Crash

May 07, 2012 Mariel rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: this is a long drive for someone with nothing to think about

Recommended to Mariel by: I could have told you all that I love you

Butt on the leather interior. Make that the hard seat vinyl sticking to the fart sound rubbing flesh like sweaty underwear that has crawled up sun don't shine places and worn for far too long and far too worn down. Ass in the seat of humanity. Hand on the wheel and the other masturbating a Johnson. Not Lyndon Johnson. Gotta be Ronald Reagan. I admit I haven't thought about wounded Ronald Reagan much since just say no to drugs! kindergarten sticker days to come up with any euphemisms in his honor...more Butt on the leather interior. Make that the hard seat vinyl sticking to the fart sound rubbing flesh like sweaty underwear that has crawled up sun don't shine places and worn for far too long and far too worn down. Ass in the seat of humanity. Hand on the wheel and the other masturbating a Johnson. Not Lyndon Johnson. Gotta be Ronald Reagan. I admit I haven't thought about wounded Ronald Reagan much since just say no to drugs! kindergarten sticker days to come up with any euphemisms in his honor. Fortunately for me, Ballard swapped out auto erotic cum vehicular slaughter fixation on the former president (short story "Why I want to fuck Ronald Reagan". I'm not being crazy) for film stars and prostitutes who you can anything you want to call them, baby. Since I have read City of Nets by Otto Friedrich I have a lot of secondhand knowledge about the film career of Reagan should I ever need football field room to run. Never mind. no one wants to go down that road with you, Mar. I wasn't thinking about Ronald Reagan in his various positions, honest. Eyes on the road kill road. The ass on the photo copy machine and stand apart and spread 'em, perp! Full body cavity search. Ballard is the hard ass female guard who could stick her hand all the way up there. I'm just doing my job, ma'am. If you read Crash you'll be all the way up there in the orifices is exactly what the book jacket blurb says, honest. My mouth hurts after all of that all the way up there, actually. I may be bruised and eating ice cream for a while. What did I have to hide? Pictures from the x-ray machine says Halloween costume for next year (if you plan these things in advance) and this is what I would look like if I were a smushed bug on your grill. The medical instruments are cold on the naked ass hanging out of the window for the passerby. She doesn't have a bed side manner. The hands are fucking cold. Clinical hands on the flesh equipment and contrasting assured movements on the machines that could be made to do the ass on the photocopy machine effect of I know exactly what I want it to expose and let's reenact this until it's all the way up in there.

The problem with reenacting and trying to get some desired effect is it can be too actor moving stage right to stage left. I know there was something about our relationship to the material world in place of one with the other cogs, I mean bodies - whoops I mean machines. No, I mean people. If the ritual doesn't mean anything to you but habit it could be like sitting in traffic for the 24-7 jam. Married sex. This used to get me off of marriage to getting off. Ballard hardened me out like a used car. Sex like a body rolled into a morgue. Eleven o'clock news every day and same old shit. Scab healed over too many times. Am I trying to say I was numb by too much sex? No, I hope I'm not saying that. It was the injury as sexual as functional. The perfunctory let's stage car crashes, fuck like electric bunnies (they dream of electric sex) and stare at the blood droplets rising to the surface. I used to lock myself in my car and give myself heat stroke on purpose. I would do it on regular life work days. Personal hell sauna thing. I am on scar back of the hand intimate with feeling vessels by letting out the various bodily vessels. Mine was different than theirs. It doesn't feel like message speaking to society's problems with coldness. It feels more like just trying to push off the what you can't use pain off the cliff (and it ain't Freudian phallic). I don't know if I felt connected to them about all of this. It just doesn't feel like that to me. I guess I'm the ghost that doesn't know its dead in those horror stories.

I would not like it at all to be submissive to anyone. Their retreat into these body crime scenes and giving up their ghost to the higher (?) authority of chance? I might be too different to understand the feel-something-different side of it. It's a whole different kind of release. No, I wouldn't like it at all. Pinocchio is too real a boy now. I don't think Ballard wanted a flesh and blood relinquishing to the sweet, sweet void anyway. I kind of wish it was. He would take apart the machine to see how it worked, I think. It's rare to get that out of Ballard, actually. He's so high concept for possibilities sometimes that I get to feeling frustrated. He's not always like that. His short stories The Drowned Giant and The Garden of Time are two of my favorite that I have ever read. If this were a robot that has dreams of bunnies it would be one of those Blade Runner machines that is a real person in a crowd of faces that look like his but could be another species for all he knows. Memories of them would just have to be made up. Realize you are standing on the ear of a felled big beast and think about what you are treading on all of the time to get to where you go without thinking about it every day (I stare at the ground too much).

In our wounds we celebrated the re-birth of the traffic-slain dead, the deaths and injuries of those we had seen dying by the roadside and the imaginary wounds and postures of the millions yet to die.

I like Ballard. I like that he thought about this stuff and tried to work it out some place that meant something to him (stories). It's not pushing it way, way down in the trunk, right? But I am Mariel and I haven't thought about Vaughn or Ballard (the Crash Ballard character) or Caroline or the others since reading until now when I'm writing my book review and if I don't think about them then they aren't ghosts. I guess I'm not a statement kind of girl. They were, though. They did nothing but try to make statements and beat up the words until it said what they thought it wanted to say. (They could have done something other than have sex where the bad thing happened. Ghosts only come to where it meant something to you so they were doing that wrong.) Did Ballard say what he wanted to say? I'm Mariel so I was looking for something else. I do think about how Ballard (character Ballard) looked to Vaughn to show him what to do. Luke Skywalker's machine hand has been veined to feed someone else.

Now, a personal story to make all who read it weep. When... This is hard.... When I was a young girl I had to.... Maybe I should lie down in the back seat first. So my mother and older sister had a "thing" for actor James Spader. Yes, I am well aware that he is practically the devil! I watched the movies down to the Don Johnson socks and white suits. "There's no dust in this dust buster!" still passes my lips in my most apocalyptic memories. What would you have done? (It's so easy to sit there and judge some person who reviews these books out of nothing but the purest generosity of her book loving heart, isn't it?) So I sat right there and watched the damned movies. They didn't have any interest in the Cronenberg film of Crash, though (we watched plenty of his other films so this I cannot account for). I haven't seen it since high school. I don't remember it being like the book. It's hard to tell when I am trying to side step the haunting specter of Spader trying to steal Jack Nicholson's Michelle Pfieffer candy from a baby in Wolf. You would just love for all the shit to come down, wouldn't you? I could review the movie of Crash just for you and then Spader would make me eat three peas and a scoop of ice cream (from the film Secretary don't I just know it. Never mind that came out in my adulthood). It was like some acting out the horrors in a Lifetime getting off on abuse movie. They even made a movie about this (not Lifetime. Spike! This was male interest. Christina Ricci played me with all my pleases and q's). Well, I won't do it!(less)

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Nov 30, 2012 Evan rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: transgressive, sexuality, deliciously-nasty, __in-my-collection, scifi-utopia-dystopia, 2011-reads, gay-interest, horror-macabre, men-behaving-badly

This book is a sausage made out of roadkill...and glass shards. And forced similes and metaphors strewn about the highway, ugly as a car wreck.

So much semen is spurted and wiped on the dashboard instrument panels that I ceased after awhile to wonder or care how our motorists could even read the dials.

So many commas and clauses litter the paragraphs like so many slashed half-moon rubber tires lining the interstate that one hopes Ballard did not race past the tollbooths and rob the inventors of co...more

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Mar 21, 2008 Chris rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: perverts of the most sordid rank

There are very few movies even remotely interesting enough to warrant reading the book it was adapted from; but back in the glorious years of the late 1990’s, when I saw David Cronenberg’s masterful adaptation of “Crash”, I knew there was absolutely no way I could go wrong with the book. Let’s face it, there is absolutely no way that you can sit through the entirety of the film and not get it on with whoever happens to be in close proximity, but just make sure there is someone there, even if it’...more There are very few movies even remotely interesting enough to warrant reading the book it was adapted from; but back in the glorious years of the late 1990’s, when I saw David Cronenberg’s masterful adaptation of “Crash”, I knew there was absolutely no way I could go wrong with the book. Let’s face it, there is absolutely no way that you can sit through the entirety of the film and not get it on with whoever happens to be in close proximity, but just make sure there is someone there, even if it’s a she-male, because if you dare watch this alone, at some point you will accost your car, and you’ll wake up in an uncomfortable daze, reeking of grease, gasoline, wiper fluid, and engine coolant. Despite whatever indicators might be misleading you on the dashboard, your car does not need to be ‘serviced’ like that. Only two things ever happen in Crash; two or more ill-omened vehicles are pulverizing one another, or people are getting their freak on in ways I don’t have the vocabulary to describe. Usually these two common elements are occurring simultaneously. I figured this would be a great read on a flight to Seattle back at the time, seeing as the purpose of my trip was basically to reenact the book, minus the car wrecks. I wasn’t ready for it.

Now, having re-read it almost exactly a decade later, I had finally come to believe I was ready for it having broadened my horizons and added unspoken volumes to my life experiences. What a fool I am.

Before going any further, I need to note that I love the way Ballard writes; while the end of the book somewhat tails off in my opinion, the sh!t this guy comes up with and the way he works each word to his own unfathomable ends is a delight to read. Considering that a great deal of this book centers almost exclusively on esoteric automobile components and body parts you’ve never heard your mother mention, Ballard finds a way to pick it up and put it to bed without the least difficulty, somehow leaving the reader anxious to discover how the characters are going to copulate with/in a vehicle and indelibly mark it with their own vile secretions during their next perverse endeavor. As an added bonus, after a single reading you’ll also have the ability to keep of your half of the most twisted and flagrantly homosexual conversation going on at the ‘Manhole’. You may never need to, but the fact you can is reassuring; there’s a slight sense of accomplishment even in seldom-employed skill sets.

Now for the warning. Do not read this while taking mass transit, especially the part where Ballard intricately describes Catherine Ballard’s grooming habits. You’ll be looking at that weird, large, muttering woman on the train with the huge sunglasses, disgustingly wondering if she goes through the same routine, and you’ll be spending the rest of the ride knowing you’ve just swallowed back a little of your own vomit, something we can all do without.

Anyway, the story centers on James Ballard (where the author gets his ideas for his characters monikers is beyond my reasoning), a well-to-do commercial director who has an apparently open marriage to his wife, Catherine, and seems like quite a space-cadet to begin with. There’s no benefit to his physical or mental condition when he f*cks up while driving and ends up in a head-on collision, which leaves the driver of the other car dead and the passenger a widow. James winds up maimed, and spends a good deal of time recovering from the wounds he’s sustained, and upen being released from the hospital, finds he’s been under the surveillance of Vaughan, a heavily-scarred maniac and patron saint of those deformed in auto crashes. Immediately, Ballard is drawn into Vaughan’s lifestyle and inner circle of car-wreck-enthusiasts; Seagrave, an oft-concussed crossdresser and stuntman, Gabrielle, a hot piece of deformed ass (for a lesbian opium-addict), and Helen Remington, the heavily-bruised widow of Ballard’s victim. What can such a group of malcontents get up to? I’ll spare the details of mutual masturbation while watching filmed automobile collisions, visiting wreckage sites to photograph the gruesome aftermath while working themselves into a sexual frenzy, and fulfilling those desires savagely by engaging in some ridiculous and completely insane all-orifice buggery in either a moving or completely totaled car, involving every possible pairing of characters at one point or another. Ballard covers all the bases; gay sex, straight sex, even people vigorously rubbing their aching loins against a front-quarter-panel while inspecting a mangled car for a little satisfaction.

The point of the book? I don’t see one. Luckily, J.G. Ballard does, so I’ll let his introduction address that. According to Ballard, “Crash” is ‘an extreme metaphor for an extreme situation’, in which he has ‘used the car not only as a sexual image, but as a total metaphor for man’s life in today’s society’. He goes so far as to explain that ‘the ultimate role of Crash is cautionary, a warning against that brutal, erotic, and overlit realm that beckons more and more persuasively to us from the margins of the technological landscape.’ I’ll be honest; I have no clue what this f*cking lunatic is talking about; the message I got from Crash was that I’m hanging out with all the wrong people: I should be devoting my time looking for companionship amongst the edge-walking dare-devils of the world, those unafraid to take that toke over the line and lay it all on the line, the type of decadent folk that don’t even consider you might be referring to a seatbelt when you mention ‘wearing protection’ during a collision.(less)

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Aug 24, 2008 Melanie rated it 2 of 5 stars Recommends it for: bicyclists?

Shelves: 2008

Reading this book wore me out. I like Ballard, I think he's a writer who really gets technology, modernity, isolation, etc., and I'm pretty non-judgmental about even sort of far-out fetishes, but what kept flashing through my brain was GRATUITOUS GRATUITOUS WHEN WILL THIS BOOK END ARRGH. And I don't even mean that it was gratuitous with the sex-and-accidents stuff (although it was)--the blunt, increasingly inelegant repetition of Ballard's arguments made a compelling idea, after a certain point,...more

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Mar 03, 2008 Joshua rated it 2 of 5 stars Recommends it for: masochists, perverts, sickos, auto enthusiasts

Less of a conventional narrative arc-based novel and more of an exercise in rhythm and repetition of key phrases and imagery, Crash is not pleasurable reading. Nor, I figure, is it intended to be. It is extremely challenging, primarily owing to the graphic sex and violence, but also due to the clinical language Ballard employs to disengage the reader from the characters and their actions. The injuries are as distant as an anatomy textbook's illustrations. The sex is robotic. The word "mucus" see...more

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Jan 20, 2008 tENTATIVELY, cONVENIENCE rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: sf

This & Ballard's "Atrocity Exhibition" were the peak of his psychopathology of urban living novels. When Cronenberg was making his movie version in Toronto in 1995, I had an acquaintance who was an actor auditioning for the main role ask the casting folks if an obscure composer (myself) wd be considered for the soundtrack. Nope, Howard Shore was always the man. I'd wanted to record samples of all machine noises & substitute them for &/or underlay them w/ all human sounds. Anyway, whe...more

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May 22, 2011 Jason rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

Defiantly transgressive, which I can certainly respect. After all, it's better to provoke a negative response in a reader (disgust, anger, etc.) than no response at all. Ballard is clearly trying to disgust and anger his readers and does so in a memorable way that would later be coopted by writers like Chuck Pahalniuk.

Having said this, this book is less satisfying than it ought to be. Lengthy, graphic descriptions of sex and violence are appropriately graphic yet inappropriately lengthy to the p...more

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Sep 25, 2012 Kyle rated it 5 of 5 stars

This is my second or third reading of Ballard's Crash and I'm still amazed by every theme this book expels. I find the relationship between car crashes and the technology of the body so fascinating--there's just so much Ballard does with sexuality and his prose achieves a beautiful elegance that really makes reading a seemingly gruesome and pathological story incredibly enjoyable. A part of me can't help feeling liberated after reading certain passages...

Crash is easily the most daring and revol...more

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Jul 09, 2011 Aaron rated it 2 of 5 stars

What interests me most about Crash is that despite J.G. Ballard’s capabilities for beautiful and evocative storytelling, I've never read a story that works so hard at being ugly. It almost seems like some sort of bizarre writing exercise that was published by mistake. Crash is a novel so heavily packed with morbidly clinical descriptions of gratuitous sex and violence that it's nothing short of surreal.

Now I've always considered myself a man with a strong stomach. Although Crash contains its fai...more What interests me most about Crash is that despite J.G. Ballard’s capabilities for beautiful and evocative storytelling, I've never read a story that works so hard at being ugly. It almost seems like some sort of bizarre writing exercise that was published by mistake. Crash is a novel so heavily packed with morbidly clinical descriptions of gratuitous sex and violence that it's nothing short of surreal.

Now I've always considered myself a man with a strong stomach. Although Crash contains its fair share of cringe-worthy moments, I managed to get through them okay. The problem does not necessarily lie in the novel’s visceral nature. The true issue is redundancy. Does it effectively portray the obsessive nature of the characters? Absolutely. Does it make for particularly interesting reading? Not really. In my experience with this novel, once you've read about one gory and sexually cathartic motor crash, you've read about them all. And yet they never cease. Ultimately, the story is low on content, and Ballard does not effectively extend it into a full novel.

As for the actual idea behind the novel, that being man's relationship with technology, I'm not sure if it really works. I've heard people say that Crash has aged poorly, but to be honest, I think it was a little dated even for the time it was published. I don’t think I really buy into automobiles as the representative technology in this novel. They’re not a new form of technology now, and they weren’t back the either. It seems like a science fictional concept that has been transferred into a contemporary setting in order to appeal to a mainstream literary audience. Ballard chose to write about cars rather than robots or computers. But why even bother? The sheer ugliness of the novel kills any potential for mainstream accessibility.

Nevertheless, I admire Ballard’s foresight. Technology is a massively prevalent medium of human interaction. Only instead of cars, it’s computers and cell phones. And practices like cybersex and sexting are far more common than car crash fetishes ever were. Automobiles are a somewhat stilted metaphor, but the parallel does exist.

At the end of the day, I love a self-destructive character study as much as the next guy (perhaps moreso), but Crash is considerably flawed in its execution. It’s not one star bad, but it wasn’t a particularly enjoyable read for me. It had some interesting ideas, but the story didn’t hold together as well as I would have liked. (less)

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Jun 16, 2011 Jan-Maat added it · review of another edition

Shelves: 20th-century, fiction, british-isles

The edition I read came with an introduction by the author in which we find:
...we live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind - mass-merchandizing, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the pre-empting of any original response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. It is now less and less necessary for the writer to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.

In th...more

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Nov 13, 2008 dara rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: trashy, reviewed, read-in-2003

I read this five years ago, and I hated it. I hated it fiercely. I recall thinking it better suited for a short story at best. I am almost tempted to read it again to see if I would still loathe it so strongly or if my reading tastes have changed. In the meantime, I'll just provide what I wrote about it at age seventeen:

I disliked this book so intensely that I feel I have to warn people. I bought this book because Amazon recommended it after I rated some of Chuck Palahniuk's books. Their writing...more

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Aug 16, 2008 Louise rated it 4 of 5 stars

Where to start... I've never read a book like this before and doubt I will again. It's one big, pornographic car crash of a novel. It's dangerous, it's obscene, it's filthy, it's exhilerating, reading it makes you feel as if you're driving too fast but once you start you can't take your foot off the accelerator, you have to keep going until you hit the flyover wall at the end.

The story is told through the eyes of the narrator, named after the author, who meets 'nightmare angel of the expressways...more

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Jul 26, 2011 Megan rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: erik-s-books

This is another one of those books that forces you to think about things you really don't want to think about. I'm not even sure if I liked it, but when words on paper make your emotional reaction so intense, that's good writing. Crash is about a man named James who gets into a car crash, then meets a man named Vaughan who introduces him to the underworld of people who are turned on by car crashes. James, his wife, the woman whose car James crashed into, and Vaughan all get involved together wit...more

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Jan 11, 2013 Ralf rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: disturbed-me

Cronenberg deserves a helluva lot credit for being able to write and direct cohesive adaptations of seemingly unfilmable novels, among them Crash. I read the book solely because I love the film very dearly, and looking back I may have been a little generous giving it four stars. Then again, transgressive literature has always been my thing. One of the more curious aspects of the book is the dreaminess of it and especially the leather-and-chrome-and-oil-sex within - the morbid sexual content inte...more

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Nov 30, 2007 Tosh rated it 3 of 5 stars

I re-read this novel recently, and it didn't grab me like the first read. But what should be pointed out is that Ballard has a vision of the world that is right on the mark. I find his writing not that interesting, but his sense of the 'modern' world is totally correct. I think "Concrete Island" is his masterpiece.

Saying that, and living in Los Angeles, cars are totally ertoic. And I imagine a car accidnet is some sort of release of some sort. There is nothing more terrifying then twisted car m...more

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Dec 18, 2008 JBedient rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

If you've never read Ballard, and your curious, this is the book you want to start with. I won't get into the plot or the antiseptic, yet haunting, prose. I'll just say that all the motifs of Ballard are here, and they are presented with crystal clear precision, with touches of what I'd call industrial surrealism.

Some people find the book a little cold and detached -- but that's the whole point -- Ballard is not a Garcia Marquez, he's not painting a romantic picture full of pastels(I'm not knock...more

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May 18, 2013 Brian Fagan rated it 4 of 5 stars

I heard an interview with the author, J.G. Ballard once where he said being involved in a car crash is problaby the most traumatic event someone will go through until their own death. That seems to be the thesis of this Crash. Whether you like this book or not, I think it's obvious that this is the work of some kind of genius. It reminded me of a much more clearly stated William S. Burroughs thesis. While, not in the real world, it's closer to planet Earth than Burroughs ever was.

If this is a w...more I heard an interview with the author, J.G. Ballard once where he said being involved in a car crash is problaby the most traumatic event someone will go through until their own death. That seems to be the thesis of this Crash. Whether you like this book or not, I think it's obvious that this is the work of some kind of genius. It reminded me of a much more clearly stated William S. Burroughs thesis. While, not in the real world, it's closer to planet Earth than Burroughs ever was.

If this is a work of genius, why wouldn't I rate it five stars instead of the measly four I did give it? There are two reasons:

1. The book is extremeley repetitive. Right off the bat we're introduced to a world of semen and car crashes. There does not seem to be a build up. While the dreamlike, surreal atmosphere of the main character, James Ballard, just kind of drifting through the story works very well, the author, J.G. Ballard, blew her load and totaled his car in the first twenty pages and then repeated.

2. The book is anti-climatic. There is a wonderful, eerie, dreamy climax that involves the main character and the antagonist, Vaughan, tripping on LSD while driving and ultimately, having anal sex. It's wonderfully perverse that actually works as a wonderful ending to the story. Unfortunately, what follows would have made for an excellent epilogue, but instead was about 25 pages of more plot invovling Vaughan following the main character and his wife, before stealing their car and attempting to fill his dream of a fatal car crash involing himself and Elizabeth Taylor.

Ballard's thesis of tying in car crash fatalities to getting off is a solid one. There is a wonderful chapter focused on a character named Garielle. Gabrielle is the epitome of a Ballard's thesis. A car crash victim who made it out alive, Gabrielle sustained injuries that left her with several metal braces along her back and legs, as well as huge long scars and divets along her body. When the main character, James Ballard, finally has sex with her, he can only get off but making love to those scars and divets. With all the metal and wounds it is the closest you can possibly get to having sex with the car crash.

On a side note i really like how every time a man finished in a woman the semen would leak out. Too many times in books and movies the man cums in a woman and the cum just stays there. The woman could do jumping jacks and the jizz wouldn't dribble out. We all know in life that it leaks out. So, i'm glad Ballard knew that too.

The idea of the book remdinded me of a quote by Jim Morrison, who said, "I feel most alive when confronting death." This book seems to suggest that the ultimate way to get your rocks off is when you are on the ve to get to death is by surviving a car crash.

At the end of the book Vaughan is dead and someone says of his death, "...the spectators moved towards this huge stage, drawn there by the logic and beauty of Vaughan's death." I think readers are attracted this book much in the same way, because there is a logic and a beauty to it. (less)

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Mar 05, 2013 Ursula rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 1001-books, fiction

This one left me with lots of notes and not much of an idea how to begin putting those thoughts together into something coherent, so I won't promise any sort of organized comments.

I'm going to guess that most readers pick this one up with some knowledge of the content, which involves the intersection (pun oh so painfully intended) of automobiles, traffic accidents, and eroticism. Our narrator (coincidentally named James Ballard) gets into a car accident with another vehicle containing a couple;...more This one left me with lots of notes and not much of an idea how to begin putting those thoughts together into something coherent, so I won't promise any sort of organized comments.

I'm going to guess that most readers pick this one up with some knowledge of the content, which involves the intersection (pun oh so painfully intended) of automobiles, traffic accidents, and eroticism. Our narrator (coincidentally named James Ballard) gets into a car accident with another vehicle containing a couple; the man dies, the woman lives. From there, Ballard becomes entangled with Vaughan, a morbid aficionado of collisions.

The book is the direct opposite of the saying "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." Nothing is ever just a cigar here. Everything is muddled together: reality and fantasy, sex and violence, metal and bodily fluids, organic descriptors for inorganic objects and vice versa. The automobile accident is seen as a way to literally jolt people out of their everyday complacency and awaken them to the real possibilities of the world. Injury and pain are the means to a form of enlightenment (but not in any form Buddha would recognize). Cars are described as arbors or bowers, or "benevolent technology." The modern relationship with the vehicle is taken to its most extreme position, its nature as both a public and a private place explored from every angle.

The writing is the melding of style and substance. Words, phrases, ideas are repeated, echoed and mimicked even as the characters find patterns in accident scenes and try to recreate them with their own movements and postures. Reading the book is itself like witnessing a car accident - you want to look away, but somehow you just can't.

Recommended for: people who like to dissect meanings, non-germophobes (there are a lot of bodily fluids), Sigmund Freud, David Cronenberg fans.

Quote: "I had thought of his last moments alive, frantic milliseconds of pain and violence in which he had been catapulted from a pleasant domestic interlude into a concertina of metallized death."(less)

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Jan 03, 2013 Jesús rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Primera relectura de 2013, muy lejos ya de la sombra de la película de Cronenberg, que fue lo que me empujó a leer la novela a mediados de los 90 y cuyas imágenes influyeron entonces inevitablemente en mi lectura (y una película que, por cierto, no he vuelto a ver). 2013: otra época, otras imágenes, otra lectura menos individualista, menos sexual y onanista, también con menos pose, menos pop sin duda, menos hacia mí y más hacia fuera, hacia el exterior, hacia lo que me rodea. Porque de pronto me...more

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Nov 30, 2012 Snorlax rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Um.

Well, it's good at what it does, and what it does best is it gets under your skin and makes you feel soiled. I think I'm still letting it sink in, or possibly letting it work its way out of my system - in my sweat, in my urine, in my subcutaneous fat - and I'm really not sure what to say. It manages to make "binnacle" into a four-letter word, which is impressive. And it's got the whole alienation thing down: the narrator seems to have spent so long in a state of abject disconnection that his...more

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Oct 31, 2012 Gijs rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 20th-century, 20th-century-1970s, british-literature, english, fiction, novels

'Crash' is a novel about people who have a car crash fetish. This extraordinarily original idea is worked out to perfect believability in the first chapter. However, when the novel progresses, one soon realizes that 'Crash' easily could have stopped there, and should have been a short story...

The narrator, supposedly Ballard himself, is drawn into the erotics of car crashes after his own accident in a car crash, especially when he meets the enigmatic Vaughan. What follows is an endless repetitio...more

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Sep 10, 2012 Mircalla64 (free Liu Xiaobo) rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fantascienza

sotto la rece che scrissi per il film di Cronenberg tratto dal romanzo di Ballard

Il regista pubblicitario James Ballard (James Spader) vive in maniera insolita l’esperienza di un incidente d'auto e scopre, in seguito ad esso di aver associato il piacere sessuale agli scontri automobilistici. James inizia una relazione atipica con la dottoressa Helena Remington (Holly Hunter), che nello stesso incidente ha perduto il marito e riesce nel contempo a contagiare la moglie Catherine (Deborah Unger) in...more sotto la rece che scrissi per il film di Cronenberg tratto dal romanzo di Ballard

Il regista pubblicitario James Ballard (James Spader) vive in maniera insolita l’esperienza di un incidente d'auto e scopre, in seguito ad esso di aver associato il piacere sessuale agli scontri automobilistici. James inizia una relazione atipica con la dottoressa Helena Remington (Holly Hunter), che nello stesso incidente ha perduto il marito e riesce nel contempo a contagiare la moglie Catherine (Deborah Unger) in un delirio da sessualità terminale che si esprime attraverso scambi di coppia. In uno di questi l'uomo subisce il fascino di Vaughan (Elias Koteas), che ha l’hobby delle ricostruzioni di famosi incidenti ed il cui sogno è l’incontro attraverso un frontale con Elizabeth Taylor.

E’ passato abbastanza tempo dall’uscita di questo film perché le incitazioni al rogo in nome della pubblica morale siano state se non dimenticate, per lo meno superate da urla originate da più recente indignazione. Ora possiamo dire che in definitiva Cronenberg ha solo fatto un gran lavoro, non è per niente facile tradurre in immagini i deliri di uno dei più controversi scrittori del secolo e Ballard è ancora adesso un cantore disilluso delle infinite possibilità di deriva umana.
Certo rappresentare una sessualità iperattiva dietro i vetri del prolungamento fallico per eccellenza, l’auto, deve essere sembrato davvero troppo a tutti gli adoratori dell’ultimo modello in commercio. Ma è proprio qua che Ballard e Cronenberg si incontrano e celebrano lo stato terminale delle ambizioni consumistiche, che non portano la felicità come promesso dagli spot, ma a volte possono condurre ad un apice eiaculatorio che si fa materia attraverso l’impatto, Crash per l’appunto. E se nel libro le parole erano forti, e lo sono ancora, di certo le immagini non sono da meno, quindi le rappresentazioni di famelici amplessi, come quelle di feticistiche riproduzioni di incidenti o le fantasie voyeristiche messe in atto con una freddezza che richiama il metallo, non sono altro che il fine ultimo di chi deve per forza richiamare l’attenzione su un pericolo, quello poi avveratosi della progressiva meccanizzazione dell’io che si fa negazione della morte, attraverso il mancato riconoscimento della paura e la celebrazione della velocità come fine ultimo, ma per correre dove, poi nessuno lo sa.
In Crash la morte è il fantasma ultimo che viene mascherato da una sessualità iperattiva, che nega la sua esistenza, in contrapposizione con essa e che alla fine diventerà il veicolo del contagio, come nel Demone Sotto la Pelle. Crash è un fantastico esempio di quello che in Cronenberg è divenuto celebrazione del diverso, un discorso iniziato anni fa con i primi film e che è sfuggito ai più in favore di una facile individuazione di una tematica di superficie come quella della poetica della nuova carne.
La chiave di lettura di Crash è da ricercarsi in un desiderio di rappresentare i riti di passaggio nel corso della vita, unico meccanismo per riconoscere la crescita individuale e sicuro termometro della nostra direzione. Tutto il film è incentrato sulla sopravvivenza del mito alla morte violenta, in questo senso i protagonisti del film vivono tutti un tempo preso a prestito, dunque territorio assoluto del mito. Il rito dell’incidente stradale è la chiave per accedere al mondo mitico rappresentato, la sessualità è il mezzo per affermare la propria sopravvivenza e il modo per celebrare il tempo in più che i protagonisti sottraggono alla morte. La chiave d’accesso per comprendere al meglio il discorso sul rito di passaggio è nella rappresentazione dell’incidente di James Dean. La morte di Dean lo ha consegnato al mito, i protagonisti del film, in quanto sopravvissuti ad un incidente d’auto sono essi stessi mitici, nel senso che hanno in comune sia la sopravvivenza che la menomazione, ma sono anche coscienti che per entrare nel mito bisogna aver avuto un’esperienza che, in qualche modo gli ha cambiato la vita, la rappresentazione ha la valenza di acclamare chi riesce a sopravvivere più volte, sia all’incidente in sé che al passaggio attraverso l’esperienza mitica che simula la morte, il cui superamento li fa sentire vivi e non più mortali, non immortali però, la differenza sta nel fatto che loro possono morire, ma non ne sentono più la paura.
Detto questo bisogna richiamare l’attenzione sul fatto che il gioco iniziato da Ballard e proseguito poi da Cronenberg è quello di scardinare le icone consumistiche che, anche oggi, ci danno l’illusoria momentanea sicurezza di essere qualcuno, un qualcuno talmente unico da trascendere, attraverso l’uso degli oggetti celebrati dalla pubblicità, il nostro destino ultimo. Se l’auto in Ballard/Cronenberg non è più il veicolo del prestigio sociale e fantasmaticamente la
celebrazione delle proprie intime dimensioni, allora forse si può vedere meglio che dietro le nostre convinzioni circa i bisogni primari, si nasconde una manipolazione. Ed è a questo punto che i due ci lasciano a riflettere, una riflessione molto difficile sulle reali possibilità di trovare noi stessi sotto il marasma di convinzioni indotte che ancora oggi ammorbano la nostra esistenza.

Anna Maria Pelella

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Aug 07, 2012 Clea rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: big-disappointments

I recently tackled J.G. Ballard’s Crash. This is technically transgression literature, so the fact that the author goes out of his way to shock, disgust and horrify doesn’t really come as much of a shock. The problem is that I wasn’t so much shocked, disgusted and horrified as I was bored.

Yes, I realize that the book is almost thirty years old by now (it was first published in 1973), and the amount of violence and gore we are exposed to on a daily basis has increased to such an extent since then

...more

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Jun 05, 2012 Ape rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I can't help but think that a lot of this went straight over my head. And it's not an easy book to read, not something you'd read for an enjoyable experience or to relax. It's kind of depressing to say the least, and a sad reflection on life. The people in this book are a bit like zombies, well, machines really, which I suppose is what they want, just going through the motions, but always feeling very distant and detached. There is a lot - no understatement - of graphic sex in this book, so it's...more I can't help but think that a lot of this went straight over my head. And it's not an easy book to read, not something you'd read for an enjoyable experience or to relax. It's kind of depressing to say the least, and a sad reflection on life. The people in this book are a bit like zombies, well, machines really, which I suppose is what they want, just going through the motions, but always feeling very distant and detached. There is a lot - no understatement - of graphic sex in this book, so it's not for the squeamish. This isn't really erotica, it's just wierd, with the survivors of car crashes getting off on driving around, seeing other car crashes and having sex so that they might become a part of a car and a car crash. All very strange. I suppose it's the ultimate extension of this obsession with cars and driving and the sex symbols that go with it. Don't they say that men that buy big cars are compensating for something? Aren't some women attracted to men purely because of the cars they drive? This is maybe taking all of that to its ultimate conclussion.

The main character and narrator of this story is called James Ballard - ok, wierd. This isn't a biography, although I'm sure I read somewhere that he sees this as the biography of his imaginary life? Anyway, he gets involved in a car crash, and in the aftermath and recovery after this, he becomes aware of Vaughan, this proper nutjob guy who does nothing but drive around taking photos of car crashes, the victims recovering, the victims later having sex in their cars, and everything inbetween, whilst constantly thinking of sex. That's all that goes on in his head, sex and car crashes, and it's so intermingled, it seems to be the one thought. He hangs out with a variety of car crash victims and a stunt driver, who's also messed up. There were slight hints at child abuse with the stunt driver's son, I thought as well. Vaughan gets nuttier and nuttier, fantasicies about actresses getting killed in car crashes, this focusing on Elizabeth Taylor (this book is from the 70s). I wonder what old Liz Taylor made of all of this? (less)

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Apr 24, 2012 Hannah rated it 5 of 5 stars

The controversial 1973 novel, ‘Crash’ tells the story of a group of people brought together by their experiences of and reactions to automobile accidents. It follows the narrator, James Ballard, and his wife Catherine in the aftermath of James’ car crash, simultaneously exploring their sexual relationships and their relationship with the technology that surrounds them.

Written at a time when new technologies were fast emerging and cultural critics were arguing that social relations were becoming...more

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Feb 25, 2012 Allan Dyen-shapiro rated it 4 of 5 stars

Crash was recommended to me as a classic piece of experimental fiction and as a defining example of transgressive fiction. My impression is it purposely breaks every single rule of good writing. Brilliantly. The effect is to simulate hallucinations--for most of the book, those associated with pot or hash, in the last few chapters, that of an acid trip. The pacing is purposely slow, big on past perfect verb and convoluted sentences right where you would normally expect writing to support fast pac...more

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Feb 06, 2012 Sean Masterson rated it 4 of 5 stars

I recently discovered the work of a social critic Paul Virilio and his notion that technology cannot advance without creating new forms of disaster. The advent of the train gave us derailment. The airplane brought us the midair collision.

According to Ballard, the automobile brought us weird sex in smashed up cars. And lots of it. These characters are hollow and lack the warmth generally associated with being a mammal. They crawl over one another searching for a connection that technology has le...more

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Nov 12, 2011 Remittance Girl rated it 5 of 5 stars

Written in 1973, Crash may be one of the most difficult books you ever read or listen to. The author bravely names his protagonist 'Ballard' and then slowly evolves him as a man who, after being in a car crash, grows erotically obsessed with them and the damage they do to bodies. He become a member of a group who are all aroused by the violence of car crashes and the transformation effected by cataclysm to both human body and machine.

The story does harken back to Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, in a...more Written in 1973, Crash may be one of the most difficult books you ever read or listen to. The author bravely names his protagonist 'Ballard' and then slowly evolves him as a man who, after being in a car crash, grows erotically obsessed with them and the damage they do to bodies. He become a member of a group who are all aroused by the violence of car crashes and the transformation effected by cataclysm to both human body and machine.

The story does harken back to Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, in a way. It is a critical look at our obsessive love affair with popular technologies and contrasts this with the ephemeral nature of flesh. Not only does the novel contain almost pedantically detailed descriptions of the exteriors and interiors of cars, but the story is set around Heathrow Airport, outside London. And there are repeated references and allusions to planes, jet engines and a general obsession with the metallic, the mechanical and the modern.

There is also a focus on the idea of celebrity. One of the central figures in the novel is Dr. Robert Vaughn, a former TV-scientist, with whom he finds an affinity in his own erotic obsession. The doctor carefully plans out his own death in a head-on collision with the actress Elizabeth Taylor.

Ballard constantly uses extremely graphic but very clinical language for sex. And be warned, there are very graphic descriptions of unconventional sex acts all the way through the novel. For someone accustomed to reading modern erotic fiction, this is jarring.

I'm uncertain as to whether Ballard chose to consistently use clinical terms for sexual organs in order to imbue the story with a taint of medical fetishism, to attempt to portray sexual situations in graphic detail while using terms that would be considered the least likely to arouse the reader, or because he was simply not comfortable using more colloquial language. My guess is that his choice to use the more clinical terms was purposeful. I don't see Ballard being particularly queasy about 'rude' language and this was written well after Miller and Nin were published and widely read.

I don't think it is possible to appreciate this book unless you keep in mind the context of the time and place in which it was written. Ballard sets it in a very grey and mundane post-war Britain. His characters are driven by an existential emptiness and boredom to "a new sexuality, born from a perverse technology".

This is really not a novel for those in search of a comfortable read. It is purposefully extreme. Moreover, the banality and lack of authentic emotion with which the events are described will, I think, leave most listeners with a great many questions. The novel has no redemption and it might be considered a fundamentally amoral narrative. It requires reader or listener to be actively critical and analytical as the book is read. But the reward for maintaining that distance is to allow the reader to ponder some extremely important social questions about our relationship with technology, our love of celebrity, and our capacity for alienation.(less)

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Jul 11, 2011 Paul Watson rated it 1 of 5 stars Recommends it for: perverts, sexual pychopaths, you will hate it if you are normal

Let me start by saying that i really wanted to like this book. I love Chuck Palahinuick and i know he draws a lot of influence from Ballard. So i'm trying to get into some of his stuff and figured i would start with his most widely known work (perhaps next to Empire of the Sun). The idea of the car fasination theme was intreging and i really really really wanted this book to be good.

But it wasn't.

I read it in one evening and i have never been so gratefull for my ability to process 1,000 words a...more Let me start by saying that i really wanted to like this book. I love Chuck Palahinuick and i know he draws a lot of influence from Ballard. So i'm trying to get into some of his stuff and figured i would start with his most widely known work (perhaps next to Empire of the Sun). The idea of the car fasination theme was intreging and i really really really wanted this book to be good.

But it wasn't.

I read it in one evening and i have never been so gratefull for my ability to process 1,000 words a minute. Reading this book was work. Yes, Ballard's thesis about consumer cultre and america's boarderline sexual obsession with technolagy is pointed and interesting. And yes Ballard is an excelant writer. But his attempt to shock the reader into intelectual submission is an epic failure. I would not have thought it possible to put so many contreversial, vulgar, disgusting and graphic discriptions of sex and violence into a book and simultaniously make a book so incredibly boring. This book is about the social creation of ultra violent, materialistic sex maniacs but it reads like a medical textbook. Ballard's detatched prose is stylisticlly impressive for maybe the first 50 pages but quickly becomes excrutiatingly repetitive (mucus in every sentance).

Also... there is really no plot. The first page is the ending (spoiler alert: Vaughn dies but Liz Taylor is alright) and the rest of the book is repeted descriptions of violent sexual acts that are more pathetic than disturbing. That being said, this book is just really gross. Everything you never wanted to think about and never thought could be done in a car is done...repeatedly for 250 pages. It is a relitively short book but in the few hours it will take you to read it you will feel like you are reading an epic...a really really boring epic.

I going to give Ballard another chance, i've heard his other lesser known boks are a lot better. It can be for safely said that this books noteriety was gained from its contraversial content and not its literary excelance.

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May 25, 2011 Nick Tramdack rated it 5 of 5 stars

A prophetic and technical masterpiece.

Some notes...

-11: "I watched the blood irrigate her white blouse."
-12: "The intimate time and space of a single human being had been fossilized for ever in this web of chromium knives and frosted glass." - this sentence isn't ungrammatical, but it assumes and discards metaphors as it proceeds. Another way to put it is, it mixes metaphors.
-13: "The long triangular grooves on the car had been formed within the death of an unknown creature, its vanished iden...more A prophetic and technical masterpiece.

Some notes...

-11: "I watched the blood irrigate her white blouse."
-12: "The intimate time and space of a single human being had been fossilized for ever in this web of chromium knives and frosted glass." - this sentence isn't ungrammatical, but it assumes and discards metaphors as it proceeds. Another way to put it is, it mixes metaphors.
-13: "The long triangular grooves on the car had been formed within the death of an unknown creature, its vanished identity abstracted in terms of the geometry of this vehicle. How much more mysterious would be out own deaths, and those of the famous and powerful?" ... -It seems like B's style works by constantly mixing the concrete with the abstract.
-B. never seems to use italics.
-these catalogs of fantasies achieve interest by matching the proper death to the proper psychological profile, usually achieving irony on the way.
-25: end of chapter: "I stared at the contours of her thighs. Across the, the grey blanket formed a graceful dune. Somewhere beneath this mound lay the treasure of her pubis. Its precise jut and rake, the untouched sexuality of this intelligent woman, presided over the tragic events of the evening." [That verb, preside, is a shortcut to excavating the secret element of any situation.] He does it again, and not as well, 2 pages later. Note how in this case he earns the sentence by packing a lot of prestige and meaning into the subject.
-28: so po-mo: "As I looked down at myself I realized that the precise make and model-year of my car could have been reconstructed by an automobile engineer from the pattern of my wounds."
-32: "The elements of new technologies linked our affections." - you couldn't write a sentence like this with a straight face today.
-37: "...I knew that my feelings toward the dead man and his doctor wife were already overlaid by certain undefined hostilities, half-formed dreams of revenge." The key to this sentence is undefined. What would it mean to define them? Is that Ballard's project in writing the book?
-39: "The crash was the only real experience I had been through for years."
-stylistic tics: "now", "already", "presided", "complex", trauma imprinted on the body, violence mediated thru... well, media.
-74: "Marker lines unravelled diagonally below us" - great evocation of movement
-94: Vaughn's brass lighter is somehow a perfect detail
-122: crash test dummies: "Already the anticipated injuries they would suffer had been marked on their bodies..."
-123: "Once again [Vaughn] struck me as being a strange mixture of personal hauntedness, complete confinement in his own panicky universe, and yet at the same time open to all kinds of experiences from the outer world." In fact Ballard might not have made this observation before, but "once again" gets the job done, and maybe even more so than if he had said it.
-126-128: Amazing analysis of a slow-motion car crash. Look hard at these pages when writing an action scene. Ballard's use of "as if" allows him to anthropomorphize the dummies while flatly suggesting that they may even have desires. The dummies have names too. This scene should be re-read. "Their smooth faces pressed on into the advancing windshield as if eager to see the chest glider soaring up the bonnet of the car." "A fountain of spraying crystal erupted around them, through which, as if in celebration, their figures were taking up ever more eccentric positions."(less)

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topics	posts	views	last activity
J.G. Ballard: Crash	12	20	Apr 22, 2013 04:04am
Too descriptive?	3	22	Feb 13, 2013 09:56am

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