Point Books Supposing The Crystal World
Original Title: | The Crystal World |
ISBN: | 0374520968 (ISBN13: 9780374520960) |
Edition Language: | English |
Literary Awards: | Seiun Award 星雲賞 for Best Foreign Novel (1970) |
J.G. Ballard
Paperback | Pages: 210 pages Rating: 3.63 | 3508 Users | 218 Reviews
Itemize Appertaining To Books The Crystal World
Title | : | The Crystal World |
Author | : | J.G. Ballard |
Book Format | : | Paperback |
Book Edition | : | Special Edition |
Pages | : | Pages: 210 pages |
Published | : | May 1st 1988 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (first published 1966) |
Categories | : | Science Fiction. Fiction. Novels |
Explanation In Favor Of Books The Crystal World
J. G. Ballard's fourth novel, which established his reputation as a writer of extraordinary talent and imaginative powers, tells the story of a physician specializing in the treatment of leprosy who is invited to a small outpost in the interior of Africa. Finding the roadways blocked, he takes to the river, and embarks on a frightening journey through a strange petrified forest whose area expands daily, affecting not only the physical environment but also its inhabitants.Through a 'leaking' of time, the West African jungle starts to crystallize. Trees are metamorphosed into enormous jewels. Crocodiles encased in second glittering skins lurch down the river. Pythons with huge blind gemstone eyes rear in heraldic poses.
Fearing this transformation as a herald of the apocalypse, most flee the area in terror, afraid to face a catastrophe they cannot understand. But some, dazzled and strangely entranced, remain to drift through this dreamworld forest. Travelling through this gilded land, the doctor tries to resist its strange allure, while a tribe of lepers search for Paradise…
Rating Appertaining To Books The Crystal World
Ratings: 3.63 From 3508 Users | 218 ReviewsCriticism Appertaining To Books The Crystal World
a physician in africa; a world of disease. decay takes strange shape! a move into the unknown; the inexplicable finds its form and renovates, reconfigures: a new, dead life! figures in a landscape become one with that landscape... stylized characters form a comic tableau, fighting and fucking and dying, always dying... a journey up-river into the heart of an exterminating whiteness... leprosy and crystallization, two sides of one coin. this cartoon world ends - not with a bang - but with stasis;The Crystal World: Time and death are defeated as crystallization takes overOriginally posted at Fantasy LiteratureThe Crystal World (1966) is J.G. Ballards third apocalyptic work in which he destroys civilization, the other two being The Burning World (1964) and The Drowned World (1962). It seems he likes the elements, having employed floods, draughts, and now crystallization. The process somewhat resembles Ice-9 in Kurt Vonneguts Cats Cradle (1963), but there is no ironic humor to be found in
A leper doctor arrives in an African backwater. He is mildly interested in renewing an adulterous affair with the wife of a friend who runs a mission upriver, but what is finds is a world undergoing a sea change. The jungle, the wildlife, even the people are all becoming something rich and strange. This is a sci-fi mash up of Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene. Faced with the inexorable march of the crystallizing environment, the hero perhaps bows to the inevitable, but he also embraces it.
Ballard novel: subject, end time. Crystal, metaphor. Verbs? Inappropriateness. Nouns, exclusivity. Technique: problems. Action-omission. Review: inanity, boredom. Book: impossibility. Author-choices, comprehension. Ballard: uniqueness, praise. OULIPO? Disagreement.LSD? Certainty.
What most attracted his attention, however, like that of the rest of the watching group, was the mans right arm. From the elbow to the fingertips it was enclosed by--or more precisely had effloresced into--a mass of translucent crystals, through which the prismatic outlines of the hand and fingers could be seen in a dozen multi-colored reflections. This huge jeweled gauntlet, like the coronation armor of a Spanish conquistador, was drying in the sun, its crystals beginning to emit a hard vivid
SpellbindingThis is an interesting piece of literature, not quite a fantasy story, but not quite within the bounds of reality. The characters are normal people, the setting is a small town with nothing special about it, except that it is beside a jungle where jewels grow out of the ground like weeds, and as a tumor, overtake anyone or anything in their way. If you can find your way out, before becoming a frozen statue of gems, the crystals melt away as you cross an invisible threshold. It's
I can't read any book where I can feel the thesaurus in the author's lap. It's pompous and inauthentic. I made it about halfway through The Crystal World, but had to finally put it away shortly after seeing the words "deliquescing," "coruscation," and "palimpest" in one paragraph. Some may think that makes me seem uneducated or simple; people who feel that way can continue to feel that way because their opinion is irrelevant. When I read an author that is trying this hard to use impressive
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