Read Online A Perfect Vacuum by Stanislaw Lem - Free Book Online

and the partaking of meals in certain positions is considered unspeakably depraved. It is not permitted, for example, to consume fruit while kneeling (but for this very freedom a sect of knee deviates is fighting) ; it is not permitted to eat spinach or scrambled eggs with one’s feet propped up. But there exist—of course!—private clubs in which connoisseurs and epicures are treated to indecent floor shows; before the eyes of the spectators special champions gorge themselves, and the drool trickles down the audience’s collective chin. From Denmark are smuggled pornoculinary magazines containing things unbelievably gross. One picture shows the ingestion of scrambled eggs through a straw, during which the ingester, sinking his fingers into heavily garlicked spinach and at the same time sniffing paprika goulash, lies on the table, wrapped in the tablecloth, his feet bound with a cord hooked up to a percolator which in this orgy serves as the chandelier. The Prix Femina that year went to a novel about a character who first smeared the floor with truffle paste, then licked it clean, after having wallowed his fill in spaghetti. The ideal of beauty also has changed: the thing now is to be a two-hundred-and-ninety-pound butterball, for this attests to uncommon ability on the part of the alimentary canal. Changes have taken place in fashion as well, and it is generally impossible to distinguish women from men by their dress. In the parliaments of the more enlightened countries, however, the question is being debated whether or not schoolchildren should be instructed in the facts of life, i.e., the digestive processes. So far, this subject, because it is indecent, has been placed under a strict taboo.
    And at last the biological sciences are nearing the complete elimination of sexual reproduction, that superfluous and prehistoric relic. Embryos will be conceived synthetically and grown according to programs of genetic engineering. From them will come neuter individuals, and this finally will put an end to the terrible memories that linger in the minds of all who have lived through the catastrophe of sex. In bright laboratories, those temples of progress, there will arise the magnificent hermaphrodite or, rather, the neutrone, and then humanity, cut free of its former disgrace, will be able, with ever-increasing relish, to bite into every fruit—now only gastronomically forbidden.

Gruppenführer Louis XVI
Alfred, Zellermann
(Suhrkampf Verlag, Frankfurt)
    Â 
    Gruppenführer Louis XVI
(or
Nazi Squad Leader Louis the Sixteenth)
is the fiction debut of Alfred Zellermann. Zellermann, practically in his sixties, is a well-known literary historian and a doctor of anthropology. He spent the
regnum Hitleri-anum
in Germany, in the country with his wife’s parents, having at the time been relieved of his university position; therefore, he was a passive observer of the life of the Third Reich. We venture to call this novel an excellent work, and add that probably only such a German, with such a fund of practical experience—and with such theoretical knowledge of literature!—could have written it.
    Despite the title, it is no work of fantasy we have before us. The setting: Argentina in the first decade after the conclusion of the war. The fifty-year-old Gruppenführer Siegfried Taudlitz, a fugitive from the crushed and occupied Reich, makes his way to South America, carrying with him a part of the “treasure” amassed by the notorious Academy of the SS (“
Ahnen-erbe
”), a trunk bound with steel bands and filled with dollar bills. Gathering about himself a group of other fugitives from Germany, including various drifters and adventurers, and moreover having taken on a dozen or so women of doubtful character for services unspecified for the time being (some of these women Taudlitz himself buys out of brothels in Rio de Janeiro), the former SS General organizes an expedition deep into the