Plot: 6/9. It’s a love story intermingling with surrealistic elements.
Invited by Dali to ascertain the best husband to her granddaughter Vivi, the narrator, a psychiatrist, investigated several candidates and concluded that Isherwood, the stable and sincere rheologist who had elaborated soft clocks would be the best bet. However, his technological job might provoke the aversion of Vivi who once ended her life for her aversion to techniques. To agitate the case, Vivi confessed her blunt infatuation with the narrator to Dali, even though the narrator dismissed the same feeling all the time. The dinner ended in Vivi’s futile suicide against her grandfather’s arranged marriage.
People all ate the soft clock except anorexic Vivi. After that, Vivi called the narrator for Dali was mutated to a telekineticist capable of melting Mars owing to the clock. The narrator thought Vivi as the antithesis to Dali and therefore persuaded Vivi to eat the clock against Dali’s influence when the band begins to play.
In the end, Isherwood suddenly fell in love with another woman insomuch that Vivi and the narrator got married inheriting Dali’s enormous fortune.
Core: 4/9. Soft clock was derived from Dali’s work and here served as a pivotal tool to solve Isherwood’s two problems on marriage and technophobia. But:
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Is it legal to eat newly developed food without testing it first and thoroughly?
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Is it moral to persuade a severe technophobe to save others at the risk of her own life and mentality rather than escape from the danger immediately?
Character: 4/9. Commonplace.
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The narrator: Is it responsible for a psychiatrist to cure a patient who didn’t ask for treatment on her initiative, and to let a technophobia who had already committed suicide for a mere guess know abruptly that she was full of appliances?
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Vivi: Vivi here seemed to act as a submissive female clock easily manipulated by the man’s will.
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Isherwood: Isherwood was so horrible that he claimed to love Vivi really at first but made a gadget triggering her technophobe probably. Eventually, he turned to another woman at the first sight insomuch as he just saw her bare body in an accident.
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Dali: Dali was an odd bod, but he was definitely the highlights. I would give a higher score if Aramaki could render more his sentimentality with her granddaughter especially on the reason why he was desperate to marry his young granddaughter.
World and Others: 4/9. Bland.
I would give a higher score if the environmental scenes of Mars were depicted more vividly as if the reader was appreciating the literary version of the bleak, absurd, and surrealistic paintings of Dali. Unfortunately, as a layman in surrealism, I could barely sense its charisma from the description, though I indeed love Dali’s magical mansion here such as illusory hallway and rebellious chair.
By the way, how could the Earth be deteriorated by the heat and monoxide to the extent of turning everything into gray and brown?