EMPIRE OF SUN CST

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Summary: About loneliness and death¿
Review: A beautiful and terrible book, Empire of the Sun has become one of mine preferred. After the attack to Pearl Harbour, the Japanese invaded South-Est Asia. Thousands of European civilians, women and children, couldn't escape and were interned by Japanese. A lot of them died from disease and starvation. James Ballard, the author, was one of those children. Living in Shanghai with his family, eleven years old, he was interned till the end of the war in the Lunghua camp. Jim, the protagonist of the novel, is the 'alter ego' of the writer, so the story is quite autobiographic.
Shanghai is seized by Japanese and in an apocalyptic try to escape, Jim, born in a rich British family, become separated from his parents and must fight alone to survive. He will be soon prisoner of Japanese and will be interned till the end of the war, spending the years from childhood to adolescence in the internment camp. The war, that overwhelms everything and everybody, is reported from the point of view of the boy in a raw and shocking way, nothing is saved from the corruption caused by war.
Shanghai is a hell's city, where thousands Chinese people lead a life without hope, oppressed first by Europeans and then by Japanese. Jim spends a life of absolute loneliness, not able to have a true relationship with other people. Obsessed by the primordial necessity of food, he become a 'disgusting boy' ready to do everything to survive, even to steal the food from other European prisoners, or to become the slave of a small criminal without scruples. Jim looks with a corrosive eye and black umor at the life of the European prisoners. With their body destroyed by disease and starvation, they loose any hope and lead a life made of baseness and small egoism. Leave alone to cope with the ruin of his life, Jim will find a refuge in a world of dreams, populated by the myth of Japanese aviators. Jim feels himself close to the Japanese kamikazes for their bravery, but especially for their loneliness and sadness. His dreams will allow him to survive till the end of the war. At the end the only life that he knows will be the life in the camp, and when this will end also his world of dreams will collapse marking the end of his childhood. By now an adolescent without any hope, Jim will wander an apocalyptic landscape, almost crazy from starvation, welcoming the death as liberation, but he will survive. The death is an obsessive presence in every page of the book, bodies, devastated by flies, are every where and the air is saturated by smell of decomposition. In my opinion this story is one of the most important documents about the atrocity of wars in the twentieth century. For its strong and shocking message against the war this is a book without time and I think that will be read also by future generations.

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Summary: Intriguing account of boy's life amidst war and devastation
Review: Empire of the Sun, by J.G. Ballard, is the poignant, unsettling story of Jim, a British boy living in Shanghai whose life is altered beyond recognition by the Japanese invasion of China during World War II. The book begins in the winter of 1941, as Jim, a carefree eleven-year-old, and his wealthy parents attend high-class Christmas parties with other foreigners who have prospered in Shanghai. The only life that the inventive, intelligent boy knows is one of luxury and privilege, hardly touched by the war in Europe. Everything changes after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Suddenly the Japanese soldiers that have long been a fixture on the Shanghai streets are forcefully, uncompromisingly rounding up foreigners and sending them to military prisons. Separated from his parents, Jim wanders through Shanghai until he "surrenders" to the Japanese and finds himself in a squalid, disease-ridden detainment center and eventually in Lunghua camp, his home for the next three years.
The book is based on the author's experiences in a Chinese interment camp from 1942 until 1945. Ballard has an incredible talent for articulating Jim's perspective and describing how the protagonist changes from an adventurous boy in a school uniform to an emaciated, resilient, thoughtful (and still adventurous) young man who desperately tries to make sense of the world. In Empire of the Sun, Ballard pointedly recounts the squalor, disease and starvation of the camp just as Jim sees them. While Jim quickly becomes immune to the sight of such things - along with constant the death, murder, and beatings - the reader remains deeply affected. Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects is how Jim comes to rely on the camp because there he can build his own little universe amidst the absurdity of the world. Empire of the Sun is an arresting, shocking, frequently comical book that won't leave the reader unchanged.

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Summary: Horrifying
Review: It can only be described as miraculous that Ballard survived what he wrote about in this thinly-disguised autobiography. At least twice he nearly starved to death. One of the ways he did survive
was to detach himself from all of the horrors he witnessed--disease, starvation, murder, executions. And he was all of 11 years old. Yet, watching an interview with Ballard on TV once, he said, for all of what he went through, he rather still enjoyed himself, saying that he thrived on change. This book is simply amazing. It is relentingly horrifying, though.

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Summary: Not what you expect
Review: This is an account of JG Ballard's childhood in Shanghai during World War II when he was imprisoned in an internment camp away from his parents but just knowing that alone tells you nothing about the book. Yes, it takes place in WWII but that's almost irrelevant to the book, Jim is barely aware of the war as far as most people would conceive it and the entire war seems to take place mostly on the periphery . . . if it doesn't affect him directly than he doesn't care. On one level this is a nicely detailed account of life in Shanghai, especially in the beginning. Ballard is a good enough writer that he can describe such mundane events with enough flair that they take on another ambiance entirely. This becomes more pronounced as Jim winds deeper into the war itself, with the book becoming almost dream like in its quality. A lot of people I think object to the actions of Jim, which are very much what we don't expect. He's fairly self centered and makes a lot of weird rationalizations but I had no trouble understanding his POV, even if I didn't totally agree with it. He's a kid caught in something he can barely understand, so he has to break it down into something he can understand and sometimes that means making it a game and sometimes that means doing some things that most of us would interpret as cruel. That was the most interesting part of the novel for me, watching Jim trying to cope with the events around him, deal with the fact that he can barely remember his parents, with the fact that the only life he can really remember after a while are in the camp itself. With everything filtered through his perceptions the reader has to evaluate for him or herself what exactly the truth is . . . Jim's perception of some characters can change over and over, or maybe not even agree with what the character is doing, but that's because he's looking at it through the eyes of a child and by way of Jim, so is the reader as well. The white flash of the atom bomb that comes toward the end isn't even a climax, it's just another strange event in a war where everything strange is normal and for Jim it doesn't even signify the end of the war, for him the war never really seems to end. Haunting in its grim depiction of reality, this stands as one of the better books to come out about WWII simply for its personal perspective.