Hi, everyone! 🙂

Thanks to one of the recent prompts, I’ve decided to return to writing book reviews and sharing my thoughts and impressions about novels and stories I’ve lately read. I helps me organize my reflections, and I hope it will be useful to you too, especially if you are as passionate about literature as I am and you are looking for fresh recommendations 🙂

I learned about J. Zajdel through my husband, who knows of my love for the sci-fi genre, so he suggested I start reading this author, claiming that his style is somewhat like S. Lem. In truth, this isn’t entirely accurate. J. Zajdel was the second well-known sci-fi writer in Poland (after Lem), and they both wrote dystopian and sci-fi literature. However, while Lem often conveyed his novels in a very philosophical, sometimes even lofty fashion, which I personally appreciate a lot, Zajdel had a dry, consistent, logical style. This was probably affected by his other profession; he graduated with a major in physics and worked as a radiological engineer. One of his aims was to popularize science through literature, while another was to criticize the society and political states of his time (communism and dictatorships), which he brilliantly did.

Speaking strictly about the review topic, Farewell Letter is a short story collection composed by the author’s friends and wife after he died. It consists of his various pieces written at different moments of his life. It perfectly reflects his writing progress and gives insight into the constantly changing scope of the ideas that interested him. This collection also includes his interview, some excerpts from his novels, outlines for unpublished books and stories – very intriguing, by the way (he died at the age of 46, so he left them unfinished), and the recollections from his close circle, which portray J. Zajdel from the personal perspective. We get to know that he was a very warm and supportive friend and that he basically nurtured the present and future generation of Polish sci-fi authors.

His works were classified as sci-fi and dystopian. Still, you won’t find the mystical or pure fantasy elements in his stories, as was common with Bradbury or Lem. His narratives are very logical, concise, and painfully possible. In fact, he introduced some fictional aspects in his stories, like UFOs, teleportation, or alternative realities, but as I said before, it was not a typical fantasy fiction. These ideas and concepts are considered hypothetically possible by science. So the author described them as theories and paradoxes and played them out beautifully, testing them in his creative pieces. Also, everything happening on the pages of this story collection is justified and explained, providing a background for action. Most of the stories have nice dynamics and brilliant irony that balances his somewhat dry descriptions, which, along with capturing dynamics saves his literature from becoming dull or monotonous. My favorite among his works from this collection was The Other Side of the Mirror, because it included the elements I like: thrilling concepts (Zajdel played with a theory about dimensions and teleportation) and thought-provoking elements, something that broadens reader’s horizons.