A toast to the memory of JG Ballard

:toast:



Ballard is most famous for Empire of the Sun, but Crash had a particularly potent effect on my high school years, even though I only read it in gulps and don't remember how it all turned out. But what a mood it cast on my sophomore and junior years....

Did anyone else note his passing on DU?

This is from his NY Times obituary:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/21/books/21ballard.html?ref=books&pagewanted=print

...



<H>e became an inflammatory figure with a 1969 book, “The Atrocity Exhibition,” an experimental mélange of brief narratives and seeming scientific reports that drew on events like the Vietnam War, the death of Marilyn Monroe, and the deaths of James Dean and Jayne Mansfield in automobile accidents to posit a connection among the mass media, violence and sexuality.

It excited special outrage for a chapter titled “The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race.”

The book’s original American publisher, Doubleday, after printing a first edition, destroyed all copies of it; the book was finally published three years later by Grove Press under the title “Love & Napalm: U.S.A.” The reviews were wildly contrasting.

“Enviable, admirable Ballard!” Ms. Sontag wrote, calling the book “subtle, brutal, cerebral, intoxicating.” In The New York Times Book Review, however, Paul Theroux described it as “a stylish anatomy of outrage, and full of specious arguments, phony statistics, a disgusted fascination with movie stars and the sexual conceits of American brand names and paraphernalia.”

“Crash” (1973) continued Mr. Ballard’s fascination with what might have been called auto-eroticism; the tale of a deviant character who is obsessed with car accidents, it was later made into a 1996 film by David Cronenberg. Critics have since pointed out that its lassoing together of the public fascination with automobiles, celebrity, sex and violence prefigured the reaction to the death of Princess Diana.

But at the time it was published, some reviewers, like D. Keith Mano, found it perverse. His review in The Times Book Review began: “ ‘Crash’ is, hands down, the most repulsive book I’ve yet to come across.” He continued: “ ‘Crash’ is well-written; credit given where due. But I could not, in conscience, recommend it.”



...

Crash too impacted me. And the movie was a masterpiece in its own right.

I plan to read more.

Godspeed, JGB

I read several of his early novels and Empire of the Sun. I should read some of his newer ones too.

In his honor, here's a link to one of his classics:

http://info.interactivist.net/node/3244