Word: lunghua
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...journey from one to the other has been central to his life and his fiction. Readers of his 1984 novel Empire of the Sun - and the millions more who saw Steven Spielberg's film version of it - will recognize Ballard's descriptions of the deprivations he suffered at the Lunghua detention camp after the Japanese army overran Shanghai in 1943. They'll recall, too, the blank, dreamlike gaze with which he absorbed the horrors unfolding around him: at the age of 14, he watched as a group of defeated Japanese soldiers, "aware that their own lives would shortly...
...suffering from advanced prostate cancer, Ballard finds the answers that matter in his children and grandchildren - his Miracles of Life. But there are miracles of fiction here, too. So convincing was the story he made of the horrors of Lunghua that when Ballard finally returned there in 1991, it was as if he had "walked up to a mirage, accepted that in its way it was real, and then walked straight through it to the other side." Ballard's own journey from inner to outer space turned out to be no distance...