From BookJive
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| Edition: | Fourth Estate (Hardcover) |
| Author: | J. G. Ballard |
| Published: | April 2008 |
| Pages: | 288 |
| ISBN 10: | 0007270720 |
| New: | $9.70 (7) |
| Used: | $4.45 (15) |
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Miracles of Life is an autobiography written by British writer J. G. Ballard and published in 2008.
Overview
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.
Throughout 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.
