Product Description

The definitive cult, post-modern novel -- a shocking blend of violence, transgression and eroticism. When our narrator smashes his car into another and watches a man die in front of him, his sense of sexual possibilities in the world around him becomes detached. As he begins an affair with the dead man's wife, he finds himself drawn with increasing intensity to the mangled impacts of car crashes. Then he encounters Robert Vaughan, a former TV scientist turned nightmare angel of the expressway, who has gathered around him a collection of alienated crash victims and experiments with a series of erotic atrocities, each more sinister than the last. But Vaughan craves the ultimate crash - a head-on collision of blood, semen, engine coolant and iconic celebrity. First published in 1973 'Crash' remains one of the most shocking novels of the second half of the twentieth century and was made into an equally controversial film by David Cronenburg.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6083 in Books
• Published on: 2008-09-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Review
'A work of very powerful originality. Ballard is amongst our finest writers of fiction.' Anthony Burgess 'One of the few genuine surrealists this country has produced, the possessor of a terrifying and exhilarating imagination.' Guardian 'Ballard has issued a series of bulletins on the modern world of almost unerring prescience. Other writers describe; Ballard anticipates.' Will Self 'Britain's number one living novelist.' John Sutherland, Sunday Times

From the Publisher
Like many of Ballard's other novels, the seeds for Crash were sown in a short story or, in effect, the series of stories that were eventually published as The Atrocity Exhibition (or Love and Napalm: Export USA). Described by Will Self as representing `the zenith of the experimental novel in English' and `a profound and disquieting book' by William Burroughs, The Atrocity Exhibition is composed of seemingly disconnected, almost shard-like tales, some made up of short listed paragraphs. Full of extreme imagery and, as its author admits, `rather obsessive sexual fantasies about the prominent figures of the day', it strove, in its fragmentary structure, to emulate the confused (and confusing) messages of news broadcasts, advertising billboards, television commercials and technical manuals. In an author's note readers were advised to `simply turn the pages until a paragraph catches your eye'.

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.

Customer Reviews

An insomniac's delight
Monotonous. The idea Ballard presents in Crash is quite interesting, but to have it repeated page after page and chapter after chapter without any attempt at developing the idea or any of the secondary strands that present themselves to the thinking reader is very disappointing. I'm afraid it reminded me of a 1970s porn movie; the same tedious scene enacted in fifteen different places. I also found a parallel with Tracey Emin's art, in that it is appreciated by the self-appointed elite who claim to find fascinating and complex concepts within it, but the art-appreciating public remain, as a whole, non-plussed. Or worse, uninterested...or bored.

A Postmodern Classic
To say that J.G Ballard's classic postmodern novel is merely out for the 'shock value' it can extract from its reader is completely missing the point.

This isn't an erotic novel, the sexual content is handled in such a way to make it clinical, almost replulsive to the reader (sexual organs are described with as much enthusiasm as a steering wheel column). Sex becomes just another mechanical act, like driving a car, the repetition only serves to highlight that fact. The endless cycle and the numbing realisation that as a postmodern audience we become deadened to the horrors that surround us that are brought into our homes by the media is also central to understanding this text.

Ballard's novel brings to light the desensitised nature of human beings who watch mass murders on the nightly news with as much affect as the advertisement for soap powder which follows.

Ballard's novel is an implossion of fantasy and reality. Bringing together the society that thrives on spectacle to the point that watching a car crash has become prime time viewing. The death of affect - the fulfilment of human passions onto material technologies rather than people, resulting in a displacement of passion and an inability to connect is also central to this text.

After this read The Passion of New Eve by Angela Carter.

A caustic look at a 20th century sexual nightmare
Ballard yet again has explored parts of the human psyche that few dare to probe.He matches de Sade and Mirbeau in his illustration of new sexualities and sexual landscapes, caressing the lost edifices of a primitive erotic language, hidden in the modern technology that rules our everyday lives.Crash still remains one of the few novels that dares to explore the modern influence on sexuality, still as shocking and brilliant as it is beautiful.