The area makes a telling appearance as an entry - “Cap d’Antibes” - in Ballard’s short experimental fiction “The Index” (1977) and features heavily in Super-Cannes. Antibes was on his list of desirable residences, too. That never happened, though ten years later Ballard said his favorite beach, where Le Corbusier had a cabin (and died in the sea), was at Roquebrune.
By 1991, he had come around and the British interviewer Lynn Barber reported that he’d like to live in Roquebrune when Walsh retired.
A few years later, talking to Interzone magazine, the south of France was still on his mind, but he wouldn’t want to live there all the time, he said, because expatriates tended to become “sealed off” from the world. “When I travel, it’s usually to the Mediterranean, where I go practically every summer,” he told the Paris Review in 1984. Ballard was a regular visitor to the Côte d’Azur, where he loved to take holidays with his partner of many years, Claire Walsh. I was curious to see how the novelist had worked his imaginative transformations and I wondered whether it would be possible to take some photographs that captured a manifestly “Ballardian” quality in the locations that fascinated him. In Eden-Olympia, Ballard created a parallel version of Sophia Antipolis, nearby in the landscape, which he was then free to mold to suit the book’s provocative speculations. The towers of Marina Baie des Anges, near Villeneuve-Loubet, France, 2014 On a recent vacation, I went to look at Marina Baie des Anges, where one of the book’s main characters has an apartment, and visited Sophia Antipolis, which was clearly fundamental to the genesis of Super-Cannes (2000), although it features only in passing in the story. The particular inspiration for Eden-Olympia, he goes on to say, was the landscaped business park of Sophia Antipolis, a few miles to the north of Antibes. The book’s violent events, expressing the emergence of what a character calls a “voluntary and sensible psychopathy,” are set in Eden-Olympia, a fictitious business park located, Ballard writes, “ten miles to the north-east of Cannes, in the wooded hills between Valbonne and the coast.” He mentions several real places that will feature in the novel, beginning with the Marina Baie des Anges apartment complex, the Pierre Cardin Foundation at Miramar and the waterfront development at Port-la-Galère. Ballard includes an introductory note on the geography of the region in the south of France where his alarming story unfolds.
Photograph: Craig Kalpakjian In his novel Super-Cannes, J.G. Super-Cannes, published by Picador, 2000.
0 kommentar(er)
