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    Crash
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    Crash
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    Crash
    Audiobook6 hours

    Crash

    Written by J. G. Ballard

    Narrated by Alastair Sill

    3.5/5

    ()

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    About this audiobook

    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.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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins Publishers
    Release dateJun 30, 2011
    ISBN9780007432752
    Unavailable
    Crash
    Author

    J. G. Ballard

    J. G. Ballard is the author of numerous books, including Empire of the Sun, the underground classic Crash, The Kindness of Women, and Super-Cannes. He is revered as one of the most important writers of fiction to address the consequences of twentieth-century technology. He lives in England.

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    Reviews for Crash

    3.5/5

    821 ratings39 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Daring and transgressive, yet ultimately one of those novels that would have been more forceful had it been distilled down to the length of a short story. Crash is inventive and uncomfortable (in a good way), but the initial shock of the premise is weakened by being dragged out over a couple hundred pages. Not even self-destructive, eroticized techno-sexual depravity will stand up under endless repetition. Still an interesting read and I'll definitely be exploring Ballard's other work.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      This was a very graphic and violent dystopian novel but also very powerful. The writing is cold and detached but shows the genius of J. G. Ballard as he points out to us what technology has done to our emotions and humanity. This book is not for the faint of heart as it is a look at modern society in regards to death, dismemberment and sexual fantasy. I do recommend the book though and look forward to exploring more of Ballard's work.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      Conceptually interesting, but it seems to me Ballard is more comfortable with short stories. I kept wanting him to pull out a thesaurus every now and then, and a few of the scenes appeared to be retreads of earlier encounters in the book. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the premise and the ideas behind the novel; the marriage of eroticism and machinery has been a topic that has interested me for a while (similar ideas are found in Tetsuo: Iron Man and perhaps to a lesser extent Ghost in the Shell and cyberpunk in general, along with a critical review in Simulacra and Simulation), and Ballard really ran with it.
    • 5/5
      As intelligent humans, I feel that it is important to look through other people’s eyes and see what they see. Do I become aroused by road traffic accidents? No, but it doesn’t mean I shouldn’t “enjoy” this post modernist work. Did I “get it”? Oh hell no, but I enjoy to be challenged and if you are like me and can’t take anymore easy reading scrapings of romantic vampire stories and want something that stays with you, give this a go. Yes it’s uncomfortable, but isn’t life like that?
    • 3/5
      This is a case of a derivative work being superior to the original, IMO. I came to the novel because I found the film so compelling. True, the two share a fascinating take on the relation of man and technology in their exploration of the eroticism of one of the more iconic pieces of machinery ever created: the automobile. But this isn't just doing-it-in-the-back-seat-of-the-Chevy sex, this is kinky, body-modification-by-violent-means sex.Ballard's characters are obsessed with car crashes and the way in which the human body and mind are forever altered by the experience. There is an obsession with scarring, with wounds, with broken bones and torn flesh, with body fluids and the way violent impact can force them from us. This is ground-breaking stuff, thought-provoking and troubling in ways that aren't pleasant to think about. Unfortunately, whether it's that Ballard's style isn't conducive to conveying the eroticism in any visceral way or whether the sheer length of this story works against it, the novel never really grabbed hold of my imagination.I had a sense, as I slogged through the latter half of the book, that I was reading a short story in novel's clothing. It feels padded to me, and highly repetitive. The erotic frisson of engine coolant as a kind of sexual musk lost its charm after the first dozen times it was evoked. Ballard's sexual vocabulary here is clinical in the extreme which may work in terms of distancing the reader from sex on wholly human terms, but it works too well. Held at a distance by the words he chooses, it's hard to get a feel for the implied eroticism of the subject matter. It's all too cerebral, too cold and mechanical. The machine is all, and humans might as well be made of metal, too.I give points for the chances he took, but subtract them for the unnecessarily sterile way in which he took them.
    • 2/5
      Too emotionally empty for my taste -- which was probably a part of Ballard's point regarding technology -- and I don't mind a disturbing read (in fact I enjoy a disturbing read) but this (and I realize I go against the grain here) had no point or purpose for me. Maybe I'm stupid and just didn't "get" it. People crash. Crash victims have sex in crumpled cars. There is something erotic about cars crashing. WhatEVER!! I so wanted to like this book. I felt icky reading it, and I'm not completely sure why. I'm certainly no prude. I absolutely loved Vollmann's "Royal Family" and it's a hell of a lot more vulgar than this. I suppose if Ballard's goal was to repulse and repel me in an unenjoyable way (I enjoy being repulsed & repelled in enjoyable ways, mind you) then he masterfully succeeded. I couldn't relate to these characters; I didn't like them; they were mostly disgusting and gross and morally repugnant (again, not that I'm Mr. Morals here, I'm certainly not) but there was nothing redeemable or hopeful about them, or in the plot, which really wasn't a plot but a series of car crashes infused with erotica by deranged if not demented minds. Usually, this kind of writing attracts me. I think this did not because of its overwhelming nihilism. I like nihilism, a la Bret Ellis or Hemingway or early Didion; I like them because they interweave their nihilism with either humor or detached outrage -- but there's neither of those qualities in "Crash". It's mind numbingly nihilistic. I suspect that Ballard may have been trying to elicit such a reaction, but at least, man, mix in some black humor along the way. If you're going to numb me with meaninglessness, at least make me smile if not chuckle a few times along the way. I can't imagine how awful the film version of this must be.
    • 4/5
      Very odd story, worth reading. See also the movie made a few decades past (same title)
    • 4/5
      Together we showed our wounds to each other, exposing the scars on our chests and hands to the beckoning injury sites on the interior of the car, to the pointed sills of the chromium ashtrays, to the lights of a distant intersection. In our wounds we celebrated the re-birth of the traffic-slain dead, the deaths and injuries of those we had seen dying by the roadside and the imaginary wounds and postures of the millions yet to die.This book isn't for everyone. It's a story of the violent melding of technology and human sexuality, written with all of the eroticism of a technical manual. It's brutal and vulgar and hopeless, but for those willing to engage with it --and I fully understand why many would not want to--there is a fascinating examination of the relationship between humans and their creations.
    • 3/5
      Crashby J.G. Ballard1973/2019PGW/Rare Bird Book3.0 / 5.0Auto-Erotica. Literally. A literary classic, but disappointing, for me.This is about a group of car-crash victims who get sexual pleasure from staging and then being in car-crashes. A story of the interaction of man with machine, a man so obsessed with pleasure he doesnt see it is destroying him....This is a brilliant story. It is overtly dark and perverse, which usually intrigues me, but I just didn't like any of the characters.
    • 4/5
      Bleak and challenging to read. The mixture of violence of the collision of technology and sex was very confronting for me.
    • 5/5
      J.G. Ballard’s 1973 novel Crash puts me in mind of the great poet of our time, R. Kelly, and his perspective-shifting masterpiece, Ignition, if Ignition dared to reach its erotic-subversive logical conclusion. For Ballard, the techno-eroticism of the automobile necessarily finds its end in an epic and annihilating collision, the most Kelly is willing to risk is a ticket and his shocks.For reference, the truncated lyrics:“Girl, please let me stick my key in your ignition, babeSo I can get this thing started and get rollin', babeSee, I'll be doin' about 80 on your freewayGirl, I won't stop until I drive you crazySo buckle up 'cause this can get bumpy, babeNow hit the lights and check out all my functions, babeGirl, back that thing up so I can wax it, babyHoney, we gon' mess around and get a ticket, babeNow hold on tight 'cause I'm about to go faster, babeGirl, you're dealin' with a pro behind this wheel, babeSo tell me have you ever driven a stick, babeYou'll be screamin' every time we shiftin' gears, babeSo brace yourself while I'm hittin' them corners, babeAnd when it's over put that tails on your license plate...”Like R. Kelly’s song, the characters in Crash are at one moment operators of the car, in the next moment one with the car itself: e.g.. “let me stick my key in your ignition babe” suggests (obviously) that R. Kelly is decidedly not the vehicle, but the mechanism by which the vehicle’s (woman’s) engines are set running. In the next stanza his car-amour acts as the driver, exploring the dashboard body of R. Kelly. Later, Kelly is again the “pro behind the wheel”-- once more at the driver’s helm--confusingly asking the car-amour if she has ever driven a stick shift, which begs lots of metaphysical questions. Kelly’s muddied metaphors aside, the familiar technology of the car coupled with the erotic encounter--the inherent danger of both--especially when combined--is just the kind of risky fantasy the modern world has made possible. But J.G. Ballard is no R. Kelly. Where R. Kelly plays exclusively with innuendo, Ballard minces no words: [ahem] “As I pressed the head of my penis against the neck of her uterus, in which I could feel a dead machine, her cap, I looked at the cabin around me. This small space was crowded with angular control surfaces and rounded sections of human bodies interacting in unfamiliar junctions...The volumes of Helen’s thighs pressing against my hips, her left fist buried in my shoulder, her mouth grasping at my own, the shape and moisture of her anus as I stroked it with my ring finger, were each overlaid by the inventories of a benevolent technology--the moulded binnacle of the instrument dials, the jutting carapace of the steering column shroud, the extravagant pistol grip of the hand-brake...The passenger compartment enclosed us like a machine generating from our sexual act an homunculus of blood, semen and engine coolant…”Ballard’s Crash explores the tipping point where the fantasy ceases to be satisfied by mere risk, and requires the crash of metal bodies to satisfy the sexual proclivities of human ones. Psychoanalysis has a name for this, of which the author was surely aware: the Death Drive.
    • 1/5
      terrible (0), it truly was terrible but I will give it 1 star as I think the author is a good writer, I wish this hadn’t been the first book I read by him. REVIEW: To say I don't get it, really sums up my experience reading this...... Here is an example I don't get. "By terrifying paradox, a sexual act between us would be a way of taking her revenge", this is said about the wife of the man that he killed in an auto accident. And what is the sci fi part of this book. It is the excessive references to cars, roads, airplanes...to technology. It's excessive and oppressive. It makes it feel like an alien force. Here's another quote, "the day I left Ashford I had the extraordinary feeling that all these cars were gathering for some special reason I didn't understand." This is a story of a dystopian world where man no longer has feelings or connections to people and is oppressed by technology. The characters in this book are not likable. They are consumed by sex. The scape of roads and freeways, airports and car parks and the various parts of the inside and outside of cars is what turns them on. The author called this a work of pornography and he was not kidding. The pages are filled with sexual references to parts of cars, sex parts such as penises and breasts, vaginas, urethras and body secretions such as sperm, mucus, blood, vomit. You really feel quite awful after reading this book. This is not gratuitous sex, this is icky sex. I could recommend this book to no one. QUOTES:“The crash was the only real experience I’d been through” "For a half an hour I sat by the window in her office, looking down at the hundreds of cars in the parking lot. Their roofs formed a lake of metal.""Overhead, across the metallized air, a jet-liner screamed."“The marriage of sex and technology reached its climax as the traffic divided at the airport overpass and we began to move forwards in the northbound lane.” WORDS:Flyovers, British word for American overpass.
    • 1/5
      I HATE THIS SO MUCH. It's profoundly repugnant. Annoys me particularly because the bits that don't turn my stomach are well-written, even ocassionally insightful.
    • 4/5
      I read this after hearing The Normal's Warm Leatherette and learning about its inspiration. Surprisingly not as disturbing as I had imagined it would be. The first chapter is by far the "worst." I'm wondering if I'm just becoming desensitized to the world. I appreciate and relate to the feelings of isolation and technology and how it still translates to today, maybe even more so.
    • 2/5
      “After being bombarded endlessly by road-safety propaganda it was almost a relief to find myself in an actual accident.” Firstly I should admit that I don't actually drive a car instead preferring two wheels. Now I can imagine getting a sexual kick from having a throbbing Harley Davidson underneath me especially if I had some young leather clad vixen had her arms wrapped about my waist or perhaps heading off to secret assignation with said vixen but getting sexually aroused by cars and in particular car crashes just doesn't work for me. Cars are merely boxes on wheels and a means of getting from A to B dry. Now I do understand the facination we all probably have with accidents of whatever form and like probably everyone else have made an effort at sometime to see one or at least the aftermath of one but to have felt some sexual arousal by it, Nah! Just nosey.Now whilst I appreciate that there are all sort of fetishes out there, the idea that there is a seemingly large group of people trawling aroung the outskirts actively seeking out and getting sexually aroused by car crashes seems a bit far fetched. I can also imagine that the motorcar in the book can be seen as a metaphor for all sorts of technology, the fact that numerous people,rather than random deviants, get sexually excited by inanimate objects also leaves me somewhat non-plussed. On the whole I found the book just an excuse for the author to indulge in an excuse to write an openly pornographic novel which seems to thumb its nose to readers,critics and in particular academics alike. Why in particular acacdemics? Well, I can just imagine in years to come some long-winded, cordoroy wearing professor spouting out so much nonsense about this book ,that the car is really a phallic symbol,that the semen and vaginal deposits spread liberally about represents humanity in a battle against the rise of machines or some other such tosh.I cannot say that I enjoyed this book but nor can I say that I hated it. I intrigued me enough to want to keep turning the pages until the very end and it gets marks for originality but it is not a book that I will revisit thats for sure.
    • 2/5
      I really could not wait for this book to end. I'm not squeamish at all, I just found all the descriptions of car crashes and their 'eroticism' rather dull and repetitive, rather like a child who's learnt to say a rude word. I did not find the conjunction of sex and car crashes believable, interesting or challenging; just a tiresome for-the-sake-of-it incoherent ramble.
    • 2/5
      Reading this book wore me out. I like Ballard, I think he's a writer who really gets technology, modernity, isolation, etc., and I'm pretty non-judgmental about even sort of far-out fetishes, but what kept flashing through my brain was GRATUITOUS GRATUITOUS WHEN WILL THIS BOOK END ARRGH. And I don't even mean that it was gratuitous with the sex-and-accidents stuff (although it was)--the blunt, increasingly inelegant repetition of Ballard's arguments made a compelling idea, after a certain point, just tedious. In much the same way that there are only so many words for various parts of the human anatomy (and, dear lord, if I see the words "groin" or "pubis" again in my lifetime it will be too soon), maybe there are only a fixed number of ways of looking at a car crash.
    • 4/5
      Lots of other people who are a lot better than me have written all kinds of things about this novel. I will say this: The first hundred pages of the novel are relatively un-engaging. It's almost entirely narrative voice with almost zero dialogue interaction between characters. This was especially difficult for me because that's my favorite part of any book--watching how the characters interact with each other. So the concept is fascinating, the narrative is layered upon inspection and flat on the surface (as many have said), and the narrator's voice is brutally unadorned, mimicking pornographic photography (as many others have said, as well).
      The writing is disappointing in all of those ways, though, because all the things that are fascinating about the book are given short shrift--this includes the scene where Ballard first meets Vaughan, which was the one I most wanted to read. The novel is also not helped by the long winded and repetitious first chapter.
      So is the book fascinating, conceptually, and highly influential on two whole generations of authors who have come along since its publication? Yes. Is it a good read? Marginally.
    • 1/5
      I know this avant-garde novel is supposed have opened up brave new vistas in dystopian fiction, by "boldly going where no man has gone before". The courage of J. G. Ballard has to be admired the way he links violent death with sex: his narrative structuring is exemplary. However, I simply could not get into the book even after three or four tries. The characters were extremely unlikeable: the main premise was bizarre: and the story failed to hold my interest. I did not finish it.

      So I will have to give this a miserable one-star rating. I cannot honestly recommend it to anyone. The only thing is, the reactions these type of novels create are highly subjective: so should it prove to be your cup of tea, it may even come up with five stars.
    • 3/5
      My reaction to reading this novel in 1997. Spoilers follow.This is a perverse novel about a group of automobile accident victims who develop a sexual fetish for car wrecks and the resulting injuries. There is a lot of sex in this book, but it isn’t very arousing. If this is an attempt at pornography (I don’t think it is), it’s not very successful. Ballard’s prose is too clinical (I believe he contemplated a medical career once), to be arousing. This prose tone and quality mutes his attempt at poetic explanations for his narrator and Vaughn's (that "nightmare angel of the highways”) thuggy, obsessed psychological state. While l I realize that people can and do develop all sorts of bizarre sexual fetishes, Ballard never really convinced me of the reality, plausibility, or emotion behind this one. While this is not an sf novel per se, it has a science fiction sensibility about it in its exploration of the erotic attraction and mediation involved in a technology – here autos and automobile transportation (even for the failures of the latter in wrecks). Ballard uses the novel to plot an extended series of sexual metaphors involving autos. In that sense, I can see his influence on the cyberpunks and their use of technological metaphors (though William Gibson is more skilled in this area). His fascination with celebrities and media – here symbolized by Vaughn’s obsession with “the film actress Elizabeth Taylor” – also prefigures cyberpunk themes. Sf critics antagonistic to the New Wave and its major figure Ballard accused him of creating disaster stories in which not only does the hero not try to prevent the disaster, is passive in the face of it, but actually seem to desire it. This is certainly true here. The narrator – named James Ballard – not only senses a coming “autogeddon” but looks forward to his death in it and plots the erotic configurations of his future death.
    • 1/5
      I read the first 4 chapters before I gave up. The writing is good but I can't stomach the content, which made me feel physically ill. Perhaps this novel deserves to be on the Guardian's 1000 novels everyone should read list, but I will never know as I will never pick this up again.
    • 1/5
      Disgusting at the beginning, boring going forward. Forget about this book as quick as you can.
    • 2/5
      Hey, everybody, look! Sex! And violence! And more sex! And more violence! And loving detail to all of this! And cars! Sex and violence and cars! Look, semen and blood! Hey, everybody, look at me! Machines are bad, guys, they really are!

      How boring. I really should stop.
    • 5/5
      Ballard is one of the most relevant writers I've come across for this day and age. I've been a moderate fan of the movie version of this book for a while, but the film does no justice to the book at all.

      The basic premise of this, and much of Ballard's work, deals with the complete de-humanization and reductionism of the modern era. His characters are sexual, psychological mechanisms operating in technological corridors. The car-sex theme of the book is blatantly metaphorical but scary in its pure crticism of our reductionist world.
    • 4/5
      This one left me with lots of notes and not much of an idea how to begin putting those thoughts together into something coherent, so I won't promise any sort of organized comments.I'm going to guess that most readers pick this one up with some knowledge of the content, which involves the intersection (pun oh so painfully intended) of automobiles, traffic accidents, and eroticism. Our narrator (coincidentally named James Ballard) gets into a car accident with another vehicle containing a couple; the man dies, the woman lives. From there, Ballard becomes entangled with Vaughan, a morbid aficionado of collisions. The book is the direct opposite of the saying "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." Nothing is ever just a cigar here. Everything is muddled together: reality and fantasy, sex and violence, metal and bodily fluids, organic descriptors for inorganic objects and vice versa. The automobile accident is seen as a way to literally jolt people out of their everyday complacency and awaken them to the real possibilities of the world. Injury and pain are the means to a form of enlightenment (but not in any form Buddha would recognize). Cars are described as arbors or bowers, or "benevolent technology." The modern relationship with the vehicle is taken to its most extreme position, its nature as both a public and a private place explored from every angle.The writing is the melding of style and substance. Words, phrases, ideas are repeated, echoed and mimicked even as the characters find patterns in accident scenes and try to recreate them with their own movements and postures. Reading the book is itself like witnessing a car accident - you want to look away, but somehow you just can't.Recommended for: people who like to dissect meanings, non-germophobes (there are a lot of bodily fluids), Sigmund Freud, David Cronenberg fans.Quote: "I had thought of his last moments alive, frantic milliseconds of pain and violence in which he had been catapulted from a pleasant domestic interlude into a concertina of metallized death."
    • 4/5
      Beautiful, tragic, terrifying, gruesome, and intensely sexual. I'm not so certain how I feel about the novel so soon after finishing it, but there is some unidentifiable feeling it has elicited. The strange duality between technology and sex is exquisitely highlighted. Everything is technical, and by the end you feel no more attached to any one character than you did at the beginning - you feel helpless against wave after visceral wave of sexual pleasure and discharge. It overtakes you. It consumes you.Ballard, you fool.
    • 2/5
      This is a difficult book. It's both unrelenting and monotonous in its deliberately provocative, yet banal style. I don't normally review the books I read but felt compelled to add my comments to the discussion that has gone before re: Crash, particularly regarding it being the 'dullest "shocking" novel ever'. I think there is a lot of truth in that quote. Ballard has clearly worked out a grand schema for both the style and content of Crash, but I can't help but feel the achievement is undermined by the ultimate fungibility of each of the characters and the lack of any attempt to explain their nihilism. Also, bizarrely - for a short work - the novel seems too long to sustain the conveyor belt repetition of 'sex acts', metaphor and fetishes. I think Ballard's idea might have been better served by a novella, dropping some of the more mind-numbing passages. You'll need some resolve to finish this and to be frank I'm not sure its worth the bother, despite the plaudits from some.
    • 4/5
      Harsh and disturbing. This was one uncomfortable read. Beautiful prose about a dark subject, I found reading this an unnerving experience.
    • 4/5
      The story is told in first person by James Ballard himself. Ballard has an accident where he is injured. The other driver is killed and his fellow passenger is hurt. After returning from the hospital Ballard makes automobile erotic connotations. He meets Vaughan who introduces him to other automobile accident victims who are experiencing similar fantasies. What follows are a lot of crashes and a lot of sex. Vaughan’s fantasies in time mature and he wants to crash his car into Elizabeth Taylor’s car and die in the process which will mark his mating with the actress. He dies in the process but palts the seed of his psychopathic tendencies in his followers.Full marks for the style but no marks for the story. When it came out in 1973, it must have shocked a lot of people for its graphic descriptions of the accidents and the sex acts. “Technology will mark our lives” is the message.
    • 1/5
      The trouble with pornographic writing is that too much creativity has you nominated for the Bad Sex award for tortured metaphors - but playing it straight means using words like "pubis" forty times in twenty pages, as Ballard seems to here. Surely the dullest 'shocking' novel ever; all the characters do is drive around, crash and have sex (often mixing the latter option with the two previous ones). Had I seen the author's explanation of his motives for writing Crash - "I wanted to rub humanity's face in its own vomit and force it to look in the mirror" - I would have avoided this nonsense. Others should learn from my mistake.