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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Beautiful imagery,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Day of Creation (Paperback)
What I liked best about this novel was the images that Ballard was able to evoke. To be honest, I started reading it and lost interest. I picked it up some years later and was hooked. He truly can create amazing pictures in the mind unlike most writers. It is perplexing to me to see a book like The Firm getting such good reviews and being read by millions when this one is hardly even a footnote, when this book is superior in just about every way. It is not his best. I would say Crystal World, High-Rise and The Drowned World are his best, but this is a very original novel.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
An interesting idea that falls flat.,
This review is from: The Day of Creation: A Novel (Paperback)
This is one of those books that clearly isn't meant to be taken entirely literally, the kind where all the events have some kind of metaphorical significance and the exterior landscape is an obvious externalization of an interior one. When done well, this can result in extraordinarily rich and rewarding fiction, the sort of story that does profound things to deep parts of your brain and can provide new insights and emotional resonances every time you return to it. Sadly, when it's done, er, less well, what you end up with is a story that fails to work on two levels instead of just one. And while it does have a few points of interest -- enough that I almost talked myself into giving it three stars instead of two -- this novel unfortunately is one of the latter kind. The metaphors and the imagery they're captured in never seem quite rich enough or subtle enough to be really engaging, either emotionally or intellectually, and the plot in and of itself is neither particularly interesting nor especially plausible. It's been quite a while since I've read any of Ballard's other work, but from what I remember he's not exactly untalented at this sort of thing. Even talented writers occasionally fall flat, however. I wanted to like and appreciate this story, I really did. But, in the end, I was counting down the pages until I was finished and could go and read something else instead. I suspect I only finished it because I'm stubborn. My advice: If you've never read anything by Ballard, start somewhere else. And if you like some of his stuff but don't feel a burning desire to read every word he's ever read, you might as well skip this one.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A delirious psychological odyssey...,
By
This review is from: The Day of Creation: A Novel (Paperback)
Ballard's 1987 novel "The Day of Creation" is a sinuous odyssey through a surrealized Africa drunk on the potential of Western technology. Ballard's narrative voice is rich and engaging, the fluctuating exterior and interior landscape rendered with delirious conviction. "The Day of Creation" reads like a particularly brutal 20th century fable, deftly pointing the cool lens of technology on our secret fascination with the Dark Continent. "The Day of Creation" has been compared to Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness." But Ballard's novel is at once deeper and more topical; by infusing his story with a compelling and unlikely romance, Ballard reveals a sensual versatility lesser writers would gladly kill for. Read as an adventure story or as erotic allegory, "The Day of Creation" is a pleasure.
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