![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The commentary on this novel is surprisingly thin on the ground. ![]() The reader will, I think, put up with a great deal, just so long as she’s let in on the joke. Once can ask oneself: what is it for? What is it trying to do? Who is it written for? What is the author about? Indeed: what is a novel for? If it is for playing a little game with one’s self, a game of no consequence, a game with the most abstruse rules and the vaguest of ends, a game that will have little or no impact on the reader, over and above prompting a host of questions the author has already answered elsewhere, or has since attempted to answer in notes to the novel book in this revised edition, but which will not be answerd in the novel itself, questions as rudimentary as what is happening, to as profound as why do I persist, at all, as a reader, or even as a sentient being… Well, to be fair, Ballard’s novel, in and of itself, doesn’t prompt these questions, they are prompted instead by the fuss and the blather that surround this novel, as well as the more experimental novels of this period in English: so in this experiment, what is being attempted? Rather than pushing the boundaries of fiction, if indeed there are any, Ballard has succeeded here in merely pushing the limits of what the reader will put up with. What is this? On reading it, one may well wonder. ![]()
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