by J.G. Ballard
This is the third book I have read by Ballard and the first that is not Science Fiction. I saw the Cronenberg adaptation of Crash, which I hated and kept away from the book until I decided that I liked Ballard. It makes sense that I hated the movie, because this book is not adaptable, Ballard, fo...
“Two months before my accident, during a journey to Paris, I had become so excited by the conjunction of an air hostess's fawn gaberdine skirt on the escalator in front of me and the distant fuselages of the aircraft, each inclined like a silver penis towards her natal cleft, that I had involuntaril...
Another book that my roommate suggested. This one also involved a lot of semen and sodomy (though nowhere near as much as Ancient evenings - sodomy, that is, there might be as much semen). I sometimes get the feeling when reading books like this, or seeing art-house movies, that I'm kind of a failur...
I did not like Crash. If the purpose of this book was to make me extremely uncomfortable, and bored, and confused about the plot, then it gets an A+.Is this really a thing? Sexual fetishes about car crashes? I suppose there must be people out there. Now, as I look at J.G. Ballard's picture on the ba...
Boring! Did you ever read a novel where you really did wish everyone would be hit by a truck at the end? This book might just be the pinnacle of objectification, which I am sure is what Ballard wanted, but the tedious clinical detailing of the protagonist's perversions and anatomical and necrotic ...
Richard Matheson, Lawrence Block, and others could write this as a chilling 10 page story. Ballard isn't up to the challenge so he spends several hundred pages repeating the same marginally interesting point.
A sometimes interesting investigation of the technology of the perverse that doesn't seem to go anywhere in particular. The style is solid and the imagery powerful, but at times, repeditive. Even normal sex is much easier to do than to write about, but when you make it so central to the understandin...
I did not enjoy this book. I think if it had been significantly shorter it wouldn't have felt so much like a chore to read. As it was, the repetition (on top of the violence of the crashes and bizarre graphic sex) just added another layer of revulsion that, for me, detracted from his point and mad...
Crash is a shocking masterpiece of sex. technology and violence. It is repulsive and beautiful at the same time. It is an allegory of the dangers of technology and the obsessiveness of sex in our increasingly alienating culture. Ballard is at his best and his most subversive in this harrowing tale o...
Another sleepless night, rain tapping at the skylight again. The sound is so predictable it's become comforting. I'd notice its absence, like the first crisp fall night without the mechanical hum of a fan that's lulled me to sleep all summer. I'm awake far too early, trailing my thumb over my booksh...
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