The characters are aware that some sort of transcendent experience is taking place that exists far outside their own sensibilities or nerve-endings. The car wash sequence in Crash - which I think is one of the great scenes of cinema - is very ritualistic. The same mantras are recited, the same knees are bent before the same bleeding Christ up on his cross. The compulsive rehearsal of the same scenario - these endless crashes being planned and executed - is in fact no more than the sort of repetitions you find in religious observance. Bertolucci, whom I know slightly, called the film 'a religious masterpiece' and I know what he meant. These crashes are celebrated as a kind of profane mass. I don't want to sound too pretentious, but there's almost an undercurrent of religion to it, religion of a pagan kind. Ballard: One aspect of Crash which I think is even more explicit in David Cronenberg's film is the sacramental aspect of the car crash. Yet rather than being divisive, violence in your books often brings people together. Ballard and his unique vision while we wait for the world to catch up.Ralph Rugoff: A thread of violence snakes throughout much of your work, from Crash (1973) and High Rise (1975) up to Cocaine Nights (1996). Ballard continued to produce books original and shocking enough to put most new writing to shame, as demonstrated by 2003’s Millennium People and his final novel, 2006’s Kingdom Come. When the brightest flames of those other 1960s greats has been extinguished, J. That Ballard wrote visionary, apocalyptic fiction for so long is astounding – that both his old and new work has remained so fresh and shocking makes him truly unique.
In the company of women j g ballard series#
The next year saw reissues of more of his backlist, and also the inclusion of The Drought in the Flamingo 1960s series – a selection of nine of the greatest novels from the 1960s published together as a set of collectable editions. High Rise is one of the great parables of our time, the story of a tower block whose ambitious and powerful inhabitants begin a civil dispute that eventually leads to uncivilised chaos and murder. 2000 also saw the repackaging of three of his classic novels, High Rise, The Unlimited Dream Company and The Crystal World. It was also the year of his 70th birthday and it saw the publication of his latest novel, the daring and gripping Super-Cannes. It was the year the future arrived – the 21st century that this visionary futurist has been thinking of in his novels for the last four decades.
In the company of women j g ballard plus#
His more recent work includes the novel Rushing to Paradise, a collection of non-fiction writing entitled A User’s Guide to the Millennium, and Running Wild, a reissued novella, plus the highly acclaimed Cocaine Nights, a Sunday Times bestseller in hardback and paperback which was shortlisted for the 1996 Whitbread Novel Award.Ģ000 was a hell of a year for J. His acclaimed 1984 novel Empire of the Sun, based on his experiences in the prison camp, won the Guardian Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It is his extraordinary life which forms the basis of the semi-autobiographical Empire of the Sun and the equally compelling sequel The Kindness of Women. His first novel, The Drowned World, was written in the same year.īallard was at the forefront of modern British fiction writing for over three decades and became a bestselling writer of international stature. In 1956 his first short story was published in New Worlds and he took a full-time job on a technical journal, moving on to become assistant editor of a scientific journal, where he stayed until 1961. After two years at Cambridge, where he read medicine, Ballard worked as a copywriter and a Covent Garden porter before going to Canada with the RAF.
After the attack on Pearl Harbour, Ballard and his family were placed in a civilian prison camp. Ballard was born in 1930 in Shanghai, China where his father was a businessman.
0 kommentar(er)
