Tag: Crash

Selections from One-Star Amazon Reviews of J.G. Ballard’s Crash

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[Editorial note: The following citations come from one-star Amazon reviews J.G. Ballard’s novel Crash. I’ve preserved the reviewers’ original punctuation and spelling. More one-star Amazon reviews.].

Honestly.

massive car wrecks

I like Ballard’s work

nearly killing his wife

I can’t wrap my brain around the idea

I don’t consider myself to be socially conservative, but

Also won’t the police be keeping track of the guy’s driving record?

I find it gross that wounds from these car wrecks would turn women on

talked extensively of the steering column, instrument panel, and bonnet

Contrary to this book’s classification as a social technological fiction,

having sex with any women he can find

and lots of masturbating

messed up fetish

hard to believe

crashing it

unrealistic

gratuitous

assigned reading

required for a college course

hated every twisted minute of it

I wish I could scrub it from my brain

one must debate the author’s motives

“Heavy Groin,” “Scarred Mouth” and “Semen” 

an obsession which could only be satisfied by having sex in car

the perverse inner workings of the author, J.G. Ballard’s, mind

automobiles, sex, and death

perverse and sick fantasies

fuel his obsession

so disturbing

Poppycock.

lewd, dark, introvert

driven by his own libido

mind is completely altered

His sexual relations were not sincere

scars and disfigurements

truly fails on all levels

conniving ways

obsessing

obsessive

minions

mangled leftovers

mere marionettes

perverse sexuality

increasingly disturbing

perverse way of thinking

hardly worth a sexual climax

It was written in 1973 and seems to take place in 1973

Just some perverts lobbing semen around car wrecks.

a radical depiction of society’s addiction to technology

It is hard for me to make a connection between cars and sex.

sexual obsession of the body stamped by the technology of the car

What’s the commentary, car wrecks are bad?

savage appetite for car crashes and victims

riddled with atrocious sexual fantasies

hard to follow and digest

void of any substance

surprisingly disgusting

spreading his semen

collision course

Elizabeth Taylor

scars and fantasies

former sports car

invalid car

braces

acid trip

scars and divots

the average reader

It elicits the response it is written to do so.

Read it for class, but would never read again.

Anyone reading this for its erotic content will be as disappointed

I understand books are written to prompt a question, to get somebody thinking. But

on a list of some guy’s “best science fiction” on the internet

I have read a number of Ballard’s works

one of the worst books I have ever read

fantasy story (not sexual fantasy)

How is it science fiction?

rancid mayonaise

dry, mechanical

Car fetish porn.

I don’t get it.

not art

not prose

junk

Mass-market Monday | J.G. Ballard’s Crash

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Crash, J.G. Ballard. Vintage Books, first Vintage Books edition (1985). Cover design by Carin Goldberg with art by Chris Moore. 224 pages.

A few sentences and fragments from The New York Time’s original 1973 review of Crash:

…hands-down, the most repulsive book I’ve yet to come across.

….as reader, I promise you, only a virtuoso foulness can turn my stomach.

…a crazed, morbid roundelay of dismemberment and sexual perversion.

…I could not, in conscience, recommend it. Indeed I most cordially advise against.

…monomaniacal drive.

…The protagonists are titillated by collisions as dogs are by curb smells.

…Punched out eyeballs. Blood. Vomit. Fecal matter. Decapitation. Sperm. Bifurcated, mashed genitals.

…Perhaps J.G. Ballard was traumatized at a drive-in theater.

…I certainly won’t read further in the Ballard oeuvre.

Vaughan died yesterday in his last car crash | J.G. Ballard’s typescript, hand-revised draft of the opening page of Crash

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Via/more.

The most effective method of dealing with the world around us is to assume that it is a complete fiction (J.G. Ballard)

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In the past we have always assumed that the external world around us has represented reality, however confusing or uncertain, and that the inner world of our minds, its dreams, hopes, ambitions, represented the realm of fantasy and the imagination. These roles, it seems to me, have been reversed. The most prudent and effective method of dealing with the world around us is to assume that it is a complete fiction – conversely, the one small node of reality left to us is inside our own heads. Freud’s classic distinction between the latent and manifest content of the dream, between the apparent and the real, now needs to be applied to the external world of so-called reality.

From J.G. Ballard’s 1995 introduction to the Vintage reprint of his 1973 novel Crash.

Three Books

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Crash by J.G. Ballard. 1994 trade paperback by Noonday (FS&G). Cover design by Michael Ian Kaye and Melissa Hayden.

I had a redneckish college roommate who was way into cars, so I encouraged him to watch Cronenberg’s adaptation of Crash with me, which he did. He was a nice guy. He watched all of it with me and our other roommate. The rest of the year he would joke, “Hey, let’s go crash this car and have sex!”

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Marketa Lazarova by Vladislav Vančura. (First) English translation by Carleton Bulkin. First edition hardback by Twisted Spoon Press, 2016. Cover by Dan Mayer. A strange and often violent tale of multiple kidnappings and medieval intrigues, Marketa Lazarova reminds me of Le Morte D’Arthur, Nanni Balestrini’s Sandokan (both in its evocations of brutality and in its marvelous poetic prose), Aleksei German’s film Hard to Be a God, Bergman’s film The Virgin Spring, Bolaño’s sweetly ironic narrators, and, uh, Game of Thrones.

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Masquerade by Kit Wiliams. Eighth edition hardback from Shocken, 1981. While no designer is credited, the cover is obviously one of Williams’s lovely paintings. A puzzle book, a treasure hunt.

The Speed and Violence of Our Age

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