The cold

The sniffles (original title: Qatar ) is a detective novel by the Polish author Stanisław Lem , known primarily for his science fiction novels, from 1976. It was awarded the Grand prix de littérature policière in 1979 as the best foreign-language novel.

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A series of mysterious deaths occurred in Naples over two years. All of the victims are foreigners, traveling alone and not knowing the Italian language, or only to a limited extent, around 50, allergy sufferers and have visited sulfur baths in Naples. All have shown signs of madness and have committed suicide afterwards. Various circumstances suggest poisoning by a serial offender, but both the local police and Interpol are at a loss. Former astronaut John is said to trace the journey of one of the dead, as far as is known. But this remains without result. After surviving a bomb attack at Rome airport, he decides, now in Paris, to give up the whole thing.

Through a chain of unlikely events, exactly what happened to the others in Italy happened to him in France. He owes his survival only to his training as an astronaut. Finally, it is found that an extremely rare combination of a certain antiallergic and a hair restorer, catalyzed by rhodanide , induces hallucinations and severe depression and has led to the suicide of tourists.

As in Lem's earlier novel The Investigation, there is no culprit in Der Schnupfen either. The events are only (extremely improbable) coincidences, and the fact that "the protagonist solves the riddle is a statistical coincidence - however unsatisfactory this answer may be for the question of the meaning of the search for knowledge." The novel clarifies the statement that also improbable Events, assuming a sufficiently large number of attempts, are very likely to occur. “Mankind has so multiplied and concentrated that atomic laws are beginning to guide it. Each gas atom moves messy, but just this chaos gives birth to the order as stability of the pressure. "Similar concepts from statistical mechanics are also Isaac Asimov's fictional science psychohistory is based.

expenditure

• Stanisław Lem: Qatar. Wydawnictwo Literackie, Kraków 1976.
• Stanisław Lem: The cold (translated by Roswitha Buschmann). People and World, Berlin 1977.
• Stanisław Lem: The cold (translated by Klaus Staemmler). Insel, Frankfurt am Main 1977, ISBN 3-458-05027-2 .
• Stanisław Lem: The cold (translated by Klaus Staemmler). Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1979, ISBN 3-518-37070-7 (= fantastic library , volume 33).
• Stanisław Lem: The cold (translated by Klaus Staemmler). Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2013, ISBN 978-3-518-74335-5 (e-book).
• Stanisław Lem: The cold (translated by Klaus Staemmler). Eder & Bach, Munich 2015, ISBN 978-3-945386-14-9 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Prize winners from 1948 to 2005 at polars.org (French) ( Memento of the original from October 28, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
2. ↑ Dieter Hasselblatt , C. Pranitsch: The sniff. In: Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Hrsg.): Kindlers Literature Lexicon. Volume 9: Kes - Len. 3rd completely revised edition. Metzler, Stuttgart 2009, ISBN 978-3-476-04000-8 , p. 795.
3. ^ Stanisław Lem: The cold. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main, 1979, ISBN 3-518-37070-7 , p. 198.