 "At the speed of light, in my car..." | 2009-09-03 |
| - Reviewed By -splendid- |
Crash is controversial, and Ballard meant it to be, but that should not distract us from noticing that it's incredibly well written. In Crash, people who have survived car crashes deal with their trauma by embracing and sexualizing the very crashes that maimed them (mentally and physically).
Ballard's descriptions of post-traumatic experience ring true. Sexual pleasure is the only thing Jim seems to value, and after his accident he unsurprisingly finds solace in more & more complicated & specific fantasies--he finds in sex the opposite of pain. We are given indications that before his accident, Jim had no human emotional connection beside the shallow consolations of sexual activity. As he recovers, we see (even if he doesn't) how his worldview, full of cold technology and the constant screaming pursuit of pleasure, set the limits of his ability to recover from the emotional and spiritual damage of the accident.
As I moved through Crash, I could feel Jim's superficiality--his desire for sensual escape from reality--inexorably drive him toward Vaughn's messianic fetishism. By obscuring the true existential horrors that should constitute trauma, he is unable to heal in any meaningful way. Vaughn's story ends predictably, and leaves Jim unable to do anything but dwell on it. |
| |
 "The erotic delirium of a car crash" | 2009-08-29 |
| - Reviewed By lreynaert2 |
`Crash' is an eminent example of J.G. Ballard's literary invention: `psycho science fiction', SF about the human mind and its dark unconscious pulses.
In `Crash' the obvious link between `car and penis', between `speed, status and sex' is turned into a perverse psychopathic obsession linking car crashes and orgasms.
The view that `(the motor-car is) the sexual act's greatest and only true locus' becomes a morbid delirium: `the crash between our two cars was a model of some ultimate and yet undreamt sexual union.'
The book's main character with his body covered by scars and self-inflicted wounds, sees `the sex act as the climax of his own death-collision'.
Half of the book is filled with explicit descriptions of hetero and homo sex gymnastics and profuse semen ejaculations. Today they are not shocking anymore, but rather boring.
J. G. Ballard's statement that car crashes are `almost the only way in which one can now legally take another person's life' is obviously not true. There exists a far more efficient and murderous `legal' means: war.
In this sense, J.G. Ballard's aggressive and menacing prose resembles in many ways the ecstatic and erotic evocations of war scenes by the German author Ernst Jünger, whose skin was also heavily marked by combat scars. Jünger's prose is a pure glorification of the war scene evocating the delirious excitement of being exposed to its deadly dangers: kill or be killed. However, Jünger's novels don't contain the suicidal component.
J. G. Ballard treats rather sympathetically a man with a sick and morbid mind, who uses his own cars as suicide bombs and those of his victims as coffins, and all that for the sole purpose of having the ultimate delirious erotic sensation.
I prefer by far the author's treatment of the same car crash subject in `Concrete Island'.
Only for the aficionados.
|
| |
| "GOVT490-Crash Review-GA" | 2009-08-06 |
| - Reviewed By User: AI3GGLS69XMX2 |
Since I've never read a novel by Ballard before, I have no way of measuring it against any of his other books. Needless to say, Crash by J. G. Ballard is a disturbing novel with a bleak vision of modern life and a fascinating take on the relation between man and technology by means of exploring the eroticism of the automobile.
Ballard writes explicitly about the world of individuals who get off on car crashes, and sexual acts involving, or taking place, in automobiles. The backdrop of the novel is Shepperton on the outskirts of London. The characters, including the protagonist, Ballard, become increasingly obsessed with the violent sexuality of car crashes. The interaction in which car and body leave their marks on each other is narrated as luridly as possible.
A great deal of this book centers almost exclusively on esoteric automobile components and body parts. It is not a pleasurable read, extremely challenging, not just because of the graphic sex and violence, but also due to the clinical language Ballard uses to disengage the reader from the characters and their actions. The injuries are distant, the sex is robotic, and the descriptive phraseology repetitive, such as "mucus" and "chromium".
Ballard definitely takes you on the exhilarating journey that explores sexual fetishisms connected to the car, and if he's aim was to unsettle people, he succeeded quite well. The book describes the relationship between a number of individuals where technology mixed with sexual desire and release can bring like minded people together. The reader experiences the alienation and emptiness that is at the heart of the story, which by no means would be considered erotic. The lives depicted within the pages depend on more and more extreme highs and drugs to keep the sexual tension going. Nowhere does love figure in this universe of motorways, airports, roundabouts and 20th century technology. Simply put, the book is about the dehumanization and depersonalization of the society and the glorification of the machine.
This book is not for the faint of heart or for those who are offended by explicit sex scenes. Worth a read, but only ONCE. |
| |
 "Crash? More like Crap!" | 2009-08-06 |
| - Reviewed By User: APME0QAWZ3G6R |
J. G. Ballard's novel, "Crash", is a tale of dark obsessions and perverse sexuality. From the author that created such critically acclaimed successes as, "Empire of the Sun", comes this pseudo pornographic novel that seems to have been taken from the alleyway of the mind that so few authors are willing to go down. The reader finds themselves both repulsed and drawn in as this tale weaves the lives of Vaughn, Ballard and his wife Catherine, and Dr. Helen Remington together in a violent sexually charged narrative.
The reader is introduced to both the insane obsessions of Vaughn and his vision of, "the whole world dying in a simultaneous automobile disaster" (p.16), and Ballard's sexual deviance within the first chapter of the book. Ballard is describing his first realization that car crashes charge his sexual impulses when narrating his "first minor collision in a deserted hotel car-park." (p. 16) we begin to understand that there is a bizarre fascination with the impact and twisting of metal and the sexual stimulation that is lurking within Ballard's fantasies. However, the book seems to be almost hiding the second narrative that seems to permeate through the shadows of the shock show sexuality. This second narrative seems to be the writers disconnect with the sterility of both persons and objects surrounding the main character. There is a certain distance in the language used to not only describe the intense sexual exploits, but the accidents, victims, and physical surroundings alike. It's almost as if it were part of a psychiatric report rather than a graphic novel. As Ballard lay in the sterile hospital environment after his accident with Dr. Remington in which her husband had been killed, he admits to himself, "The crash was the only real experience I had been through for years. For the first time I was in physical confrontation with my own body, an inexhaustible encyclopedia of pains and discharges..." (p. 39) it is here that we start to see the second narrative unfold. Ballard starts to realize that his life was a day to day hodgepodge of unimportant events and affairs. It is only after the accident that he begins to feel and become aware of himself again.
It seems that all the characters in this novel are essentially turned on or sexually awakened by the violence that is described in page after page. When Ballard is describing Catherine's "pleasantly promiscuous mind, fed for years on a diet of aircraft disasters and ware newsreels, of violence transmitted in darkened cinemas..." (p. 46) and how Dr. Remington's, "way of taking revenge on (Ballard) would be a sexual act between (them). As the novel moves forward we understand that violence seems to be the catalyst for sexual enticement.
The landscape woven by Ballard within the novel is busy yet desolate at the same time. This combination seems to echo the underlying theme of the book. During his recovery Ballard spends endless hours on his balcony looking over, "the endless landscape of concrete and structural steel that extended from the motorways to the south of the airport." (p. 48) He describes his home as "shielded from the distant bulk o London by an access spur of the northern circular motorway which flowed past us on its elegant concrete pillars." The use of the word shielded seems to tell the reader that the character feels isolated, the constant use of the words concrete and chromium within the book add to this sterility.
The novels villain is portrayed by the character Vaughn. Though at first the reader encounters him only as a shadow during Ballard's healing process, we soon understand that he is almost as central a character as the narrator himself. We see the sinister intentions of Vaughn early on in the novel during the scene of his death in which he's killed innocent people in an effort to kill the screen actress Elizabeth Taylor. Vaughn's obsession with dying in a violent crash with a celebrity is written all over this book. It seems to take on a life of its own, however, Vaughn; as Ballard notes; isn't interested in (the violent sexuality that permeates throughout the novel), but technology." (p. 116) Though Ballard may indeed believe this, the reader understands something far more violent lurking within the character, a user who is willing to destroy the lives of all those around him in order to fulfill his own sick fantasies.
Overall, the novel revolves around death, violent sexual episodes, extramarital affairs and a serious lack of association among both the characters and the narrator. The book seems more intent on making its reader cringe or masturbate (depending on one's taste) than it is on delivering any type of social critique or even fictional enjoyment. Though the book has been critically acclaimed this reader can honestly say that after reading this book one feels almost robbed of the time spent reading it and violated in one form or another from the words contained within it.
|
| |
| "A brilliant but unlikeable work of genius" | 2009-07-20 |
| - Reviewed By robertwmoore |
I found this to be a relatively unlikeable work of genius.
CITIZEN KANE is persistently regarded as the greatest movie ever made, but I have always found it to be a movie easier to admire and respect than to love. There is a coldness at the heart of KANE that keeps me from caring deeply about it in any but the most cerebral fashion. Nearly every frame is impossible not to find impressive, but at no point is my heart engaged. It is hard to care about the fate of Charles Foster Kane and that is the film's flaw, to the extent that such an amazing film can have a flaw.
I have much the same reaction to J. G. Ballard's CRASH. It is, in my opinion, a masterpiece, but one that is almost impossible to love. For me the novel has no heart, even though it also has no head. The book does not operate on the level of logic. No one would ever equate cars and violence and sex and Western civilization (the only street mentioned consistently in the book is named Western) in any deep fashion. The automobile is sometimes credited with the rise of teen sex as giving the young a place that they could be alone, but I personally have never conflated sex and the automobile as expressing the latter's essence. This novel is a work of genius not on the level of ideas, but on the level of imagery. Ballard creates his own mythology in which sex and cars and violence are intimately. This is expressed in the novel over and again in his language. Almost every aspect of the car is described both sexually and violently. Features of the care are both phallic and dangerous. The imagery makes not sense, except in terms of the linked visual aspects of the novel. CRASH ends up a weird blend of CAR AND DRIVER meets PENTHOUSE LETTERS meets CRITICAL INQUIRY meets 120 DAYS OF SODOM meets PEOPLE Magazine meets Guy Debord's THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE.
Lack of self-control and physical injury and sex are constantly conflated. All of the characters are subject to uncontrollable compulsions. The characters in the novel do not possess any self-control. They embrace danger and sex because they cannot refuse to do so. Ballard depicts our involvement with cars are central to our culture, and this involvement is deeply masochistic. The characters are obsessed with cars and car wrecks as a form of S&M. They are turned on by the danger, by the deadliness of the technology that has taken over and controls our lives. Ballard's characters as passive, almost bystanders, and deeply voyeuristic. The characters are scarred - literally - by the technology by which they are obsessed. They are overwhelmed by the sheer inhumanity of the technology. The cars are persistently described in cold, hard, artificial terms. Chrome, metal, molded, completely manufactured, they are contrasted with humans, who are scarred, damaged, and completely biological in orgin. The cars emit exhaust, oil, and grease, while the humans give out blood, urine, semen, and sweat. Ballard is relentless in carrying out this imagery and the persistent with which he does it is incredibly impressive. Ballard is, in short, nothing short of a genius. Only, his final product is not a likeable one. In describing a world that has become completely detached from all things human, he has created a novel that is too remote from humanity to love.
CRASH is both one of the most impressive novels that I have read in a long time, and also one of the most unlovable. |
| |
| "You'll never look at a steering column the same way again" | 2009-07-08 |
| - Reviewed By dhalgren99 |
To start this on a slightly humorous note, I would have loved to have been in the room when Ballard's agent had to pitch this one to the publisher. I don't envy that poor fellow one bit, this one couldn't exactly have been an easy sell.
Why is that, you ask? Isn't Ballard a well known and respected author of "speculative fiction" (what critics like to call science-fiction when they're forced to admit that a book that comes from a genre normally known for aliens and spaceships is actually on par with "real" books . . . but I digress) . . . heck, he even wrote that movie where Christian Bale got to play him. What could possibly be so shocking and off-putting about this novel?
Simply put, its about people who get off on cars. On cars, in cars, and more specifically, in car crashes. There's no real good way to put this that sounds at all normal and during the reading of this novel I was kind of afraid people would ask me what I was reading because there's no way to describe it without sounding mental. It's an erotic novel about car crashes. There, I said it. That's not something that exactly screams "family reading". Or even "niche audience reading".
But, getting the big elephant in the room regarding the concept out of the way, it's actually a fairly decent novel. What Ballard tends to excel in is taking situations that could be utterly absurd and putting a voice to them that makes it all sound realistic. When I describe the book, it sounds laughable, because I'm not capable of conveying the deeper meaning behind it. When Ballard presents it, you start to see where he's going with this.
And where he's going is some place very, very strange. The book is narrated by someone named James Ballard. Ballard gets into a car accident early on in the novel and in the process awakens a weird fascination within himself, a certain erotic fixation with cars and wrecks, the anatomy of an accident and how it all fits together into something he finds almost unbearably, coldly, sensual. In the process of discovering this he hooks up with a man named Vaughn, who is even more fascinated by the idea of it and goes around taking photographs of car accidents, arranging prostitutes in the shapes of stricken victims because it seems to turn him on, and beginning to orchestrate his own car wrecks, including one special obsession.
Don't get me wrong, this book is disturbing. There's a focus and intensity to it that's incredibly unsettling, an attention to detail that makes me not want to question how much research Ballard did here. Sexual positions and the anatomy are described in mind-numbing detail, until the sex scenes are stripped of all sense of eroticism, becoming coldly clinical, a listing of positions and acts that comes across as sterile as the clean lines of a new automobile.
Which seems to be Ballard's point. Once you get over the quietly shocking premise, there really is a serious point lurking underneath all the endless recounting of genitalia. There's something broken in the world, Ballard seems to be suggesting, and our obsession with technology and the road is just an outward manifestation of it. Car crashes bring people together in a kind of shared ecstasy, pushing every misfiring that this century has implanted in our heads. And through it all in Ballard's cold, clinical voice, recounting just where thing have gone wrong. Vaughn is a mess, yes, but on another level he's come to a conscious realization that can't shake and this is the only way he can think of to handle it.
What's interesting is how the hallucinatory style that he pulled off so brilliantly in "The Crystal World" works just as well here when turned to much grittier and realistic subjects. While "The Crystal World" was glittering and mysterious, here the situations become gritty and dark, the sex grimy and disturbing, and love just another word for a mental illness we haven't quite got around to diagnosing just yet. It's not a world you really want to spend all that much time in and by the time the book comes to a close you may find yourself gasping for air, but its a fascinating glimpse all the same, with a valid point to make, even if we're not ready for the implications of it.
It was written in the seventies, but if you think its' not relevant to today, imagine what the book is really suggesting. It's not about sex in cars but how we've let technology act as our replacement for human interaction, that the only way we can really interface with another human being is with technology as an intermediary. And in a world where millions of people are unable to communicate to each other without the Internet, without webcams, without multiplayer online games, without text messaging, where love can be subservient to avatars and icons, where we don't talk but ping and Twitter at each other, its still a point very much worth thinking about. |
| |
Expedited Available
