For me, impossible not to vote for JG Ballard’s Complete Stories (WW Norton) – I agreed to write about it for my hometown newspaper, thinking I could bat something out on my teenage recollection of Ballard’s greatness, but decided to crack the book open and soon found myself swallowed inside. Reading the entire volume in sequence, as I did, two or three stories a night for most of July and August, became a kind of mind-meld, and Ballard’s complete tales revealed themselves to me not only as a great, obsessive fictional voyage, but an epic covert autobiography of the writer behind them.
The Avengers
Modernism brings out the dark drives that slumber in us. It reserves no place for the unexplainable or the mysterious – and for precisely that reason causes a return to barbarism. We need mystery, that little bit of poetry. Seeing everything makes you sad.
There is a very good reason why I am not tripping on LSD right now: I have no desire to be disoriented for six hours. There’s also a reason why I am not conking myself on the head with a croquet mallet, but “The Prisoner” somehow has the same effect.
Should this book have been published? Certainly all the work of a great writer like Vladimir Nabokov ought to be available to scholars and interested readers. To my mind, Dmitri Nabokov was clearly right to ignore his dying father’s request that he destroy these fragments of an unfinished novel. But that doesn’t mean “The Original of Laura” actually deserves the attention of anyone but the most rabid Nabokov fanatic. Apart from a few enchanting phrases — “the orange awnings of southern summers” — there’s just not much here.
We were two sombre boys hunched in our coats, grim winter settling in. The college was at the edge of a small town way upstate, barely a town, maybe a hamlet, we said, or just a whistle stop, and we took walks all the time, getting out, going nowhere, low skies and bare trees, hardly a soul to be seen. This was how we spoke of the local people: they were souls, they were transient spirits, a face in the window of a passing car, runny with reflected light, or a long street with a shovel jutting from a snowbank, no one in sight. (via Don DeLillo, Midnight in Dostoevsky : The New Yorker)
There was a new language to learn, sentences whose nouns and verbs were separated by days, syllables whose vowels were marked by the phases of the sun and moon. This was a language outside time, whose grammar was shaped by the contours of Ursula’s breasts in his hands, by the geometry of the apartment. The angle between two walls became an Homeric myth. He and Ursula lisped at each other, lovers talking between the transits of the moon, in the language of birds, wolves and whales.
JG Ballard, “News from the Sun”
This year Ballard’s stories in particular have been a revelation to me, being at once well made, full of the supposedly contemptible components – plot, setting, character – and yet irreducibly strange in proportion. It’s a marvel how implacably and consistently weird he managed to be despite appearing to use all the normal tools at the disposal of any English short-story writer. All in all there is something a little shaming in reading Ballard: you have to face the fact that there exist writers with such fresh imaginations they can’t write five pages without stumbling on an alternate world.
One needs only to scan the stories in “Beginners” and the ones in “What We Talk About” to see the most obvious change: the prose in “Beginners” consists of dense blocks of narration broken up by bursts of dialogue; in “What We Talk About,” there is so much white space that some of the stories (“After the Denim,” for instance) look almost like chapters in a James Patterson novel. In many cases, the man who didn’t allow editors to change his own work gutted Carver’s, and on this subject Sklenicka voices an indignation she is either unwilling or unable to muster on Maryann’s behalf, calling Lish’s editing of Carver “a usurpation.” He imposed his own style on Carver’s stories, and the so-called minimalism with which Carver is credited was actually Lish’s deal. “Gordon … came to think that he knew everything,” Curtis Johnson says. “It became pernicious.” (via Stephen King, Raymond Carver’s Life and Stories - Review - NYTimes.com)
