The Atrocity Exhibition

Rating:
Summary: Ballard's best - sex, psychopathology and sacred geometry!
Review: Interest in Ballard's work is sure to be stirred by the controversial film of his novel, "Crash." "The Atrocity Exhibition" shares many of the same characters and themes. In fact, of the two works, "Atrocity Exhibition" is the better: it pushes the artistic conventions of fiction to the limits to explore the degenerating mental landscape of the protagonist. Against a nightmarish postmodern background of unethical psychological experiments gone awry and obsession with media icons, even questions of simple identity become impossible to unravel. Travis/Travers/Traven/Talbot is pushed to madness and perhaps even murder - one character seems to die in four seperate scenes! - by his co-workers, fellow psychiatrists at a teaching hospital. Modern architecture becomes confused with perverted sexuality as the protagonist projects his fantasies of Elizabeth Taylor onto high rise apartment buildings. This edition is a gem. It contains four additional Ballard stories, a preface by William S. Burroughs, and deranged illustrations by Phoebe Gloeckner who juxtaposes her world- renowned medical illustrations with images of disturbing eroticism and mechanization. Provocative, exhilarating and terrifying, Ballard sucks the reader into the psychosis of his characters. This work is Ballard's literary masterpiece. After reading it, the world seems a much scarier place.

Rating:
Summary: Thank you, Mr. Perry!
Review: Let me extend my gratitude to Mr. Perry for one of the only sober Amazon reviews I've read. Yes, the Re-Search edition is garish and nearly unreadable.

I agree with Mr. Perry. Get this in plain text---however, as far as I know, it is nearly impossible to find, except in an out-of-print version called LOVE AND NAPALM.

THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION is a masterpiece and doesn't need the Christmas-ornament treatment lavished on it here.

I've given Ballard's book five stars; the Re-Search edition deserves none.

Rating:
Summary: Inner and outer explorations form the Atrocity Exhibition
Review: The Atrocity Exhibition is a novel, or a series of short but connected stories, depending on how you decide to come at it. Traven/Travis/Tallis/etc. appears as one man, moving through different evolutionary experiments, physical and psychological. He is experimenting with his psyche, as Ballard experiments with storytelling and writing. Chapter headings like "The University of Death," "Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown" and "You and Me and the Continuum" give an idea towards the scope of the characters' inner and outer explorations. The experimental sexual interactions, recurring alternate deaths and celebrity obsessions are from lists produced by Ballard using free assocation. Glimpses of themes of many of his later works can be found in this text.

Special features of the Re/Search revised edition includes an introduction by William S. Burroughs, new notes and comments from Ballard, and four additional short stories. Notes and commentary from Ballard himself run in the margins alongside the text to which they are related. The collection of medical illustrations by Phoebe Gloeckner is impressive. Often overlooked are the excellent black and white urban images, photographed by Ana Barrado. Her pictures are purposefully "Ballardesque," showing abandoned parking lots, beaches and launch sites.

Rating:
Summary: Inner and outer explorations form the Atrocity Exhibition
Review: The Atrocity Exhibition is a novel, or a series of short but connected stories, depending on how you decide to come at it. Traven/Travis/Tallis/etc. appears as one man, moving through different evolutionary experiments, physical and psychological. He is experimenting with his psyche, as Ballard experiments with storytelling and writing. Chapter headings like "The University of Death," "Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown" and "You and Me and the Continuum" give an idea towards the scope of the characters' inner and outer explorations. The experimental sexual interactions, recurring alternate deaths and celebrity obsessions are from lists produced by Ballard using free assocation. Glimpses of themes of many of his later works can be found in this text.

Special features of the Re/Search revised edition includes an introduction by William S. Burroughs, new notes and comments from Ballard, and four additional short stories. Notes and commentary from Ballard himself run in the margins alongside the text to which they are related. The collection of medical illustrations by Phoebe Gloeckner is impressive. Often overlooked are the excellent black and white urban images, photographed by Ana Barrado. Her pictures are purposefully "Ballardesque," showing abandoned parking lots, beaches and launch sites.

Rating:
Summary: The Angle Between Two Thoughts
Review: The short stories (or "condensed novels" as Ballard refers to them) that comprise this astonishing novel can be taken as a series of snapshots of a man in the still centre of a catastrophic psychological breakdown.

The almost static nature of large parts of the book (intensified by sterile settings such as hotel rooms, institutional buildings, multilane highways - in short transitional places with no value other than their ability to lead elsewhere) are due to the main character having lost any awareness of the passage of time.

He has been hollowed out by his mental crash and has filled that emptiness with a timeless and undiscriminating apprehension of everything around him - and this is where the danger of the book comes from. Where, Ballard asks, would someone who saw the world as a series of discrete and unconnected things (and this, perhaps, is where those obsessive lists that intersperse the book come from) start to assign priorities among those things, to start re-building some coherent picture of this chaos of images.

The answer is that Travis (or Traven or Tallis or whoever it is behind the masks the "hero" manufactures) takes the most powerful images he finds as the basis of his new world - and according to Ballard those would be of sex, violence and celebrity.

And so T**** wanders through a empty world watched over by the vast, indifferent and no longer even vaguely human images of fame, finding as much to be aroused by in the gentle but swift rippling of the bodies of two colliding cars as in the complexly intersecting forms of two human bodies.

And yet this flattened affective landscape acquires a topography as T**** learns to, firstly, simply accept this world and then to rejoice in the strange freedom it gives him.

Ballard is often accused of being amoral, and this is perhaps not unfair, but he might retort that he is actually more moral than his critics. He sees a world which has been altered by human perception of it so profoundly that our choice is to either accept those chances, or be swept under piles of a sand that, on microscopic examination, is made up of countless millions of identical pictures of Marilyn Monroe.

Rating:
Summary: Not much fun.
Review: This book is more effective as a piece of art than as an actual story which you can pick up and read. Imagine if someone with a car crash fetish started having a lot of sick hallucinations, and he got together with William S. Burroughs to try to write down what he was seeing in his mind. I am a fan of these experimental or post-modern writing styles. I read Pynchon, DeLillo, Palahniuk, etc. Still, I found it difficult to appreciate The Atrocity Exhibition. I knowing about it, let alone reading it, does give you some credibility among the really hip, so you might want to pick it up just for that.

Rating:
Summary: Not much fun.
Review: This book is more effective as a piece of art than as an actual story which you can pick up and read. Imagine if someone with a car crash fetish started having a lot of sick hallucinations, and he got together with William S. Burroughs to try to write down what he was seeing in his mind. I am a fan of these experimental or post-modern writing styles. I read Pynchon, DeLillo, Palahniuk, etc. Still, I found it difficult to appreciate The Atrocity Exhibition. I knowing about it, let alone reading it, does give you some credibility among the really hip, so you might want to pick it up just for that.

Rating:
Summary: I really don't know what to say about this book.... but...
Review: This is perhaps the trippiest and most important book that I have ever read. I'm not going to pretend that I read tons and tons of avant-guarde literature: this was recommended to me by a philosopher studying postmodern ethics. What you have in this book is something that is neither necessarily real nor unreal, a story nor not a story. This is the Madhyamaka novel-- neither this nor that.

I'm not even fully sure that I 'got' it when I read it. it works much more subconsciously than other books-- without cohernat plot or story line-- suffering through lack of detail, etc. But it hits you, and you understand. It is represenatational of things-- of reality.... I'm not going to be able to put down a lot more than this because I want to avoid pretense, but read this book!!!

Rating:
Summary: We are disgusted at our own enjoyment.
Review: You're in for a bumpy ride...

The Atrocity Exhibition is an perversely original, deeply disturbing tale of the 'New Reality', and the disintegration of Society. It is bursting at the seams with a ferocious wit, sexuality and, always a key Ballard theme, much railing against the irrational, all-pervading violence of the modern world. He writes with a spare, exact prose that almost makes his subject matter inviting, drawing us along irresistibly. His is the dark poetry of reason, rationalising the truly irrational. Beautiful words evoking hideous imagery. Sex and violence have never been so intrinsically linked. He wishes to arouse our dormant sensibilities, to shock us, perhaps test our tolerance threshold.

Much in common with Ballard's later Crash, this hauntingly powerful novel employs Burroughsesque non-linear techniques to convey his controversial ideas. The text is broken up into composite bands of sub-heading and paragraph, giving the reading a very fragmentary feel, and like The Naked Lunch it can be dipped into at any stage of its development with satisfying results. The prose exists in isolation, the essence of good writing. The barely-plotted, minimalist storyline reflects the central character's inner mindscape haunted by dreams of JFK and Monroe, dead astronauts and motor-crash victims, as he traverses the terrible wastes of nervous breakdown. Seeking his sanity, he casts himself in a number of roles: H-bomber pilot, presidential assassin, psychopath. Finally, through the black, perverse magic of violence he transcends his psychotic turmoil to find the key to a bizarre new sexuality.

The Atrocity Exhibition is cleverly controlled tour de force of inventive writing. Every page filled with death, depravity, delusion, genocide, or some other unspeakable vice.

We are disgusted at our own enjoyment.