Inorganic chemistry
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Voyage to Faremido (Hungarian: Utazás Faremidóba, 1916) is a fantastic novel by Frigyes Karinthy. It presents beings who not only understand the secrets of nature, but they are the secret of nature themselves — they are nature personified.
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Content
These beings consist of inorganic materials (thus having a superficial similarity to robots). The novel describes the adventures of a pilot, who lost his way and came to the world of these beings. They help the protagonist to see the beauty of their world, and help him also to come home.
Language, and title
Term “Faremido” has a clear motivation: the inhabitants of Faremido use a language consisting purely of musical sounds (thus, their language is harmonic in the most literal sense). Every word is transcribed in the novel using syllables of solfege: sequences of the syllables Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So, La, Si. For example: “solasi”, “Midore”, “Faremido” etc. (Such a language has indeed been devised earlier: See Solresol.) In fact, all terms should be intoned instead of pronounced. Thus, in this world a musical language is used. The protagonist remarks that their speech is both wise (in the meaning) and beautiful (as music), thus thought and feeling are blurred to be the same for these beings.
Related works
Kazohinia (written by Sándor Szathmári) is another example of utopian-satirical literature. Even its main topic is similar: nature, mankind's relatedness to it; rationality versus emotion; intelligent beings as part of a cosmic order.
Voyage to Faremido is sequelled by another novel, Capillaria: both are written by the same author, and they are presented as Gulliver's subsequent travels. But neither their genre nor their topic is similar.
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