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Summary: Crash provides an eerie sythesis of man and machines
Review: Crash is a pivotal work in cyberpunk writing... A truly scary representation of how far humans have been devoured by our love of machines. Highly influential, it's spawned reams of philosophy, including commentary from Baudrillard, one of the most important nihilist/philosophers of the next millenium.
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Summary: Shocking, disturbing, certainly unusual...
Review: ...but I couldn't find the meaning of the book. What's it about? Sex? Psychopatic people? Cars'accidents?
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Summary: Excruciatingly dull....
Review: This book *desperately* wants to shock and disturb you. Unfortunately, Ballard's hackneyed prose only succeeds in boring the reader to distraction.The third time Ballard used the phrase "natal cleft," I threw the book across the room in frustration. You know an author is reaching when he runs out of synonyms for CROTCH!! (Perhaps Ballard needs Roget's Sexual Thesaurus!) I regret that I can never reclaim the precious hours I wasted reading the first half of this book. My only consolation is that I DIDN'T read the second half. Do yourself a favor and avoid *both* halves of "Crash."
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Summary: A bit off-kilter
Review: I don't mean this in a bad way, but this book was weird. I recently read a review of the movie and had never heard of J.G. Ballard before. The critic described the movie in the most controversial way and the plot seemed so surreal that I decided I had to read this. The book itself, I thought, was not as crude as the movie. The same effect was not able to be reached. The movie depicted the strange sexual behavior the main characters felt but forgot to mention the real reason this book was ever published. If you only saw the movie, I hope you weren't frightend away by Mr. Ballard. Anyway, if you like strange subject matter and a change from the ordinary, then this book is for you. Enjoy.
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Summary: psychosexual psychoanalysis
Review: well. this book was something else. so was the movie. but that is an understatement. certainly, the book pulls out all the stops dealing with sex and human relations but ballard in a way has written more than a book that would be classified as hard-core porn, but he certainly has a point. as human beings, we're always searching for the newer and "better" thing. once something that we do for a couple years or so gets old, we have to find something new. this is what ballard wants to tell us. (he could have just said it.) but that would take away the risque label it was branded with. all in all, it's one of ballard's memorables but not one of his best. turning it into a movie was perfect timing, especially now in the 90's when every other person is into s/m and every 1 out of 6 enjoys phone or cyber sex. it won't be long before people want to live their most twisted fantasies, have sex with their computers and phones, (or a car for that matter,) and 'crash' will have certainly influenced that fantasy. recommended. not for all tastes but recommended.
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Summary: Hollow Men staggering through a Hollow Plot
Review: The entire premise of the book was too thinly believable for me to accept - a maniacal doctor who's sexually aroused by car wrecks. He runs about photographing them, wondering whether the victims' genitalia were injured and masturbating at crash safety tests. As the book progressed, I found it harder and harder to believe in the doctor's obsessions - and in his desire to die. Admittedly, those factors do not make the book bad art, they merely make it repellent. Crash is not an entirely worthless book. It addresses a number of issues significant to present-day society. If you're looking for a masterpiece about sex and death, though, don't believe the hype on the cover. Look elsewhere.
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Summary: The obsessional hypnotist, with another weird juxtaposition.
Review: So is that too artsy-fartsy, "obsessional hypnotist"? Ballard is the best I've read for creating hypnotic visions of obsession that follow a weird (and unlikely!) inner logic -- and through richess of description and psychological detail, gradually persuading you that, maybe, just maybe, they are not so unlikely after all. His first novel, "The Drowned World," is one of his best in this regard; "Hello, America" probably the most socially observant. Even "The Crystal World" shows an ecstatic admiration of beauty in the world's destruction that I think is a sort of obsession. In that company, "Crash" is not as successful, but that's probably because it seems the least likely. All the same, I couldn't help admiring the audacity of weaving together the automobile (cornerstone of modern life), sex (cornerstone of most any life), and destructive tendencies, of self and others (which certainly the automobile and pursuit of sex sometimes foster.) Put it as I just did, and it makes a weird sort of sense. All the same, I wasn't entirely persuaded, but I tip my hat to the masterfully vivid Mr. Ballard for trying.
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Summary: twisted fun
Review: whenever friends ask me about this book i say if one were to feed it into one of those word frequency analysis programs the top of the list would be "semen" and "chromium". ballard's icy command of language is impressive and has a certain giddy joy to it. worth a read but you've gotta be in the right mood for it.
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Summary: Cars never felt the same way again...
Review: I'm not a literary critic. I'm merely someone who reads a lot. One definite way that I can judge a book to be good is by how it changes the way I think. When I read, the text usually becomes a part of me. Like a virus that has been let loose on the environment, the words don't just sit there they react and mutate with ideas I already have floating around inside my brain. The words in CRASH did exactly that. They effected my view of the automobile profoundly. I would never see that so common form of transportaion in the same way. After I read CRASH I simply could not get Ballard's idea of the communion of flesh and metal in an erotic manner. In my opinion, this book is speaking the hidden language of our rapidly advancing, technologically dependent society, unable to really admit or come to terms with its obsession.
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Summary: crash, the novel
Review: To: "A Reader. 03/28/97. rating = 6 ... not bad after all..." your synopsis of the twentieth century's most enigmatic author, I find thorougly deplorable . It is my belief that you are an echidnious buffoon. This is an example of apoctalyptic literature and a halluncinary book that meshes our society of today with tradgedies you will not understand. The rapture of our beginning or of our end. Tomorrow when we die I will rise above you in the knowledge of "CRASH". I've nothing more to say!
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