"The Atrocity Exhibition is J.G. Ballard's most complex, disturbing work, with fabulous photos by Ana Barrado and artwork by Phoebe Gloeckner.
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Mar 07, 2011
Rhys
rated it: 
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.
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Dec 05, 2009
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 a 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 a More...
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Dec 17, 2009
Jim
rated it: 
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
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Jan 07, 2012
Isabel
rated it:
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.
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Dec 28, 2009
Matt
rated it: 
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 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 More...
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Oct 14, 2009
Concord Newfree
rated it:
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
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Mar 23, 2010
Eric
rated it: 
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 (cert
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Dec 17, 2008
Aaron
rated it:
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.
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Oct 13, 2011
Michael
rated it:
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
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(5 people liked it)
May 20, 2009
Owen
rated it:
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
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Mar 29, 2010
Lewis
rated it:
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 docto 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 docto More...
Jun 26, 2011
Liz
rated it:
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-ind
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Jan 30, 2012
Eric
rated it:
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
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Jul 05, 2010
Daveski
rated it:
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.
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Mar 21, 2010
Charles Dee
rated it:
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
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Dec 28, 2009
Bob
rated it:
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
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Oct 12, 2007
Burninghouse
rated it: 
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.
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Jan 17, 2012
Siskoid
rated it:
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
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Feb 03, 2011
abo
rated it:
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 figu 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 figu More...
Mar 01, 2010
Elliot
rated it:
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers.
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Jan 30, 2008
Dan
rated it:
Originally called Love and Napalm: Export USA, the Atrocity Exhibition is a tightly-wound cycle of writing that somehow cuts below the surface of language to get at elements of the human psyche that are not really speakable. Ballard is the master of putting characters into environments that are really just our modern media world externalized -- i.e., a city filled with huge billboards of little pieces of Jackie Onassis or Marilyn Monroe's face blown up and turned into a literal landscape. The
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Jul 24, 2008
D_Davis
rated it:
The final parts of this book are amazing. Why I Want to F*** Ronald Reagan, The Assassination of JFK Considered as a Downhill Motor Race, Princess Margaret's Face Lift, and Mae West's Reduction Mammoplasty are all brilliant works of satire, and deeply scathing of American pop-culture and humanity in general.
The rest of it is good in spurts, but I found the vision to be too singular to warrant the length - and it's not even that long. Throughout these pages it is easy to pick up on More...
The rest of it is good in spurts, but I found the vision to be too singular to warrant the length - and it's not even that long. Throughout these pages it is easy to pick up on More...
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Nov 09, 2007
Matt
rated it:
Ballard is genius but a dangerous and difficult creature to wrap your neurons around. Having full medical training there is a blistering knowledge of the esoterica of human body and skin parts. Atrocity Exhibition makes full use of this, contrasting the body with vast structures, road plans, in its seemingly random parade of connected paragraphs.
Ballard attempts to de-centre perception and will calmly and cooly relate imaginative vignettes of violence and sexuality, tapping into som More...
Ballard attempts to de-centre perception and will calmly and cooly relate imaginative vignettes of violence and sexuality, tapping into som More...
Nov 16, 2008
Shawn
rated it:
A book (like Pynchon's V or Burrough's cut-up novels) to experience, not read.
Seriously, you will be immersing your head (if not your heart) into a strangely dis-associative mindspace, made even more disturbing and poignant by its now-fixed place in the past. If THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION was a a marker, a beacon point in time, where are we, mankind, in relation to it now?
Not for everyone, not for the squeamish, not for those looking for a narrative or story, not for the un More...
Seriously, you will be immersing your head (if not your heart) into a strangely dis-associative mindspace, made even more disturbing and poignant by its now-fixed place in the past. If THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION was a a marker, a beacon point in time, where are we, mankind, in relation to it now?
Not for everyone, not for the squeamish, not for those looking for a narrative or story, not for the un More...
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Jan 10, 2012
Perry
rated it:
It's about several different characters all with the same name who kind of crawl through this landscape of crushed cars and weird geometric shapes and how life can be equated to those crashed cars and various other apocalyptic things.
Definitely enjoyed most of the Atrocity Exhibition. Feel like I've never read anything like it before, even though I've read other of Ballard's novels. The Atrocity Exhibition is kind of unique in that and it doesn't follow a dramatic arc, which is made p More...
Definitely enjoyed most of the Atrocity Exhibition. Feel like I've never read anything like it before, even though I've read other of Ballard's novels. The Atrocity Exhibition is kind of unique in that and it doesn't follow a dramatic arc, which is made p More...
Feb 08, 2010
Brian
rated it:
Possibly one of the most important books written in the last 50 years. The Atrocity Exhibition is a collage, more than a book. One of them most challenging assortment of words ever to be put on paper. Read it once, scratch your head, read it twice, pound your head against the wall, read it three times and you'll get it and think you're one of the most intelligent people ever to grace this dopey planet of ours.
Feb 06, 2009
Adam
rated it:
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 that 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 Taylo
Dec 16, 2009
graycastle
rated it:
I really like what Ballard is trying to do, but I don't think it quite works. This is the guy who wrote the script for the movie Crash - no, not that Crash, the one with James Spader. The Atrocity Exhibition, like Crash, is fascinated with bodies, with breaking bodies open and with the relationship between bodies and technology, and while that's a subject that I can read about forever, I find this particular book a bit too heavyhandedly (or weightily) experimental to make for a positive textua
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Nov 27, 2011
Joseph
rated it:
I can't decide between three or four stars. Completely random paragraphs...sexuality or cars and more importantly car crashes; JFK, Marilyn, Madme Chiang, and somehow ending plastic surgery. No, none of that is a spoiler. There is no plot, climax, or conclusion...just a tangled journey you get lost in.
