Gruppenführer Louis XVI

Gigamesh is the review as literary criticism. This is the review as a door you are grateful nobody opened.

An SS officer, after the war, takes to the jungle and builds France. Not a metaphor for France — the court, the titles, the costumes, a local population conscripted into being courtiers, German rebranded by decree as the language of Versailles. The ancien régime restaged by the people who had just finished destroying the century that replaced it. Lem describes the book the way a critic would describe a novel he half admires and wholly refuses to write: here is the conceit, here is why it is unbearable, here is the page on which it would have to stop being a joke.

A Perfect Vacuum already contains Gigamesh, which is the catalogue’s exhibit of the method. Gruppenführer Louis XVI is the exhibit of taste. Not every imaginary book should be written. Some should be reviewed, filed, and left unwritten on purpose. A library of imagined knowledge is also a library of books whose existence would have been a mistake.

On the readability rating. The review is thorough. The novel is absent. That is the form, and in this case it is also a mercy.