![]() ![]() When I first read the book, I found the fiction as drastic and incoherent as a DMT trip, whereas the notes were highly stimulating. For a 1990 reissue, he annotated the novel with reflections and anecdotes. In the 1960s, Ballard wrote The Atrocity Exhibition, his most deliriously experimental novel, which wore its indebtedness to William Burroughs (whom Ballard revered "to the other side of idolatry") on its sleeve. Might he not have simply pretended it existed, then given us books of pure ideation? ![]() ![]() Ballard was such a superb commentator on his own fiction, one wonders whether the fiction was needed at all. In Ballard’s interviews, the ideas teem with intoxicating abundance, whereas the novels that serve as vehicles for those ideas tend to be clunky and long-winded, their plots and cut-out characters the paraphernalia of an entertainment form unsuited to the agitated 21st-century brain that Ballard in other ways anticipated. The JG Ballard book that should grace every home is not Crash, nor even The Atrocity Exhibition, but Extreme Metaphors: Interviews with JG Ballard 1967-2008. ![]()
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