Crash (original 1973; edition 2008)

*note to self. Copy from A. ( )

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. ( )

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. ( )

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." ( )

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. ( )