Rating: 
Summary: One of the worst books I've ever read!
Review: It's a shame that Crash was as bad as it is. The plot really isn't that terrible on its own; it reminds me a lot of Chuck Palanuik's work. The constant sex in the story echoes "Choke" and Vaughan's character is very similar to Tyler Durden in "Fight Club", in the way he leads the main character deeper into his darkest obsessions.
If only the writing weren't so bad! I could make a list of about ten-twenty phrases that were used constantly, including (but not limited to), binacle, treadle, benevolent technology, globes of semen, autogeddon (carmageddon would've been better), triangle of her pubis, the angle of X aligning with the symetry of the car's Y, etc. In fact, I would bet, if I fleshed this list out (which would involve cracking the book open again, which I'd rather not do) that one could open to any page of the book and find at LEAST half of the phrases of the list - or close variants - on any page the book was opened to. It's that bad.
In the hands of a more capable writer, the story would be decent. However, all of the characters are completely flat. They're all sex-starved, ill-defined, and completely devoid of any emotions or self-realization. Even the scenes which should be vaguely interesting - the car crashes and the sex scenes - are so bland and repetitive that they become dull. I forced myself to read the book just because I was sure there had to be SOMETHING redeeming about the book, some hidden meaning or revelation that would make the wait worthwhile. Not so. There were at best maybe twenty pages scattered throughout the book that were vaguely interesting (there was one part describing an automobile test-crash that was fairly vivid and managed not to be a chore to read), but other than the scene just mentioned I'd be hard-pressed to think of what they were.
I'm not normally that hard on most books. Even if I'm not particularly interested in a book or don't care for it, I can find redeeming factors or allow for the possibility that I might have missed something. At the very least, I can at least say I've read the book. However, the absolute absence of character depth and the terribly redundant 'prose' (go to the bookstore, pick it up off the shelf, and try my game if you don't believe me) make this one book I truly wish I had never wasted my time with.
So if you're looking for something about obsessions, the darker side of humanity, sex, death, car crashes, whatever, do yourself a favor and get something by Chuck Palanuik instead. Or, if you're dead-set on this particular story, I would recommend watching the movie. It strays from the plot of the book on several very significant points (albiet for reasons I can understand), but at least it'll only take two hours of your time and you won't have to wade through the painfully amateurish writing.
Rating: 
Summary: car crash sends man into sexual frenzy
Review: that's right! ballard, the accidentee in question, has a major car crash with a man and his wife. the man dies but his wife lives. but from then on all ballard can think of is sexual positions with relation to car parts. it is really much more than that, i dont want to give away the whole plot, but that is pretty much what the book encompasses. i bought this book, not knowing what sex addict this man is in it, but i do now. i cant put the book down, however. once i started it, i just wanted to get to the end just to say that i read it. i am not sure that i will get anything profound out of it, you might.
Rating:
Summary: The Worst Thing I've Ever Read
Review: I really, really hated this book. After a few chapters it actually turned into a personal challenge to "beat the book" by finishing the horrid thing. I did finish it and still wonder why I bothered.
At one point I actually started counting how many times Ballard used "Heavy Groin," "Scarred Mouth" and "Semen" but I eventually lost count. There were just too many repetitive uses to track without more effort than I was willing to apply.Seriously. It is bad. Just plain bad.
Made worse by the fact that I read it after Palahniuk's "Survivor" which was quite excellent. Kind of like following a spoon full of "Chunky Monkey" with a heaping helping of rancid mayonaise. This is the one and only book I have EVER tossed in the garbage when finished. I feel I need to quickly read something good to cleanse myself. Maybe another reading of "Catch-22" would do the trick???
Rating: 
Summary: Weird even for Ballard
Review: I've been a fan of J.G. Ballard's ever since I read The Drowned World and The Wind from Nowhere, both dramatic and imposing mood pieces about the end of the world. Ballard's prose has a heavy, sensual languidness to it suited to these dark themes, some of which derives from his unhurried rhythm and pacing. In fact, his prose seems to have an almost oxymoronic, somnolent muscularity and strength--a quality that certain Buddhist statues, which are said to represent "the spirit of strength in repose"--are also said to possess, interestingly enough. (I suspect Ballard himself would be amused by such a recondite association). And as another reviewer here remarked, perhaps his prose is something of an acquired taste. But getting back to the book, this story about a strange and disturbing subculture that has evolved a sexual obsession and fetish for crashing automobiles is no doubt one of the more bizarre ideas for a novel ever created. The members even go so far as to create and re-enact fatal "classic" car crashes from the past--such as the one that killed James Dean or Jane Mansfield. Its theme also reminded me of the recent movie, the Fight Club, in its idea of a repressed and narcissistic culture of violence that lies just beneath the surface of our otherwise highly polished, technologically advanced society. Since I also saw the movie, I thought I would comment on it here. I didn't think I was going to like the book or the film originally, even though I'm a fan of Ballard's, but I found I actually liked it a lot despite my initial misgivings. Partly, this was because I happened to hear an interview on the radio where Ballard discussed how he got the idea for the book, and which helped to explain it at least somewhat. Well, maybe. It's still pretty weird. Anyway, I'll recount the story here for those who missed the interview. It was on National Public Radio. Ballard said he got the idea from passing a fatal traffic accident where a beautiful women had been killed, and you could see everything from the road as you drove by. The woman's body had ended up mostly nude on the rear deck of the passenger compartment, and he said people were driving by gawking at the scene and rubbernecking, and he suddenly got the idea that the whole thing was very erotic for them despite the obviously tragic circumstances and the woman's untimely death. At that point the link between eroticism, car crashes, and death was made, and he was off and running with his bizzare new story idea. I thought Spader, Koteas, Unger, and Hunter were excellent in their roles, and that also helped to make an otherwise implausible film more realistic. Of course, it's a David Cronenberg film, so what was I expecting? Well, I was probably expecting lots of weird sex and violence--such as the scene in his Naked Lunch, based on the Burroughs book, where the guy is getting anally raped by an 8-foot high half-human, half-centipede creature (Ballard, take note). Well, I like his movies usually, but this one was pretty weird even for someone with Cronenberg's predilection for darkly disturbing themes, and it certainly stands out as one of the more bizarre films on the theme of sex and violence, or on the relationship between sex and violence. *Irreverent scientific footnote: And if humans think their sex has an element of violence in it--they should see how marine flatworms do it. It's called "penis fencing." The flatworms duel it out with their gigantic penises (eat your heart out, John "H." Holmes) and the first one to stab his big sharp dork through the skin of the other implants his sperm, causing the other flatworm to become pregnant and give birth whether he wants to or not. Biologists also think that these flatworms were the first multicellular animals to have sexual reproduction as we know it, which means that sex and violence have been linked ever since its earliest evolutionary origins. *Irrevent literary footnote: I was in a bookstore recently, and I opened up a book of Greek plays at random, and this was the first line I saw in a play by Euripides: "We are a group of men with large erections; we roam around the city, we take what we want." It just goes to show you that those old flatworms and Greeks were on the right track, after all. (Ballard and Cronenberg, take note). It makes me wonder..
Rating:
Summary: Dumb Cult Classic
Review: This is the stupidest book I've read in a long, long, long time. Why it's a cult classic is beyond me.
Rating: 
Summary: Without a doubt - very original.
Review: I read this novel over three days.I found it easy to read,it kept my interest despite the fact it lacked a true storyline.I love how Ballard makes a point about technology in such an unlikely way.
I was not sickened by it all ( as other reviewers may have been),but interested in it.I liked the lack of emotion in the characters.I wanted to understand their desires revolving around cars and technology.This novel is different from anything I have ever read and that is why I give it 4 stars.
Rating:
Summary: "the disfigurements marked the elements of her real beauty"
Review: In J.G. Ballard's seminal 1973 novel _Crash_ we are presented with the world we live in jamming, recoiling, and about to explode. A miraculous, violent prose mirror of the poetry of atrocity, _Crash_ is a blanched landmark marking the side effects of humanity's progress as utterly reflexive, respondent to, and perhaps even interchangeable with depravity. Cars are travelling coffins and machinery and technology form a portent of apocalypse, a signpost to the coming "autogeddon," all of us mavens of the blacktop getting ours in the end. The perversity of _Crash_ is not that it is perverse in itself, but that it *describes* perversities. One such perversity being retailed is no less than the insane, harrowing possibility of automobile death being completely concomitant with the irrational albeit real possibility of sexual contact among people; people passing daily from routine to routine ubiquitously, randomly, and (so they imagine) innocently. All of us travel seemingly innocuously from place to place in our cars; the determination of a vehicle accident is always there in the back of our minds. So it is with our bodies, even if we choose to deny it. The physical mutilation and damage of a crash is linked to the sexual intercourse and mucus production of our bodies in ways only a visionary like Ballard can divine. His book, with its cold, clinical language and solemn, sensual atmosphere, only enters the realm of obscenity when his characters choose to no longer ignore this perversity of vision, but to embrace it. In this way Vaughn's messianic power and death-aesthetic are understood clearer. The protagonist, named after the author, embodies Ballard's own two-fold goal to accept this 20th Century bifurcation as both author and character. Those who are disturbed and angered by this novel are angered and disturbed by a reality that exists clearly and positively to the author, who is confronting the audience with it as effectively as he can. Their truck should not be with whether or not he is a madman and beyond help, as one psychiatrist who read the novel shortly after its publication amusingly put it. Rather their concern should be with civilized humankind's diffraction and disappearance from the scene of human relations in the 20th century. The non-relation to the outer world, this gloomy filtering of reality through channels of smog and death, efficiency and toxicity, are the real atrocity-- not the prose of an author with three daughters of his own vitally addressing the problem. If technology has blinded us to our own responses and emotions, then technology shall become the new sight, the guiding principle to the selection of our desires and erotic behaviors. This is the threat of the novel. Once it has been read and understood, you will not soon forget it.
Rating:
Summary: nearly flawless, a tentalating nearly apocalyptic masterwork
Review: I read this book a couple months ago, but it left a signifigant enough mark that elements of sex and car crashes...and all the minute by minute details of these inhumane yet beautiful encounters...have been reapearring in my own poetry and writing. This was my first encounter with J.G. Ballard after seeing the awesome movie Cronenburg made based on it, and it makes me want to venture further into his disturbing world where eroticism bleeds into every orifice of fantasy and experience, a place right out from a William S. Burroughs novel where nothing is true and everything is permitted... Ballard indeed is alot like Burroughs, both are great cathartic authors who exorsice theri cataclysmic and illrational fantasies withou apology. The main difference, as most critics will surmise, is that Ballard is much more clinical and focuses on every detail of each situation rather than exploding or flowing from experience to experience like WSB's work... Anyway, on with the novel itself. This book will suck you in from beginning to end, guiding you along the destroyed or elsewise desynsetized and immoral gateways of the imagination, lush and luring descriptions of bruised highways that exist somewhere between progressive reality and progressive fantasy, and as well the cars that drive us thru these roads. While on these adventurous roads of progress, the most surreal and unbelievably amazing sexual encounters take place...at first somewhat mundane and typical, but as the lead character travels deeper on this path of unrestrained erotica, the expereinces are increasingly darker and more sadistic (or atleast sadomasochistic). Then these adventures lead to flying off the road and into just as disturbing crashpoints, places where bodies are mingled and over time are reformed into scartissue patterns of new sexuality...which is espescially noted by the lead character's involvement with the crippled girl Gabrielle's scarred leg opening. You can feel the sexual fluids seeping out in vivid details, it's like S&M to an all new level... Towards the end, drugs are called in to make the journeys even more unreal and hallucinatory...resulting in awesome landscapes of highway angels on the tarmac and such...and whether drugs or not, the obsessions of these individuals are alwals unique. What more can I say without getting overly pretentious? Check out this book asap...
Rating:
Summary: Definitely Different
Review: There are very few books in existence that I know of which can prepare you for Crash. Nauseatingly disgusting and beautiful at the same time, author Ballard tries to find redemption in technological malaise. This is the first book I've ever read by Ballard, but if his other works are similar to Crash, he should be better known than he is presently. I should also mention that I've never seen the film version of this book. Within a few pages, I realized why Cronenberg made this into a film. Cronenberg has made a name for himself exploring the same bleak landscapes that Ballard apparently works in: namely, the marriage between humanity and technology. Crash shares some attributes with Cronenberg's Videodrome, at least in my opinion. What is interesting is that Cronenberg didn't do a film version of Crash much sooner (Crash was published in 1973). The second thing that hits the senses while reading Crash is the writing style. Cold, detached medical terms jockey with lovingly descriptive phrases concerning technology. Ballard is a magician with the English language and Crash is a first class spell in the syntax department. The first thing that is noticeable, of course, is the sickeningly gory descriptions of car crashes, wounds and ... sex. Chins will hit the floor over the sheer magnitude of blood and sex within these pages. But this isn't violence for the sake of violence; it is a careful constructed theme showing the awful repercussions that technology has wrought on our lives. ... The characters are dehumanized, without a doubt, but what Crash does is to show how humans are trying to reconnect to their emotions and humanity. That they choose to do so through the very means that has robbed them of it is the paradox. All of the characters that see car crashes as erotic adventure are essentially lost people. Ballard and his wife Catherine engage in mindless affairs and word games because they have lost their humanity, their sense of being. Car crashes give them a means to attempt to assert some form of dominance over technology, and the fact that Vaughan has more scars than any of the others shows that he is much closer to achieving this than any of the others, explaining his hyper sexuality and dominant position in this group of crash aficionados. Ballard brings the icons of technology into his story as well. Famous people such as Elizabeth Taylor, whom Vaughan wants to die with in a crash, are people most associated with technology. They are the faces we see in film and television, and could be seen as an organic face of technology. To meld with one of these figures in a crash is to go the extra step. Their death adds an extra dimension to the eroticism. It isn't just famous people that can bring this about. The character of Gabrielle is important in this context due to her leg braces and spinal supports. Gabrielle's organic existence, her very energy, is supported by technology. Ballard fantasizes about the metal braces and the special handles she needs in her car, explaining that they open up whole new avenues of eroticism. Even though I can see the beauty of Ballard's prose work and understand his connections between technology and humans, this in no way means that this book didn't disgust me. My stomach occasionally does slow turns when I think back on a particular passage or event, and driving to work and school occasionally makes me feel queasy. The idea of imitating crash positions during ...intercourse isn't going to win over the chicks, either. This is a book that is tough to read but certainly worthwhile. Be careful about recommending this book to people. Some folks are bound to take it the wrong way.
Rating: 
Summary: AUTO-erotica??
Review: This book is really just a relatively boring look at perverse psychological adaptation. I didn't find it disgusting or disturbing, just an overly magnified examination of sado-masochism bound to modern machinery. The author's relatively sparse insights are suffocated by his dronning repetition and zombie-like characters.
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