Crash

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Ballard certainly added an extra kink to the perversity of this novel when he elected to give the narrator his own name. Yet, despite the injuries inflicted, they do not have this burning desire that helps man compose a consistently successful future.

In short, "Crash" is a dazzling, futuristic, and voyeuristic book, that couldn't be written today, (in 2019).

Robert Vaughan, who takes a keen interest in the brace holding James's shattered leg together and photographs it.

Believe me, no one needs this sort of protracted and gratuitous anguish: except perhaps those who think quadruple amputees are chic. At some points in his career, Ballard claimed that Crash was a "cautionary tale", a view that he would later regret, asserting that it is in fact "a psychopathic hymn. Like many of Ballard's other novels, the seeds for Crash were sown in a short story or, in effect, the series of stories that were eventually published as The Atrocity Exhibition (or Love and Napalm: Export USA). First, I've never met anyone in my life who got their sexual rocks off from car crashes, and yet, somehow--this book would have you believe--in a little section of London near the airport the neighborhood is crawling with people who do! The cause of the crash was a man driving his car over the edge of a flyover and into a bus passing below.

In the light of this, perhaps his detached, unfaltering attitude to bodily functions, disease, damage, obsession and general human mess is understandable. He noted that a moment has come in the history of mankind when sex-free artificial reproduction of the species became available: "We could literally put a moratorium on sex for 100 years and we still would not extinguish the human race. I crawled up the seats and opened the passenger door, not really a door anymore, but more of a hatch. In the fantasy, semi-abstract world of Ballard and Cronenberg, the vectors of thanatos and eros coincide in a single act of intercourse through man-made technology.

In a sense, pornography is the most political form of fiction, dealing with how we use and exploit each other in the most urgent and ruthless way. This edition is part of a new commemorative series of Ballard’s works, featuring introductions from a number of his admirers (including Robert Macfarlane, Martin Amis, James Lever and Ali Smith) and brand-new cover designs from the artist Stanley Donwood. Crash', is about Ballard, who is turned on by car crashes, as he meets various people: Vaughn, (a man who fuses technology is sex), while the characters over-indulge in behaviour that makes it an uncomfortable read. Cronenberg was concerned that Peter Suschitzky would be unable to perform the cinematography for the film due to his commitments to Mars Attacks! Jeremy Thomas, who later produced Naked Lunch, spoke to Cronenberg about the book and that he should read it.A highly acclaimed and strikingly influential novelist, British author Zadie Smith burst on to the literary scene with her sharp and funny debut White Teeth.