Fiasco: A Haunting Science Fiction Novel of First Contact Where Dark Poetry Descends into a Nightmare of Misunderstanding

This might well be the last Lem novel I ever read: I got a lot out of a couple of his books, but the ones I've read more recently have been lost on me. Fiasco was really difficult for me to finish: the plot was predictable, the characters uninteresting, and even the story itself was only vaguely compelling. Humans find another planet, and through a miracle of time reversal manage to travel there. Lem takes this as an opportunity to tell a story about how difficult it would be for humans to interact with a completely alien world. I think he made the point better in His Master's Voice, personally. Sorry to be such a downer about this.