Rating: 
Summary: Unsettling and timely
Review: "The Atrocity Exhibition" is an unsettling collection of post-linear vignettes devoted to the technolization of lust, the role of perversity in the late 20th century information landscape, and the shifty barrier between the organic and the architectural. Annotated by Ballard, the expanded edition of "The Atrocity Exhibition" includes three "stories" detailing cosmetic surgery on celebrities and a witty science-fiction yarn about Ronald Reagan's third Presidential term. Ballard's prose is disquietingly precise. Other recommended Ballard: "The Wind from Nowhere" (his harrowing first novel), "The Unlimited Dream Company," "Memories of the Space Age," "Chronopolis," "The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard"
Rating: 
Summary: hmmm
Review: ...those of you who disagree will probably say i'm uneducated or narrow minded, but i say to you that artistic forays away from traditions of writing or painting are very healthy but must be aware of the risk of becoming bad - as amply demonstrated by this novel. Maybe i am an idiot though who doesn't understand the elite, i dunno, i like alot of strange and chalenging media but this didn't fry my bean.
Rating:
Summary: Atrocity Exhibition: The Motherload of Ballard's Darker Vein
Review:
I could easily title this review The Patients are Running the Asylum (and Isn't It Wonderful), but you'll have to read The Atrocity Exhibition to find out why....
This strangely elegant work seems to be the nexus of Ballard's 'Concrete Trilogy' (formed by Crash, Concrete Island, and High Rise) . These other works are crisper with straight ahead, if fantastic, plots and a tight focus on their subject matter. Atrocity Exhibition is where Ballard fuses everything from this period of his writing. Sex and Speed collide with Isolation and Arhitecture to create a narrative seemingly out of control, but with its own dream logic.
Small, usually paragraph-sized, snap shots follow hard on one another in this artfully crafted non-linear tale. It's also decidely fast paced. Imagine someone resurrecting Max Ernest to direct a Hong Kong-style thriller. The reader zips along in divine confusion as characters that we think we understand seem to drift from there moorings into an increasingly abstract landscape. And its hard to tell if we are looking at decay or evolution.
For that matter opposites are played against one another throughout. We are left to balance discourses on Freud and Jung with chapter titles like 'Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan' and 'The Assassination of John F. Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Road Race'. In true Dadaist style Ballard pushes our preconceptions of high and low art with this kind of play.
The greatest delight of Atrocity Exhibition is how hard the reader has to work to keep up. Just when you think you've figured out what this tale is about, you realize that you've only reached the foothills of another steep learning curve. But don't worry, the wonder, the strangeness, and the perversity will keep you coming for more. The mind's natural desire to create narrative is thwarted again and again to be rewarded with something deeper and more profound, but almost indescribable.
Full of strange intertextual references and images this book is still years ahead of its time. It's also not without it's own deadpan humor. At one point we see a full scale replicable of Keinholz's sculpture 'Dodge '57' (which consists of the back end of a '57 and the legs of a couple making out) zooming down the highway. Ballard also weaves in his obsession with the Space Program. Even though the manned interstellar missions are over for now, we've only begun to explore the space these travels have opened up in our minds. Atrocity Exhibition, written in the late '60s, places Ballard firmly in the vanguard of those exploring the fertile space between machine and mythology.
This work is by a master of the surrealistic at the height of his powers. The next time you hear someone carping about the impossiblity of interactivity in art, just smack 'em in the side of the head with a copy of The Atrocity Exhibition.
Rating: 
Summary: The precursor is playing a perverted game on us
Review: Again Ballard is perverting our perceptions of life. You can either see that as a good thing or a bad thing. It's not an easy book to read. In fact at some times you may end up feeling frustrated with the book but if you persevere with it it'll be alright...once you have his notes explaining the book to you but even then he still leaves you to think about the nature of what it is all about What I think the book is about is the whole cult of celebrity fame and the ever narrowing medical definition of it's conditions. What we see is that today's world is leading us to be dehumanized neurotic people with dangerous and repressed fetishes. Again the contents of Crash appear hear but in prequel form. He was only starting out his ideas of Vaughan's crazed nature and so on. There is also the reinactment of many of the car crashes such as JFK and Elizabeth Taylor and so on. They say the book is experimental in it's approach. I'm not much of a book hound so I don't know what the hell they mean but it certainly one which is different in it's topical approach. Perhaps it could be said that it is experimental because it kinda reads as a magazine - a sort of doctor's journal where even the doctors are as insane as you are. You can read any part of it that you like and go over it again and again to suit your fancy. But it still holds out an enigma that will not make itself clear Frustrating and not altogether enjoyable but it's a book that gets you thinking and makes you wonder - How messed up are we?
Rating:
Summary: Celebrity worship, psychic fragmentation, and World War III
Review: Although I've only read this book once and need to read it several times more to grasp its full meaning, _The Atrocity Exhibition_ clearly stands out as one of the most thought provoking "novels" I've ever encountered. The decentralized storyline and ever-shifting narrator combine to form a bleak but familiar picture of the late twentieth century. Many of the themes explored in CRASH and CONCRETE ISLAND appear here, as well as randomized lists and other rhetorical conundrums to challenge the reader's conception of "character" and "plot". Similar in many respects to the cut-up work of William S. Burroughs but far more readable and relevant.
Rating:
Summary: Masterpiece. That says it all.
Review: Ballard has a knack for making his insane ideas and conceptsmake perfect sense. This is a perfect example of that. This book isfilled with breathstealing bizarre concepts. You can really get to thinking about them. Many ideas in this angered some. Liz Taylor, Jackie O, and especially Ronald Reagan are all hit hard by Ballard's vicious insight (I don't think Ballard trying to be insulting. He was just being... weird). It's hard to tell exactly what this book is. Is it about the Atrocity Exhibition or is it the Atrocity Exhibition? The letters found at the bottom of random pages point to the latter. Ballard throws away everything anything ever taught about writing, including plot and continuity so don't try to find any, and sets out to create pure art out of words. Does he succeed? Yes.
Rating:
Summary: Bizzare
Review: Brilliant and very bizzar. It requires the reader's full attention. My favorite chapter/story is "The Assasination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race"
Rating: 
Summary: Painfully Repetitive
Review: Eighty percent of this book could easily be discarded doing no damage to the overall piece. The majority of this book reads like a mad-lib using this formula. -- Take four characters names (two male, two female).
-- One pop-culture icon (Marilyn Monroe, J.F.K., Ronald Reagan, Ralph Nader (apparently in the late sixties the author considered Nader a huge pop icon) etc.).
-- Several pornographic descriptions of body parts or sexual acts.
-- A couple geometric descriptions of architecture (overpasses, parking ramps, room layout, etc.)
-- One act of mechanical destruction (car crashes mostly).
-- One act of human mutilation (from genital mutilation incurred during rape, to napalm disfigured children). Add these components to cocktail glass, shake vigorously, and viola--you have any one of the first ten chapters of this book. Now within this gibberish there are several prophetic and/or poignant points made. Sifting through all the psycho-babel and pretentiousness to finds these, however, is an exercise in tedium. No attempt is made at characterization with the two male characters being completely interchangeable, as well as, the two female characters. It's fairly clear this is intentional, but that doesn't make it a good idea. Having at least one "sane" character in the story to break up the monotony of the disjointed stream-of-consciousness narrative certainly would have made for a more pleasant reading experience. The next five chapters could also be reduced to mad-lib formulas and are done in the style, of a think-tank-style psychological study on how people would like to kill, have-sex-with, or do both to a miscellaneous pop-icon. Read one and you've read them all--although the one about Ronald Reagan is probably the best. The next three appendices are just dry descriptions of cosmetic surgery as fictitiously applied to pop-icons. I can see no real merit to any of these. Then just to confuse us, the final appendix is one of the most brilliant things I have ever read. It's a hilarious and poignant narrative about the medias ability to focus on the trivial while trivializing the vital. An absolutely brilliant satirical piece as good as any I've ever read, and the reason for the second star in my rating. I believe J. G. Ballard is very likely a brilliant writer. This book, however, I would consider a failed experiment.
Rating:
Summary: Painfully Repetitive
Review: Eighty percent of this book could easily be discarded doing no damage to the overall piece. The majority of this book reads like a mad-lib using this formula. -- Take four characters names (two male, two female).
-- One pop-culture icon (Marilyn Monroe, J.F.K., Ronald Reagan, Ralph Nader (apparently in the late sixties the author considered Nader a huge pop icon) etc.).
-- Several pornographic descriptions of body parts or sexual acts.
-- A couple geometric descriptions of architecture (overpasses, parking ramps, room layout, etc.)
-- One act of mechanical destruction (car crashes mostly).
-- One act of human mutilation (from genital mutilation incurred during rape, to napalm disfigured children). Add these components to cocktail glass, shake vigorously, and viola--you have any one of the first ten chapters of this book. Now within this gibberish there are several prophetic and/or poignant points made. Sifting through all the psycho-babel and pretentiousness to finds these, however, is an exercise in tedium. No attempt is made at characterization with the two male characters being completely interchangeable, as well as, the two female characters. It's fairly clear this is intentional, but that doesn't make it a good idea. Having at least one "sane" character in the story to break up the monotony of the disjointed stream-of-consciousness narrative certainly would have made for a more pleasant reading experience. The next five chapters could also be reduced to mad-lib formulas and are done in the style, of a think-tank-style psychological study on how people would like to kill, have-sex-with, or do both to a miscellaneous pop-icon. Read one and you've read them all--although the one about Ronald Reagan is probably the best. The next three appendices are just dry descriptions of cosmetic surgery as fictitiously applied to pop-icons. I can see no real merit to any of these. Then just to confuse us, the final appendix is one of the most brilliant things I have ever read. It's a hilarious and poignant narrative about the medias ability to focus on the trivial while trivializing the vital. An absolutely brilliant satirical piece as good as any I've ever read, and the reason for the second star in my rating. I believe J. G. Ballard is very likely a brilliant writer. This book, however, I would consider a failed experiment.
Rating:
Summary: a warning to the unversed
Review: i bought the book because of the rave reviews, because i fancy myself to be progressive and able to think on many levels. however, i was not able to grasp this book - or collection of short essays, or vignettes, or whatever - even with the foreward by burroughs and the extended commentary by ballard. confusion made reading a chore, and not an enjoyable one (where after a mighty struggle i manage to decipher an idea enough to get my mental teeth into it so that i can digest it later). what i mean to say is NOT that this is a bad book, but rather that it is not for those who aren't familiar with ballard's philosophies/notions of automobiles and sex. i wish i could have understood these concepts more because the writing itself was excellent and the structure of the book interestingly different from everything i am used to. in a word: beware.
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