Miracles of Life - J.G. Ballard

Even as someone who considers J.G. Ballard as one of my favourite authors, and having over the years read all his works of fiction and short story collections, I didn’t think I would enjoy Miracles of Life quite so much as Ballard’s semi-fictional autobiographies Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women. Indeed the author’s depictions of his early life in Shanghai and his imprisonment in a Japanese prison camp followed by his attempts to comprehend the experience for the rest of his life through his fiction is rather more straightforward and less novelistically written in this autobiography.

However, there are still extraordinary revelations and moments of brilliance and poignancy in Miracles of Life, the kind of insightfulness that made Ballard perhaps the greatest chronicler of the neuroses of the 20th century, and as this work shows, perhaps even a personification of them in himself.

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