Welcome to Litsy!

Mmm, experimental ! Good for Ballard that he doesn‘t give a monkey‘s. Written in the 70s too, wow. Not for the fainthearted.

Right, I appreciate this guys talent.

He's an incredible writer and I also appreciate the fact that he's written something unique here.

But..

This is repetitive.

It's basically about guys blowing their loads in car crashes and having a fetishism in such things such as attending crash sites etc.

Like I said, this guy is a great writer but he gets repetitive here.

One thing I found cool though is that it's set where I now live in England.

"Seagrave‘s slim and exhausted face was covered with shattered safety glass, as if his body were already crystallizing, at last escaping out of this uneasy set of dimensions into a more beautiful universe."

"The world was beginning to flower into wounds."

"My brief stay at the hospital had already convinced me that the medical profession was an open door to anyone nursing a grudge against the human race."

"In a nightmare I had once seen [my wife] giving birth to a devil‘s child, her swollen breasts spurting liquid faeces."

"The man, a chemical engineer with an American foodstuffs company, was killed instantly, propelled through his windshield like a mattress from the barrel of a circus cannon."
Today in odd similes.

I like a challenge, I appreciate non-traditional and experimental stories and great writing excites me: so why did this book bore the hell out of me? Perhaps because there was nobody to root for. Or was it the complete lack of even a modicum of humor? I'm far from prudish, but maybe sex scenes without an ounce of originality, that barely rise above the level of girly magazine letters to the editor, are just not for me. Snore.

Crash
by J.G. Ballard
1973/2019
PGW/Rare Bird Book
3.0 / 5.0

Auto-Erotica. Literally. A literary classic, but disappointing, for me.
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.

In this hallucinatory novel, the car provides the hellish tableau in which Vaughan, a "TV scientist" turned "nightmare angel of the highways," experiments with erotic atrocities among auto crash victims, each more sinister than the last.

This sounds all sorts of messed up and crazy... i need to read this!!!??

#fiction

#GetMovin ##americassweetheart
This is a very distorted imagining of one of holywoods iconic female images - a woman who spans the innocence of national velvet to the ultimate sexuality of cleopatra and the classic American play 'cat on a hot tin roof'- j g ballard has the image of her as central to his fantasies of car crashes ( i hesitate to say that i think she was born in Britain?) Still definitely an American goddess - sweetheart???

#hitandrun fiction at its finest
#misfits
#MarchintoOz @Cinfhen @Lizpixie

Somebody smashed their car into my library. 😕

Litsy! Stop crashing! 😡

Supposedly, Crash is about modern technology and its effect on human relationships. The characters are obsessed and sexually aroused by car crashes. Technology has advanced to the point where it's hard to read this and keep the car culture of Ballard's early 70's in mind. #birthdaychallenge #1973

In a dark reading mood.
#birthdaychallenge #1973

Finally!!! Ordered this from The Book Depository a few weeks ago. So much for 5-8 days. No bookmark either. 😢 #birthdaychallenge #1973

I'm gonna be honest. I had to force-feed myself this book. Ballard's writing style isn't the problem. (unless you count over-using the word stylized.😊) It's not that the subject matter wasn't interesting either. I don't know. I know I'm in the minority, but I didn't care for this one. I have a few of his other novels, so I'm going to try him again. 41/1,001 #1001Books

Ballard Love

Ballard sure has an amazing way with words.

Note: The Happy Reader bookmark, from latest issue :D

These descriptions seemed to be a language in search of objects, or even, perhaps, the beginnings of a new sexuality divorced from any possible physical expression.

#Recommendsday - Disturbing, erotic, gruesome, perverse, and oh so twisted. I certainly don't recommend it to everyone, but if you like to squirm, you can't go wrong with this one. All that aside, it's a brilliant commentary on modern society. Read it and then watch the movie adaptation by one of my favorite directors, David Cronenberg. 👍🏻

As far as messed up books go this one takes the cake. But once you get past the sex, the body fluids and the car crash fetish, you'll find a confronting commentary on our intimate and sometimes perverse relationship with technology. WARNING: some explicit sex.