Product Description

The cult status of "Crash" has intensified since its original publication in 1973, making it a classic of underground literature. In this hallucinatory novel, the car provides the hellish tableau in which Vaughan, a 'TV scientist', experiments with erotic atrocities among crash victims, each more sinister than the last: ultimately, he craves a union of blood, semen and engine coolant in a head-on collision with Elizabeth Taylor.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #66384 in Books
• Published on: 1995-01-19
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

Review
In my opinion Crash is the finest post-war, avant-garde British novel. Indeed, I would argue that it's almost the last one as well. Ostensibly the story of a road-accident victim who becomes embroiled in a sinister sado-masochistic cult, the members of which stage car crashes in order to get their kicks, Crash is in fact a profound critique of that aspect of modernity the author has so pithily described as 'the Death of Affect'. Ballard writes about a world without feeling, dominated by stylization, media and the cult of celebrity. It remained fresh, powerful and shocking. And, of course, it was amazingly prescient. Review by Will Self, whose books include 'Great Apes' (Kirkus UK)

Science-fictioneer Ballard extends his field of vision beyond the genre in a death directed if not obsessed vista where sexuality and "perverse" - a recurrent word - technology, the technology of the automobile, are on the same vector - not only seemingly interchangeable as well as indivisible. Ballard has almost written his book in blood and semen (again recurrent, discharged everywhere) as if to reduce the distance between the cock and the cockpit. You might be reminded of Robbe-Grillet - so much of this is accomplished through the cine-camera technique via Vaughan, a computer "scientist as hoodlum," one of the recording eyes (the other is Ballard himself); there are the same photovisual jump shots, the same junctions and repetitions. And of course the orgasm or the little death as it has been called becomes the larger one as his speed freaks (yes, they are both kinds) propel themselves toward the larger death ahead. A comparison to The Clockwork Orange has been made and it is justified by its ugly, hostile, metallic insistence. And also as such, it qualifies as a bravura performance with a whiplash impact. Whether or not you choose to be there is something else again. (Kirkus Reviews)

From the Publisher
'Ballard is amongst our finest writers of fiction' Anthony Burgess

About the Author
J.G. Ballard was born in 1930 in Shanghai, where his father was a businessman. After internment in a civilian prison camp, he and his family returned to England in 1946. He published his first novel, 'The Drowned World', in 1961. His 1984 bestseller 'Empire of the Sun' won the Guardian Fiction Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It was later filmed by Steven Spielberg. His most recent novel is 'Kingdom Come', published in 2006, his autobiogaphy 'Miracles of Life' was published in 2008 to much acclaim.