When you imagine JG Ballard at work at his desk, you picture him holding not a pen but a scalpel. There's a sentence early on in this book, where someone fantasising about Elizabeth Taylor obsesses over ‘the exquisite transits of the screen actress's pubis across the vinyl seat covers of hired limousines’, and this is such a perfect Ballardian sentence. Human sexuality seen as a kind of astronomical phenomenon; the personal made coldly scientific.The amazement of Crash is how convincingly its fo...

Before reading this book, I thought I was worldly, weary, and wise. I thought I had seen all the perversity and sex that modern novels could deliver. I thought I understood fetish.I understood nothing.This is a wild poem in novel format drawing out the most sexual visualizations. I could compare it with Anaïs Nin with her absolute poetry of sex, but to do so would ignore the absolute grotesquerie of Ballard's coupling with mangled machinery.This is a novel of car crash survivors being unable to ...

Uh, I’m pretty sure it’s a metaphor.Just kidding.I never read reviews of a book I’m about to gobble or have just finished, lest they unduly influence my perception. Last night, however, I did make the mistake of looking at my friends’ reviews of this (you’re all good) and accidentally glanced at the opinion of the Goodreadersphere-at-large. Holy moly, talk about divisive! The few I read indicated that the vox populi of GR place Crash somewhere next to cancer and the Holocaust on the list of worl...

Celebrity culture, modern technology, and sexual fetishes have never collided (haha, sorry) like this: Ballard's wicked masterpiece shows a group of people who get off from being involved in car accidents, they dream of crashing into Elizabeth Taylor and having an orgasm while becoming road kill. Apparently, becoming sexually aroused by staging and witnessing catastrophes and accidents is a real thing, because real people are indeed fucking perverted, and not only in a good way. It's called symp...

Sex, sleep, eat, drink, dream…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 our own deaths, and those of the famous and powerful?Sexual dystopia? Sure. But Crash is much wider than this – it is a sinister obsession with death and desire. And J.G. Ballard is mechanistic Marquis de Sade of the motorized century.The novel seems to be grotesqu...

*****WARNING THIS IS A GRAPHIC ADULT REVIEW NO KIDDIES PLEASE.*****”I knew that Vaughan could never really die in a car-crash, but would in some way be re-born through those twisted radiator grilles and cascading windshield glass. I thought of the scarred white skin over his abdomen, the heavy pubic hair that started on the upper slopes of his thighs, his tacky navel and unsavoury armpits, his crude handling of women and automobiles, and his submissive tenderness towards myself. Even as I had pl...

Not a "novel" really—see it as an extended erotic poem instead. It’s one pretty cool experience, & fantastically odd; it’s a journey of infatuation into the erotic element inherent in all car crashes. Like a dada experiment with clashing ideas and absurd pop symbols, everything is sensuous, even human defects are seen through a wholly unique filter, in sharp contrast with the immaculate beauty of the automobile. Sex, like driving, has plenty of potential energy that's stored up—the want for ...

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...

This was recommended to me as a good time, but I'm not sure who it would be a good time for. Probably not for women or for cars, both of whom have a pretty rough go of it in these pages.

Meter, vinyl, petroleum, bodywork, engine, crystal, chrome. Every word in this novel becomes erotic. There is sperm, desire, tooth, areola, curvature, wound, and scar. Each attack of the flesh by the metal signs the man's victory. Rockets, planes, and cars may well melt on us, hoping to reduce us to heaps of crushed guts and disfigured faces. Yet, despite the injuries inflicted, they do not have this burning desire that helps man compose a consistently successful future.Deviance is not a gratuit...