Miracles of Life
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Miracles of Life | |
| Author | J. G. Ballard |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Autobiography |
| Publisher | Fourth Estate |
| Publication date | 2008 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback) |
| Pages | 278 pp (first edition, hardback) |
| ISBN | ISBN 978-0-00-727072-9 (first edition, hardback) |
| Preceded by | Kingdom Come |
Miracles of Life is an autobiography written by British writer J. G. Ballard and published in 2008.
[edit] Plot
The book describes Ballard's childhood and early teenage years in Shanghai in the 1930s and the early 1940s, when the city is ravaged by the Second Sino-Japanese War and W.W.II. After the happy years spent with his well-to-do family in the International Settlement, Ballard experiences the horrors of war and then the deprivations of a concentration camp, Lunghua, where he is imprisoned with his relatives, his sister, and hundreds of other British nationals.
After being liberated by the Americans in 1945, James returns to England with his mother and sister, but the return to his home country—that he does not really know, being born in Shanghai—is made difficult by the dismal atmosphere of post-war Britain and the difficulty to integrate in British society. After trying to become a doctor in a prestigious Cambridge college, Ballard quits the university and enlists in the R.A.F.
The stint with the air force in a Canadian air base will prove to be a wrong move, and Ballard quits the R.A.F. and returns to Britain. The autobiography subsequently describes his happy marriage, the birth of his children (the "miracles of life" that the title hints at), his wife's sudden and unexpected death, and the ensuing difficulties, that Ballard faces by deciding to raise his children as a single parent.
The book also describes the beginning of his literary career, his friendship with pop artist Eduardo Paolozzi, his experimentation culminating in his destructured novel The Atrocity Exhibition, though less space is devoted to the Sixties and the Seventies than to the 15 years spent in Shanghai. Also the success of Empire of the Sun and the making of Spielberg's film based on it is told, re-telling in non-novelistic style events already covered in his previous autofiction The Kindness of Women.
The book ends with Ballard's return to Shanghai in 1995, and with a very short and moving epilogue where the writer announces that he is sick with a terminal illness.
Thoughout Miracles of Life Ballard compares the events of his life as he remembers them and the more or less inventive way in which he has told them in his previous life narratives Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women.
[edit] Importance of the book
As soon as the publication of Miracles was announced in 2007, Ballard scholars and experts looked forward to it, expecting it to clarify some aspects of Ballard's life that had been fictionally reworked in his previous works, especially in the partly autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun and in the autofiction The Kindness of Women. Ballard has repeatedly declared that those two books are a mix of real events and fictional elaboration, which left many crucial figures (e.g. his parents) out of the picture. Since Ballard has interwoven real life experiences (especially the time spent in the Lunghua camp) in many of his works (even the overtly non-realistic ones, such as his science-fiction novels and short stories), many readers were interested in the opportunity to read Ballard's own possibly ultimate version.
The book actually offers important biographical details about Ballard's crucial period in Shanghai, 1930-1946, but does not cover in detail other parts of his life (e.g. the 1970s and 1980s). However, many elements of Miracles show Ballard's intention to present it as a truthful narrative of his life, such as the pictures of his parents, his wife, his children, and his current partner. A remarkable difference of this narrative from both Empire and Kindness is the presence of Ballard's parents, who had been "edited out" from the previous works.
Much of the added value of the book is to be found in Ballard's witty and insightful remarks that comment on his experiences, but also tie the facts of his childhood and teenage years to the realities of today's globalized world. Shanghai, the city he was born in and the one he gets back to in his 1991 visit, is envisioned as a prototype of our late-modern or postmodern world.
[edit] External Links
- Review of Miracles of Life on The Observer
- Review on The Guardian
- Review on The Telegraph
- Review on the Independent
- Review on the Indipendent.ie
- Review on The Spectator
- Review on The Times Online
- Review on the Literary Review
- Review on The Scotsman
- Review on the Daily Mail
- Review on Time Out
- Review in Time magazine
- An interview and an extract of the book on The Ballardian
- Review on The Times Literary Supplement
- Review on The Globe and Mail
