Cocaine Nights

Product Information

If the strangeness of Shanghai is meant to foreshadow Auschwitz, Vietnam and the contextless chaos of modern media, Jim's medical studies in postwar England tell us a lot about Ballard's values as a prose-writer. When he begins to dissect a cadaver, a friend warns him: "You'll have to cut away all the fat before you reach the fascia." It's an appropriate metaphor for Ballard's clinical approach to narrative, an odd mixture of focus and nonchalance. While he liked to set himself apart from oh-so-literary avant-gardists by insisting that he was "an old-fashioned storyteller at heart", he was impatient with the conventions that had underpinned respectable mainstream fiction since the Victorians. Surrealism's emphasis on the inexplicable and SF's tolerance for haphazard characterisation and unnaturalistic dialogue suited his own inclinations, even if some readers might find these things alienating. Everytime I read another book by Ballard I move him up the list of my favorite authors. He deftly explores the concepts of man against man, man against nature, man against himself. His books are sultry, sexy, and humming with elegant intelligence. His themes continue to be relevant today, whether they were written early in his career in the 1960s or in his twilight years. If you like some of the writers I mentioned in this review, give Ballard a try. He might prove to be a favorite of yours as well.

urn:oclc:224334758 Scandate 20101007213522 Scanner scribe1.sanfrancisco.archive.org Scanningcenter sanfrancisco Worldcat (source edition) Protagonist Charles Prentice arrives in Spain to investigate his brother's involvement in the death of five people in a fire. In the Spanish upmarket coastal resort of Estella de Mar, and like everywhere in Ballard's future, crimes have no motives. Cocaine Nights is a n absolutely fascinating memoir that provides an intimate look into the life of a cocaine addict and drug dealer in South Florida. Michael Rosenberg offers up a no-holds-barred account of his experiences, including the highs and lows, the triumphs and failures during his cocaine addiction.When I was a young writer in the 1980s, I read Ballard's luminous, erotic story collection The Day of Forever. It was so formally inventive that I would not have guessed it had been published in 1967. Nor did I know that the baffled conservative literary establishment of his generation had tried to see off his early work as science fiction. Ballard always insisted he was more interested in inner space than outer space. As a teenager I read and recall quite enjoying The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), Crash (1973), and High-Rise (1975), so was interested to return to J.G. Ballard

Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2010-09-15 21:18:54 Bookplateleaf 0003 Boxid IA127614 Boxid_2 CH129925 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City Washington, D.C. Containerid_2 X0008 Donor A house fire in the upmarket British expat enclave of Estrella de Mar on the Costa del Sol results in five deaths. Frank Prentice, the manager of the popular Club Nautico, pleads guilty and is charged with murder, but no one believes he committed the crime, not even the police. Frank’s brother Charles travels from the U.K. to investigate the crime and find the culprit.Cocaine nights is, in some senses, a precursor to Super-Cannes. Like Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes is set on the coasts of continental Europe and, also like Cocaine Nights, it features British expats living in an enclosed community. However, it is in this second novel where Ballard’s exploration of inner space, violence, and community reaches its peak.

It stretches out for a long time, and it doesn't really feel like there's much of a payoff. I understand some of what Ballard might be going for here: a world devoid of morality, anodyne, soulless automatons going through anhedonous lives as metaphor for the modern condition. I think the failure is in subject matter, making a creepy, alienated feeling into a book length murder mystery. I could have done without a lot of the exposition. I just want to read enjoyable prose, or find some kind of recognition in what I'm reading - even a Kafkaesque sort of recognised alienation. A bristling thriller pastiche from the surrealistic novelist (Rushing to Paradise, 1995, etc.) and peripatetic social observer (A User’s Guide to the Millennium, 1996). Travel writer Charles Prentice, who seems to be carrying a lot of Ballard’s baggage, is a man on a mission: to get his brother Frank out of a Costa del Sol prison. It won’t be an easy job, since Frank, who managed the wildly successful Club Nautico, has already confessed to setting the fire that burned down the Hollinger home, with three family members and two hangers-on inside. Every question Charles asks the locals—foreign nationals, most of them, who’ve come to regard the paradisiacal resort as much better than home—makes him more suspicious of Frank’s confession. Where would Frank have gotten the mixture of petrol and ether that was used to start the fire, and how did he know how to introduce it into Hollinger’s air-conditioning system? Why was Hollinger in bed with the pregnant Swedish maid, and his wife Alice the same with longtime secretary Roger Sansom, when the fire broke out? In fact, since an enormous party was clearly in progress at the time of the fire, why did no one in attendance make a move to rescue any of the victims? And if Frank wasn’t responsible, why has he confessed—and then refused to see the brother who’s convinced he’s innocent? Classic mystery questions, all, but knowing readers who can see that Ballard is less interested in solving the mystery than in using it as a parable of the modern social contract won’t be surprised when Charles, instead of closing in on the solution, finds himself insensibly sliding into the comfy, doomed place his brother has vacated. For all Ballard’s air of jaunty abstraction—his tawdry comedie humaine seems to be viewed through the wrong end of a telescope—his prophetic eye for the ties that bind is as sharp and unsparing as ever.

Violence and Community in J.G. Ballard Balfron Tower in Poplar, East London by Cianboy. Via Wikimedia commons. I've always enjoyed J G Ballard's novels in the past, but this one lost me about three quarters of the way through. In truth, Ballard's basic decency was always there, even in his most outrageous tales. It is a measure of how obtuse the guardians of public morality continue to be, that Ballard was ever accused of being a nihilistic pervert or a champion of orgasmic car crashes. Like all satirists, he assumed that humans should behave compassionately and morally. Grieved by their failure to do so, he expressed his alarm – not with earnest handwringing, but by ushering us straight to a dystopian fait accompli. In short, he shanghaied us. So I stopped enjoying it. He lays the groundwork for his plot very thoroughly. He is like an advertising man. He is very persuasive and very plausible. But his words are a veneer laid over a corrupt underbelly that failed to convince. The twist at the end also didn't ring true. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.