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Highcastle: A Remembrance By Stanislaw Lem

- With Highcastle, Stanisław Lem offers a memoir of his childhood and youth in prewar Lvov.

- Reflective, artful, witty, playful—“I was a monster,” he observes ruefully—this lively and charming book describes a youth spent reading voraciously (he was especially interested in medical texts and French novels), smashing toys, eating pastries, and being terrorized by insects.

- Often lonely, the young Lem believed that he could communicate with household objects—perhaps anticipating the sentient machines in the adult Lem's novels.

- Lem reveals his younger self to be a dreamer, driven by an unbridled imagination and boundless curiosity.

- In the course of his reminiscing, Lem also ponders the nature of memory, innocence, and the imagination. Highcastle (the title refers to a nearby ruin) offers the portrait of a writer in his formative years.