Cronenberg names Pynchon, Barnes, Kafka and Céline as early influences
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| David Cronenberg |
What did you want to do with your life back then?
I did aspire to be an obscure novelist. I thought you could probably do your best work outside of fame, because you’d be following your integrity. [Like] Kafka, who barely published in his own lifetime. I loved finding people like Djuna Barnes. I figured someone like me would discover me years from then.
What were you writing?
Sci-fi, mostly, but some stuff like Thomas Pynchon. There was that hallucinogenic view of the world, and V. was such a wonderful novel. I read it in the sixties in France, and also Journey to the End of the Night, by Céline, a little later that year. There was a clarity to it, a weird and exuberant cruelty. He was seeing war in the coldest, most revealing light. You would not read that book and think that you wanted to be a soldier. No romanticism. [Read More]
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- David Cronenberg on J. G. Ballard
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