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Ypsilon is a human being reduced to the most basic essentials, a
naked one-eyed brain floating in an aquarium of nutritious liquid.
Through his consciousness we observe his obstinate struggles to
maintain his freedom of action in this utterly dependent situation
- to assert the right to express his anger, to fall in love, to run
away - whilst it slowly dawns on him that he is a part of a
wide-ranging scientific experiment. In this fantasy about a society
which is scientifically only slightly more advanced than our own,
the Swedish novelist P C Jersild explores the resilience of the
human spirit set against the threatening Big Brother of
technological progress. Like most of his other novels, it paints no
rosy picture of the future of mankind, yet it celebrates the
defiance which cannot be eradicated as long as the mind itself
remains intact.
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Children's Island (Paperback)
P.C. Jersild; Translated by Joan Tate; Afterword by Ross Shideler
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R642
Discovery Miles 6 420
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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First published in Sweden in 1976, "Children's Island" increased
the popularity and critical acclaim of its author, P. C. Jersild.
The novel, which has sold more than 400,000 copies in Sweden alone,
has been translated into French, German, Dutch, and
Czechoslovakian. A film was made out of it. The University of
Nebraska Press is the first to make available in English a book in
some ways reminiscent of J. D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye,"
"Children's Island" is told from the point of view of a
ten-year-old boy, Reine Larsson, who succeeds in "not" going to
summer camp. Reine stays home because time is running out: puberty,
sexual desire, adulthood are threatening to rob him of the energy
he needs to find the answers to life's dilemmas. He lulls his
divorced mother into thinking he has gone to camp and confronts the
task of supporting his love for McDonald's hamburgers. What he
finds in Stockholm--a kind of Children's Island all its own--is a
series of often hilarious adventures that help Jersild define
contemporary society. It's a society of isolation, violence, and
aggressive commercialism, a society actually much more threatening
to Reine's psyche and well-being than the changes taking place
within his own body. The revulsion he feels for his sexuality and
that of others becomes symbolic of the alienation that defines the
world Reine grows up in. Robert E. Bjork, general editor of the
Modern Scandinavian Literature in Translation series, calls
"Children's Island" "an extremely entertaining, extremely funny,
and very serious book."
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