J. Ballard – The Kindness of Women (страница 1)
J. G. BALLARD
The Kindness of Women
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollins
This edition published by Fourth Estate in 2014
First published in Great Britain by Harper Collins in 1991
Copyright © J. G. Ballard 1991
The right of J. G. Ballard to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.
Introduction copyright © Michel Faber 2014
‘The Ballard Tradition’ by Will Self copyright © Will Self 2003
‘The Worst of Times’ by J. G. Ballard and Danny Danziger copyright © The Independent 1991
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins eBooks.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this e-book has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.
Cover by Stanley Donwood.
Ebook Edition © MAY 2012 ISBN: 9780007381166
Version: 2014-09-25
From the reviews of
‘Is Ballard our best novelist? Perhaps. He’s certainly the most interesting, the one whose account of the last half of this century has the most to tell us. A moving book – stimulating and substantial.’
‘Ballard’s prose is cool, glassy, almost eerily unengaged; but then Jim’s life is in a sense a dreamy one, in which personal trauma and historical event become part of the same dream-scape.
NICK HORNBY,
‘Ballard offers us a fugal rather than a chronological version of his life, and readers familiar with his work will encounter the originals of the burdened, magical images that resonate through his novels and stories. A force is operating in this astonishing book that is hard to resist: a rogue intelligence in tandem with a febrile, yet lucid, imagination, that is at once mercilessly honest, trenchant and exhilaratingly extreme.’
‘Ballard’s eye for physical detail has always been superb and it is as good as ever here. He sees the weirdness of things, and can capture that weirdness in odd verbal ways.’
CLAIRE TOMALIN,
‘Compulsively readable … unbearably moving sequences about domestic contentment, the death of “Jim’s” wife, the pleasures of suburbia, the quiet life; horrifying insights into the madness of sixties drugs and violence; dark glimpses into the strange distortions of Ballard’s mind.’
‘Unexpectedly moving … a worthy sequel.’
‘Brilliant … Ballard’s wit has never been livelier. Ballard is an eerily visual writer, conjuring up dreams sharp enough to bleed. Ballard fans will relish the book’s masterful synthesis of all the strands of his imagination. Raw and tender in its beauty, and dark in its hilarity,
‘A writer of extraordinarily distinctive vision and power. A raw physicality roils beneath the glacial surfaces of Ballard’s prose, and the novel is taut with tension between “Jim’s” cultivated detachment and Ballard’s wounded humanity. Ballard is a psychic alien, viewing the world from his suburban eyrie with a perspective formed by a unique set of experiences, peering not into the stylised futures and pasts of the sf hacks, but into the real future we already inhabit.’
‘A highly readable novel which looks honestly at the traumatic effects of war and gives a graphic description of the social and cultural upheavals of the past half-century.’
‘A brilliant writer.
‘He writes so confoundedly well.’
Contents
Praise
PART ONE A Season for Assassins
CHAPTER ONE Bloody Saturday
CHAPTER TWO Escape Attempts
CHAPTER THREE The Japanese Soldiers
PART TWO The Craze Years
CHAPTER FOUR The Queen of the Night
CHAPTER FIVE The Nato Boys
CHAPTER SIX Magic World
CHAPTER SEVEN The Island
CHAPTER EIGHT The Kindness of Women
CHAPTER NINE Craze People
CHAPTER TEN The Kingdom of Light
CHAPTER ELEVEN The Exhibition
CHAPTER TWELVE In the Camera Lens
CHAPTER THIRTEEN The Casualty Station
PART THREE After the War
CHAPTER FOURTEEN Into the Daylight
CHAPTER FIFTEEN The Final Programme