Perfect Vacuum. Gigamesh is the one that best explains why the trick is not a trick. Lem describes a novel that would be unendurable to read and irresistible to have described: a condemned man’s last half-hour, mapped onto the oldest epic we have, with the scholarly apparatus turned up until it shrieks. The review gives you the structure, the joke, the last image, and none of the pages.

That is the honest relationship to a book that does not exist. Not a wiki plot, not a pastiche chapter, a reading. The catalogue you are in is closer to Lem than it is to a concordance, and this entry is here partly as a credit.

The noose, seen against the sky, falling on the neck of a man who is standing still. That is all the novel needed to be. Lem wrote that down and stopped.

On the readability rating. A thorough review, which is a form of description with opinions. Not a quotation from Hannahan, because there is no Hannahan. The absence is the form.