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« Biografia e opere di Bal... | J. G. Ballard » |
Post n°2296 pubblicato il 31 Luglio 2019 da blogtecaolivelli
In 1964 Ballard's wife Mary died suddenly of pneumonia, leaving him to raise their three children - James, Fay and Bea Ballard - by himself. Ballard never remarried; however, a few years later his friend and fellow author Michael Moorcockintroduced him to Claire Walsh, who became his partner for the rest of his life (he died at her London residence) and is often referred to in his writings as "Claire Churchill". Walsh, who worked in publishing during the 1960s and 70s, was a sounding board for many of his story ideas, and introduced him to the expat community in the south of France which formed the basis of several novels. After the profound shock of his wife's death, Ballard began in 1965 to write the stories that became The Atrocity Exhibition, while continuing to produce stories within the science fiction genre. In 1967 Algis Budrys listed Ballard, Brian W. Aldiss,Roger Zelazny, and Samuel R. Delany as "an earthshaking new kind of" writers, and leaders of the New Wave. The Atrocity Exhibition (1969) proved controversial - it was the subject of an obscenity trial, and in the United States, publisherDoubleday destroyed almost the entire print run before it was distributed - but it gained Ballard recognition as a literary writer. It remains one of his iconic works, and was filmed in 2001. A chapter of The Atrocity Exhibition is titled "Crash!", and in 1970 Ballard organised an exhibition of crashed cars at the New Arts Laboratory, simply called "Crashed Cars". The crashed vehicles were displayed without commentary, inspiring vitriolic responses and vandalism. In both the story and the art exhibition, Ballard dealt with the sexual potential of car crashes, a preoccupation he also explored in a short film in which he appeared with Gabrielle Drake in 1971. His fascination with the topic culminated in the novel Crash in 1973. The main character of Crash is called James Ballard and lives in Shepperton, though other biographical details do not match the writer, and curiosity about the relationship between the character and his author increased when Ballard suffered a serious automobile accident shortly after completing the novel. Regardless of real-life basis, Crash, like The Atrocity Exhibition, was also controversial upon publication. In 1996, the film adaptation by David Cronenberg was met by a tabloid uproar in the UK, with the Daily Mail campaigning actively for it to be banned. In the years following the initial publication of Crash, Ballard produced two further novels: 1974's Concrete Island, about a man who becomes stranded in the waste area of a high-speed motorway, and High-Rise, about a modern luxury high rise apartment building's descent into tribal warfare. Although Ballard published several novels and short story collections throughout the seventies and eighties, his breakthrough into the mainstream came only with Empire of the Sun in 1984, based on his years in Shanghai and It became a best-seller,was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize and James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. It made Ballard known to a wider audience, although the books that followed failed to achieve the same degree of success. Empire of the Sun was filmed by Steven Spielberg in 1987, starring a young Christian Bale as Jim (Ballard). Ballard himself appears briefly in the film, and he has described the experience of seeing his childhood memories reenacted and reinterpreted as bizarre. Ballard continued to write until the end of his life, and also contributed occasional journalism and criticism to the British press. Of his later novels, Super-Cannes (2000) was particularly well received winning the regional These later novels often marked a move away from science fiction, instead engaging with elements of a traditional crime novel. Ballard was offered a CBE in 2003, but refused, calling it "a Ruritanian charade that helps to prop up our top-heavy monarchy". In June 2006, he was diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer, which metastasised to his spine and ribs. The last of his books published in his lifetime was the autobiography Miracles of Life, written after his diagnosis. His final published short story, "The Dying Fall", appeared in the 1996 issue 106 of Interzone, a British sci-fi magazine. It was reproduced in The Guardian on 25 April 2009.
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