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23rd out of 226 books
—
300 voters
The Atrocity Exhibition
The Atrocity Exhibition is J.G. Ballard's most complex, disturbing work, with fabulous photos by Ana Barrado and artwork by Phoebe Gloeckner.
Paperback, 136 pages
Published
June 1st 1990
by Re/Search Publications
(first published 1970)
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I have mixed feelings about this book, as I do about all of Ballard's fictions. Ballard is brilliant, no doubt about that: he possesses one of the clearest prose styles of any writer, a style not just clear but unexpectedly ecstatic in a glacial sort of way. Some of his short stories are among the finest ever written. His collection *Vermilion Sands* in particular is absolutely one of the highest points of the form. As for his novels, they can be astoundingly original but also too obsessive.
*The...more
*The...more
Apr 17, 2013
Nate D
rated it
5 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
wound areas
Recommended to Nate D by:
Two M.'s (J. Nichols and Kitchell)
Not exactly a novel, Ballard may have written more involving narratives than this 1970 present-dystopia of modernity in meltdown, but it's unlikely that he has ever surpassed its severe and unsettling perfection of form and function, diamond-hard, brilliant, and single-mindedly focused. While each unit could function as a story (and they were originally published as such in the late 60s) there's also a total cohesion here that makes it more than a collection, into some kind of shambling and uniq...more
6 likes · like · see review
Jul 06, 2009
Misha
marked it as will-come-back-to-later-no-really
Only a few pages in. Flashes of brilliance. He was a smart guy, this Ballard.
This is proving a challenging and thought-provoking read.
A couple of sentences I love:
- "They hung on the enamelled walls like the codes of insoluble dreams, the keys to a nightmare in which she had begun to play a more willing and calculated role."
- "For some reason the planes of his face failed to intersect, as if their true resolution took place in some as yet invisible dimension, or required elements other than thos...more
This is proving a challenging and thought-provoking read.
A couple of sentences I love:
- "They hung on the enamelled walls like the codes of insoluble dreams, the keys to a nightmare in which she had begun to play a more willing and calculated role."
- "For some reason the planes of his face failed to intersect, as if their true resolution took place in some as yet invisible dimension, or required elements other than thos...more
3 likes · like · see review
Aug 18, 2007
Jim
rated it
2 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
Anyone who is up to the challenge of non-linear fiction.
You have to wonder about a book where the author suggests in his introduction that you flick through the book till a paragraph catches your eye and start from there. If you do that then okay. Treat it like a book of flash-fiction and it works fine. Ballard can write let me assure you and knowing that is a good place to start if you decide to attempt this book. I had a similar response to Beckett's How It Is with its peculiar linguistic style but I kept telling myself, Beckett is a genius so, if...more
An experimental novel about sex, death, media manipulation, car crashes and celebrity, written at the fag-end of the 1960s and foreshadowing various themes found in his later works. The narrative is very repetitive, with chapters telling versions of more or less the same story, and I found it by turns tedious and repellent.
Rather too experimental for my tastes - it has taken me forever to read it, and it's only 184 pages long.
Rather too experimental for my tastes - it has taken me forever to read it, and it's only 184 pages long.
It's written by Ballard, and so, no surprise, it's strange, disconcerting, and incredibly modern. It's about psychology, anomie, mass media, sexuality, celebrity culture, Surrealism, nuclear war, but it treats these things vaguely, indirectly. It's a suggestive book, not in the sexual sense, hinting at more ideas than it has time to treat (later editions, annotated by Ballard himself, do only a little to change this; Ballard's footnotes aren't so much explanatory as obfuscatory, piling another l...more
Revisited this right before Christmas...
Check out this back cover blurb:
When the ATROCITY EXHIBITION was originally printed (1970), Nelson Doubleday saw a copy and was so horrified he ordered the entire press run shredded.
What Nelson Doubleday allegedly saw that made him figuratively soil himself in righteous indignation was one of the stories near the end of this book entitled 'Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan.' Legend has it that a wag distributed copies of this story (minus title and headings...more
Check out this back cover blurb:
When the ATROCITY EXHIBITION was originally printed (1970), Nelson Doubleday saw a copy and was so horrified he ordered the entire press run shredded.
What Nelson Doubleday allegedly saw that made him figuratively soil himself in righteous indignation was one of the stories near the end of this book entitled 'Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan.' Legend has it that a wag distributed copies of this story (minus title and headings...more
9 likes · like · see review
Whenever I think of Ballard's work, I sort of want him to be remembered as the underrated Palahniuk of a generation ago. Unfortunately that's not accurate. Palahniuk is a novelist who continually gives us stories with a beginning, a middle, and an end (the way he is supposed to). Ballard, on the other hand, is a flasher. He occasionally whips open his mental raincoat and shows us what he's got. What he shows you is shocking and disturbing, but as a reader you walk away feeling sorry for him in s...more
At first I thought this is going to be good. But the authors self-proclaimed "free association" method of writing quickly becomes tedious. In the version I read, each chapter was followed up with explanations. I found the explanations and their tangential ramblings to be much more interesting than the story itself. I could sum up the book in a few sentences 1) Car crashes are like sex and sex is like car crashes. 2) Ralph Nader, JFK, Marylin Monroe, Jackie Kennedy, Elizabeth Taylor.
This book proves once again (as if I needed any further proof this far into our tiresomely exhibitionist century) that other people's sexual fetishes* make for extraordinarily dull reading, even when they are gussied up with exquisitely beautiful prose and oodles of (once upon a time) celebrity names.
This isn't "experimental" literature-it's a dragging, masturbatory ejaculation of pointless prose aimed at a fawning, self-congratulory readership ashamed of its own lusts (for gossip, fame, sex, go...more
This isn't "experimental" literature-it's a dragging, masturbatory ejaculation of pointless prose aimed at a fawning, self-congratulory readership ashamed of its own lusts (for gossip, fame, sex, go...more
Impossible to rate or even classify this weird and disturbing book from the late '60s (it's not a novel, it's not a collection of mini-novels, it's not even a psychological treatise, though it has aspects of all three). It explores the links between death/danger and sexuality (his own wife had died suddenly a few years earlier). Parts of it will be thought obscene by many. It reflects Ballard's interests in psychoanalysis and surrealism: the very structure of the book is surreal. All of this mak...more
10 likes · like · see review
Libro letto molto, molto a fatica e, devo dire, con una perenne ed onnipresente perplessità di fondo.
Insomma, la retorica di Ballard è una retorica particolare, che ha qualcosa del beat ma mooolto più all'avanguardia. La narrazione intera sembra svilupparsi attraverso un'enorme ed immenso costrutto d'impressioni e connessioni inconscie, quasi insensate, come a volerci semplicemente comunicare COSA nella società è perverso e sporco, senza l'interferenza dell'azione e ricostruendo processi di natu...more
Insomma, la retorica di Ballard è una retorica particolare, che ha qualcosa del beat ma mooolto più all'avanguardia. La narrazione intera sembra svilupparsi attraverso un'enorme ed immenso costrutto d'impressioni e connessioni inconscie, quasi insensate, come a volerci semplicemente comunicare COSA nella società è perverso e sporco, senza l'interferenza dell'azione e ricostruendo processi di natu...more
2 likes · like · see review
I suspect that most people would find this work either confusing or repetitive, but I tolerate fragmented prose extremely well and enjoyed it immensely. The chapters are more like short stories, each broken into a paragraph which has a bold title (there's a definite resemblance to the Aeolus chapter of Joyce's "Ulysses"); in the last few chapters, these bold titles can be read sequentially as a sentence or two echoing the content of the chapter. There are many tropes which repeat (certain celebr...more
Probably the most abstract of Ballard's writing, crossing over from his more familiar realm of cold/sterile science fiction into hallucinatory territory, slightly reminiscent of Burroughs. It's fun in a morbid way, though the process of reading is difficult since the central narrative is "elusive" at best. It's worthwhile if you're up for the challenge, though.
It's enjoyable to see how much the Atrocity Exhibition confuses people, it's a mission accomplished, really, I can't think anything BUT that if you are somehow not confused, then you are missing the point entirely or are selfconsciously trying to understand anything and everything in the world in some vein attempt at pan-sophism. I don't know, perhaps it would help to have had a nervous breakdown to pick apart the flurry of fragments. Or more than one: one to understand, two for context, a third...more
5 likes · like · see review
May 20, 2009
Owen
rated it
3 of 5 stars
·
review of another edition
Recommended to Owen by:
Devowasright
Probably the most challenging thing I have ever tried to read. Either it's so brilliant that half of it goes right over my head or it's a complete load of crap (or a little of both) but even though I don't really understand it after the first time through, it was still a compelling experience. The jump-cut presentation and intensely visual descriptions of odd situations made reading this book feel like channel surfing - you don't really have a context, just a bunch of random disjointed images th...more
What just happened? I think the book is about how sex - for people anyway - has become more conceptual than actually animal. In this novel there is no sexuality without psychological pathology. Scummy, grimy, and wet psychological pathology, that is.
But this is not a book full of sex scenes. Rather, it has famous people who were killed in car accidents or suicides and a big wasteland full of wreckage. There are a few characters, at least one who is crazy and one who is his doctor, but they all s...more
But this is not a book full of sex scenes. Rather, it has famous people who were killed in car accidents or suicides and a big wasteland full of wreckage. There are a few characters, at least one who is crazy and one who is his doctor, but they all s...more
not sure I'm into the way the central motif (science = pornography = violence) is deployed. sometimes it's just tired misogyny. personally, I'm more interested in the effect of violence on its victims than in how it perverts the psyche of the violent or potentially violent, but that was the reverse of Ballard's focus. I mean, I am interested in both, but I'm bored with the continual erasure of the victims of violence, which makes this text (like many other similar ones) feel somewhat self-indulg...more
JG Ballard's "The Atrocity Exhibition” would, perhaps, be best enjoyed by fans of William Burroughs. Ballard was a great fan of Burroughs and Burroughs here provides the preface. My dirty secret is that I have never been a great fan of Burroughs. I like his voice (and I mean his verbal, performing voice) and sometimes I like his poetry, but his work as a whole simply does not resonate with me. Unfortunately the same can be said with The Atrocity Exhibition. I wanted very much to like this book m...more
I cannot pretend to really understand The Atrocity Exhibition, but that is part of Ballard's construction- periodic images of clarity emerge as fragments from the tangled and twisted metal of the post-crash automobile. It's a delight that this edition contains additional notes from Ballard at the end of each chapter that help locate some of his thoughts.
His central figure Travers is forever in flux, fuelled by and obsessed with the speculative disaster of the car crash, enacting it through vario...more
His central figure Travers is forever in flux, fuelled by and obsessed with the speculative disaster of the car crash, enacting it through vario...more
My 4th Estate 2006 British edition of The Atrocity Exhibition features, along with helpful author annotations at the end of each chapter, a brief preface by William S. Burroughs. This is apt, because Burroughs is the only writer I can immediately think of whose writing even compares to this experimental work—I hesitate to use the word “novel,” because, like many of Burroughs’ works (I’m thinking primarily of Naked Lunch and Exterminator! here), it eschews the novel’s unified narrative for a stru...more
Car crashes, sex, pop art, Marilyn Monroe, assassinations, Ronald Reagan, more sex, paranoia, Ralph Nader... the varied elements that make up The Atrocity Exhibition never really come together into a cohesive whole, but then again they aren't really meant to. The title is apt - reading this book really is like wandering through an exhibition. The various paragraphs, essays, sentences, and lists that make up this book share common themes but don't fit together the way a traditional novel does. Th...more
Oct 09, 2012
Spaced
added it
Unconscious reading may have been quite an amusing experiment at the height of surrealism in the 1930's, but it doesn't appear to be so anymore. This book undermines any rationality and humanism, and instead opts for a mimicry of a reality that is overwhelmed by excessive sensory stimulation. A variety of media from television to films infects this book and our consciousness, making it both hard to digest and easy to read. But it is the juxtaposition of such images that Ballard is pointing us to...more
Dec 01, 2007
Fostergrants
marked it as to-read
when a book receives 1 star as well as 5 stars, i immediately want to read it to find out where the middle ground is!
1 like · like · see review
At times this read like a first run for the ideas that come together brilliantly in Crash. Ballard is devoted to classic Surrealism, and the events take place in a landscape evoked from the paintings of Max Ernst, Salavador Dali, and DiChirico with Ballard's distinct additions of highway embankments, mental hospitals, and mutli-tiered parking garages. Have a dictionary handy for the medical terms. Ballard works against himself when his apt imitations of the mind-numbing jargon of medical and soc...more
The most extreme of Ballard's books - many of the themes that were explored in a more conventionally narrative style in Crash are explored here in a surrealist sequence of 15 short segments that retell the same story (though there isn't really a plot) from slightly different angles, as if realizing multiple possible parallel universes with shades of difference. The lack of linear narrative direction is accentuated by the inclusion of extensive marginal notes from Ballard in the 1990 Re/Search ed...more
Dated.
Best read as suggested by the author himself: incompletely and at random.
Best read as suggested by the author himself: incompletely and at random.
A piece of new wave sci-fi that holds the seed of much of his later work, especially Crash (the one that was made into a movie about how sexy car accidents are). Not really a story, but a sequence of images, some of which I found rather powerful, though the book is generally obscene (in that William S. Burroughs vein). Though sometimes repetitive, my edition is greatly enhanced by annotations from the author himself. These explain both his references and writing methods, but mostly contain pithy...more
Una raccolta di racconti assolutamente incoerenti tra di loro e con se stessi. Non esiste un filo conduttore e diverse parti risultano alquanto oscure. Ad esempio, uno stesso protagonista assume nomi diversi, magari muore in un racconto e in un altro torna come se niente fosse.
Leggo che questi racconti sarebbero ambientati prevalentemente in una clinica psichiatrica durante una mostra delle opere create dai degenti, mostra alla quale gli stessi non possono prendere parte. Questa dovrebbe essere...more
Leggo che questi racconti sarebbero ambientati prevalentemente in una clinica psichiatrica durante una mostra delle opere create dai degenti, mostra alla quale gli stessi non possono prendere parte. Questa dovrebbe essere...more
Romanzo, saggio, sequenza di brevi racconti (o di condensed novels, come le chiamava Ballard): non è facile capire o spiegare con esattezza quale sia l’esatta collocazione della Mostra delle atrocità.
Quattordici capitoli, a loro volta suddivisi in brevi scene non più lunghe di mezza pagina.
Mobili e indefiniti i personaggi, a partire dal protagonista, che lavora in una clinica per malati mentali e cambia di continuo nome (Travis, Tallis, Trabert, Talbot). Attorno a lui si muovono figure enigmatic...more
Quattordici capitoli, a loro volta suddivisi in brevi scene non più lunghe di mezza pagina.
Mobili e indefiniti i personaggi, a partire dal protagonista, che lavora in una clinica per malati mentali e cambia di continuo nome (Travis, Tallis, Trabert, Talbot). Attorno a lui si muovono figure enigmatic...more
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J.G. Ballard (James Graham Ballard) was born in 1930 in Shanghai, China where his father was a businessman. After the attack on Pearl Harbour, Ballard and his family were placed in a civilian prison camp. They returned to England in 1946. After two years at Cambridge, where he read medicine, Ballard worked as a copywriter and a Covent Garden porter before going to Canada with the RAF.
In 1956 his f...more
More about J.G. Ballard...
In 1956 his f...more
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“Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time. Anything erected there, a city, a pyramid, a motel, stands outside time. It's no coincidence that religious leaders emerge from the desert. Modern shopping malls have much the same function. A future Rimbaud, Van Gogh or Adolf Hitler will emerge from their timeless wastes.”
—
29 people liked it
“All over the world major museums have bowed to the influence of Disney and become theme parks in their own right. The past, whether Renaissance Italy or Ancient Egypt, is re-assimilated and homogenized into its most digestible form. Desperate for the new, but disappointed with anything but the familiar, we recolonize past and future. The same trend can be seen in personal relationships, in the way people are expected to package themselves, their emotions and sexuality, in attractive and instantly appealing forms.”
—
21 people liked it
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I linked to your review in my review--I hope you see this as a compliment. I just found what you had to say very insightful.
Cheers,
Eric
Jan 15, 2012 10:50pm
Jan 30, 2012 07:35am