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Super-Cannes: A Novel (Paperback)

by J. G Ballard (Author) "THE FIRST PERSON I met at Eden-Olympia was a psychiatrist, and in many ways it seems only too apt that my guide to this 'intelligent'..." (more)

3.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (12 customer reviews)

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Product Details

Paperback: 400 pages
Publisher: Picador; 1st edition edition (Sep 17 2002)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0312306091
ISBN-13: 978-0312306090
Product Dimensions: 20.6 x 14 x 2.3 cm
Shipping Weight: 363 g

Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (12 customer reviews)

Amazon.ca Sales Rank: #607,220 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)
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#27 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Authors, A-Z > ( B ) > Ballard, J.G.

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Product Description

From Amazon.co.uk

JG Ballard covers familiar territory in Super-Cannes: new social structures under pressure, new psychopathologies to be explored. As he did in his previous novel Cocaine Nights, he has avoided the more abstract imagery and plot of Rushing to Paradise or The Day of Creation to create, on the surface, a more mainstream novel, clearly concerned with modern issues of racism, random violence and sexuality. But familiar territory is always the most deeply subversive place in a Ballard novel.

Eden-Olympia is more than a mere business park. It is an expensive and intense hive, the modern "Dream Palace" of "a new elite of administrators, enarques and scientific entrepreneurs"; its aim, "to turn Provence into Europe's silicon valley". Paul Sinclair finds himself with time on his hands in this radical environment when his young wife takes a job at Eden-Olympia. She replaces a doctor who killed 10 executives with a rifle before shooting himself. He left no note and no explanation. Sinclair finds himself living in the same house and learning some of the same lessons as the killer.

There are the (un)usual Ballardian motifs; the injured airman, the swimming pools, the cars, the voyeuristic sex and violence, the perverse personal iconography of the central characters (the hothouse social environment even harks back to High-Rise from 1975), but in this new context they are even more profoundly unsettling than before. The apparently slick, professional characters are flawed and ambiguous, while strange events, as in the outstanding novella Running Wild from 1988, lead to extreme conclusions. Ballard is an expert in explaining how what at first appears perverse, amoral or simply wrong, is actually obvious, sensible and sane, and then going even further. From the beginning, the clues are all there. Eventually, both Sinclair and the reader are clear on what must be done. --John Shire --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

The connoisseur of the bizarre (Cocaine Nights, The Atrocity Exhibition, etc.) turns his attentions to the globalized corporate elite in his 26th book. Crippled aviator Paul Sinclair ("I counted the titanium claws that held the kneecap together") accompanies his young wife, Jane, to her new posting at a luxurious corporate park on the French Riviera. A manicured paradise of multinational conglomerate HQs and their executives' villas, Eden-Olympia (which the author has modeled on the current business parks of Antibes-les-Pins and Sophia-Antipolis) is managed by a seductive yet sinister psychiatrist named Wilder Penrose, who ensconces the Sinclairs in the house of a former local doctor named Greenwood, who one day went on a suicidal murder spree, leaving 10 dead. In short Ballardesque order, the Sinclairs become estranged from one another: Jane falls into heroin-fueled m‚nages with the Belgian couple next door; Paul takes up tranquilizers and trysts with an Eden-Olympia vamp. Paul becomes obsessed with unraveling the mystery of the massacre, coming almost to identify with Greenwood. His efforts eventually reveal the horrifying true nature of Eden-Olympia, where the most bestial drives of corporate executives are harnessed in Brownshirt-style "therapy sessions" to create optimum working efficiency. Paul's collision course with the psychopathic Penrose is a new twist on Ballard's weird neo-romanticism, whereby our self-defining "latent psychopathy" is put to use to save society rather than to revel in hedonistic defiance of it (… la Crash). Ballard actually seems to have penned a story with a clear-cut hero (if the reader overlooks Paul's drug use and pedophiliac urges) and villain ("I don't want to start a race war or not yet"), with the fate of civilization in the balance. This novel, for all the author's trademark grotesqueries, may be Ballard's most commercially viable yet. Author tour.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Inside This Book (Learn More)

First Sentence
THE FIRST PERSON I met at Eden-Olympia was a psychiatrist, and in many ways it seems only too apt that my guide to this 'intelligent' city in the hills above Cannes should have been a specialist in mental disorders. Read the first page

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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover

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Customer Reviews

12 Reviews

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3 star:		(1)
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3.4 out of 5 stars (12 customer reviews)

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Again, one monolithic vision of dystopia., May 5 2003

By	Michael Varga (Montreal, Canada) - See all my reviews

Though most of Ballard's work contains unvarying plots, motifs, characters, etc., I was quite stunned to find that 'Super Cannes' and 'Cocaine Nights' are - albeit with minor tweaks and variations - actually one and the same book. From the backdrops to the manic idiosyncrasies of the characters, the key components in each enjoy such thorough correspondences and identity that a synopsis of one book effectively adumbrates the other. It seems Ballard's technique of thematic reiteration and repetition has achieved such perfection as to suggest that an author has finally (and remarkably) cloned his own work and slipped it over the transom. Read both books if you wish to scrutinize the sublime homogeneity of Ballard's imagination. Or pick one or the other, and feel satisfied that you've economized on money and time.

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3.0 out of 5 stars ..., Sep 26 2003

By	"fat_runner" (North but South) - See all my reviews

Although it has some lovely queasy undertones and a very workable premise, I found myself a intermittently bored with Super-Cannes after the 50 page mark. This is the first book by JG Ballard that I've read, and it pleased me enough to want to seek out others, but I think his choices for certain plot developments, rather reductive characterizations, and of often laughably pulpy dialogue* were poorly made, and if it wern't for his reputation, slightly greater literacy and the interesting plot, I would just have soon read some supermarket "thriller", like another (terrible) Dan Brown book.

*i.e. "...an affable and fleshy Franco-Lebanese, he stood behind his desk, camel hair coat over his shoulders, more public relations man than security chief. Crime might be absent from Eden-Olympia, but other pleasures were closer to hand."

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1.0 out of 5 stars Again, the same monolithic vision of dystopia, May 1 2003