Crash: A Novel
by J. G. Ballard
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Book Summary Information
Author: J. G. BallardEdition: Paperback
Published: 2001-10-05
ISBN: 0312420331
Number of pages: 224
Publisher: Picador
Book Reviews of Crash: A Novel
Book Review: GOVT 490 for Prof. Miller
Summary: 3 Stars
Technology and sex in J. G. Ballard's "Crash"
"Crash" is Ballard's composition about a perverse obsession of the integration of death, sexuality, and technology, specifically the motor vehicle. The book is filled with dramatic visions of perverted sexual acts, nearly every single act occurs in a vehicle.
The book begins with the death of the most pivotal character Vaughan. He is the catalyst for all of the events throughout the book. His demented obsession with car crashes and the injuries they cause on the human body, specifically the genitalia, is the driving force for everyone else in the story's manic obsession with similar things. After the introduction explains how and why Vaughan died the way he did it retreats in time back to right before he meets the main character, which turns out to be Ballard himself.
The impetus for the meeting between the two is a accidental car crash that Ballard is in that is caused by speeding and wet roadways. This accident causes the death of a young man and injures the young man's wife who happens to be a doctor. The two meet many times afterwards and eventually begin having an affair. However their affair only works when they are within or near a car. This melding of the car and sex is a central theme throughout the book and the cars are envisioned as sexual objects themselves despite being inanimate objects. This continues to expand as the visions of two cars wrecking into each other are explained in the same way as a sexual act. It seems that in this story Ballard is saying the two acts are the same.
The story continually returns to Vaughan's obsession with car accident damaged bodies, car accidents, sex, Elizabeth Taylor, her death and Vaughan's own death in a car accident together. Throughout the entire time Ballard knew Vaughan the man had been planning the car accident that would kill the actress and himself. Trying to discern which injuries would be the best for her to receive in the accident and what type of accident would be the best to cause those injuries. The whole thing was an act of sex to Vaughan and to make it even more sexual he wanted to hit and kill her as she was having an orgasm with the rental limo driver.
Vaughan's obsessions are infectious to all the people around him and cause their increasingly perverse sexual predilections. Even in his death he pushes those people who crowded around him in life to be pushed further along with their own obsessions. The story shows the blurring line between where a persons body ends and technology
Summary of Crash: A Novel
J. G. Ballard's graphic, violent novel is controversial wherever it is read, even on Amazon.com's own Web page! The book's characters are obsessed with automobile accidents and are determined to narrate the horrors of the car crash as luridly as possible. In the words of the novel's protagonist, the wounds caused by automobile collisions are "the keys to a new sexuality born from a perverse technology." Read this novel and learn why David Cronenberg, who had previously adapted Dead Ringers and Naked Lunch for the screen, fought to turn it into his latest film.In this hallucinatory novel, an automobile provides the hellish tableau in which Vaughan, a "TV scientist" turned "nightmare angel of the highways," experiments with erotic atrocities among auto crash victims, each more sinister than the last. James Ballard, his friend and fellow obsessive, tells the story of this twisted visionary as he careens rapidly toward his own demise in an internationally orchestrated car crash with Elizabeth Taylor.
A classic work of cutting-edge fiction, Crash explores both the disturbing implications and horrific possibilities of contemporary society's increasing dependence on technology as intermediary in human relations.
A classic work of cutting-edge fiction, Crash explores both the disturbing implications and horrific possibilities of contemporary society's increasing dependence on technology as intermediary in human relations.
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