The investigation

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The investigation (original title Śledztwo ) is next to The sniffing one of the two crime novels that the primarily through his science fiction has become known novels writer Stanislaw Lem wrote. The book, which was written in Lem's early literary phase (1957/58), already contains essential stylistic elements that also characterize the author's later works. It embeds philosophical, epistemological and scientific questions in the plot of a criminal story and expands the spectrum of an apparently conventional crime novel to include aspects of statistical phenomenology and Kafkaesque fantasy . The protagonist is a strictly rational-thinking criminologist who is entrusted with a criminal case that apparently cannot be solved with logic.

action

In several cemeteries in England corpses inexplicably disappear before their burial, only to reappear unexpectedly elsewhere. The evidence suggests short-term resurrections, although this is of course excluded from a medical point of view. A young criminal investigator is supposed to clear up the strange occurrences, of which it is not even clear whether they are even crimes that can be prosecuted. He becomes increasingly entangled in his confused ideas and attempts to explain. He is assigned a mysterious statistics expert who uses mathematics to develop his own extremely obscure theories.

Book editions

  • Śledztwo . Wydawnictwo Ministerstwa Obrony Narodowej, Warszawa 1959.
  • The investigation . Translated from the Polish by Jens Reuter and Hans Juergen Mayer. Insel, Frankfurt am Main 1975, ISBN 3-458-05966-0 .
  • The investigation . Suhrkamp Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main 1978, ISBN 3-518-36935-0 (= Fantastic Library, Volume 14).

Film adaptations