The Atrocity Exhibition is a really a long poem, like The Waste Land or Four Quartets. This is why it's very easy to reconfigure the text as poetry.The lost gills of the dying film actressThe pilot watches him from the roof of a lion houseThe familiar geometry of the transfigured pudendaOn the way to a terminal zoneA fading harmonic fractured smile spread across the windscreenThe wig amongst the beer bottlesAnd you, coma : marilyn MonroeYou: coma : Marilyn MonroeO technique of decalcomania, O su...

By and large, I think J.G. Ballard is awesome, with everything of his I'd read to date being a real treat. Sadly, such things can never last...Mostly flying at least 100 feet above my head at all times, this book mostly made me feel like a complete dumbass. I understood the meaning of individual words, sentences, and even the occasional paragraph, but as a whole? I know it's got something to do with sex and car crashes, but after that, I'm out. Actually, that's not quite true. There's also somet...

The Atrocity Exhibition is something like a shock therapy – it is painstakingly unpleasant but it makes one react.“Now that sex is becoming more and more a conceptual act, an intellectualization divorced from affect and physiology alike, one has to bear in mind the positive merits of the sexual perversions.”The Atrocity Exhibition is a series of dreamscapes or, to be more precise, madscapes born in the sick mind of the protagonist – the psychiatrist with the split and fragmented identity. His vi...

Impossible to rate or even classify this weird and disturbing book from the late '60s (it's not a novel, it's not a collection of mini-novels, it's not even a psychological treatise, though it has aspects of all three). It explores the links between death/danger and sexuality (his own wife had died suddenly a few years earlier). Parts of it will be thought obscene by many. It reflects Ballard's interests in psychoanalysis and surrealism: the very structure of the book is surreal. All of this mak...

Not exactly a novel, Ballard may have written more involving narratives than this 1970 present-dystopia of modernity in meltdown, but it's unlikely that he has ever surpassed its severe and unsettling perfection of form and function, diamond-hard, brilliant, and single-mindedly focused. While each unit could function as a story (and they were originally published as such in the late 60s) there's also a total cohesion here that makes it more than a collection, into some kind of shambling and uniq...

Should be read after Crash. Human as landscape, industrial wasteland as superorganism. The mathematical formulae of asexual coitus. Fiction as abstract art. Pale, sapped, inhuman dreamscapes. Traffic jams. Meteor-scored faces, etched in ghostly moonlight. A skeletal William S. Burroughs mannikin was strung up in Ballard's closet, dressed as Marilyn Monroe, strapped with a prosthetic something or other, dangling a clownish Ronald Reagan mask from its vampiric jaws.

JG Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition is, to put it mildly, an interesting reading experience. Ballard's early and repeated section 'Notes Toward a Mental Breakdown' offers something of a roadmap for the internal landscape presented in this book (novel?). A barrage of images and twisted versions of reality are thrown at the reader along with casual references to WW3, apocalypse and the erotic. Don't look for a narrative thread here. Instead, think about The Atrocity Exhibit as both an assault and...

The 60s according to Ballard: a world of mayhem and violence in all their possible shapes and manifestations, from deranged science to the pornographic use of catastrophes by tabloids and TV, in a surreal atmosphere of stillness and extreme acceleration at the same time. This is not a novel: it's a scrapbook made of pictures from weekly magazines and anatomy manuals, mathematic equations and visual art cryptic references. The text is a series of short paragraphs with apparently (?) unrelated tit...

A dark satiric blur of short prose bursts melding societal obsessions with sex, war, death, celebrity, and the almighty automobile into one phantasmagorical conglomeration. To read it is to experience a relentless series of oft-repeated images seared across one's brain: sprawling art installations; constant circling helicopters; clinical acts of sexual deviancy; automobiles eroticized and destroyed; celebrities and politicians (often as one and the same, also eroticized and destroyed); urban was...

As brilliant as Crash is, that's how not-brilliant this mess is.Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time. Anything erected there, a city, a pyramid, a motel, stands outside time. It's no coincidence that religious leaders emerge from the desert. Modern shopping malls have much the same function. A future Rimbaud, Van Gogh or Adolf Hitler will emerge from their timeless wastes.Were I still of acid-dropping age, I'd still be over th...

Reading this was like being trapped in a doctor's waiting room and repeatedly bashed in the back of the head with a cast iron frying pan. Not plot driven, not character driven, just a series of graphic montages that just get weirder as the book goes on. At no time during this read could I have explained what was going on, and I was bored silly throughout, with a lot of WTF-did-I-just-read moments. I think the author might have been intended the book to be funny. Perhaps you are not supposed to t...

I have mixed feelings about this book, as I do about all of Ballard's fictions. Ballard is brilliant, no doubt about that: he possesses one of the clearest prose styles of any writer, a style not just clear but unexpectedly ecstatic in a glacial sort of way. Some of his short stories are among the finest ever written. His collection *Vermilion Sands* in particular is absolutely one of the highest points of the form. As for his novels, they can be astoundingly original but also too obsessive.*The...

Although The Atrocity Exhibition is indeed innovative in its nonlinear, associative structure, and ambitious in its sweeping satire of popular culture, it's difficult for me to interpret the novel as anything other than a prototype for Crash , which is surely the more mature and complete realisation of the ideas and themes which Ballard first presents here. Most notably absent in these impulsive, impressionistic sketches are the cohesiveness of the later novel's vision, it's immediacy, the ea...

Revisited this right before Christmas...Check out this back cover blurb:When the ATROCITY EXHIBITION was originally printed (1970), Nelson Doubleday saw a copy and was so horrified he ordered the entire press run shredded.What Nelson Doubleday allegedly saw that made him figuratively soil himself in righteous indignation was one of the stories near the end of this book entitled 'Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan.' Legend has it that a wag distributed copies of this story (minus title and headings...

Disjointed? Yes. Psychotic? Yes.Titillating? Occasionally.Interesting? Of far less interest than could have been expected.A lot of ramblings about car crashes, sex, Kennedy, all kinds of trauma...

For all those people who read "Naked Lunch" and thought, "Gee, I'd like to read more of something like this but with a definite emphasis on the psychosexual aspects of architecture and how it mirrors the collapse of society" then not only have you come to the right place, but there is really nowhere else to go. Or for all those people who believe the world needs at least two books focusing on sexual arousal via the use of car accidents, you are going to be very glad this book exists. But for tho...

Here is the amazing true story about my experience reading the #2 novel in my J.G. Ballard Binge, The Atrocity Exhibition. I picked this one up and opened it to a random page…and I read a sentence that was remarkably strange. Here is the sentence: He sat on the edge of the water-filled basin, staring into the lucid depths of that exposed placenta. So I did it again, opening the book to a random page, and got: The profound anality of the Presidential contender may be expected to dominate the Un...

Ballard’s iconic experimental novel previewing the death of affect and lending itself to the horrible drum loop that opens Joy Division’s Closer. Includes such fun words as ‘mimetized’ and ‘buccal’ and ‘polyperverse’. Mad and briilliant.

This and Crash are two of my favourite books, precisely because of their weirdness, because they showed the teenage me that something surprising and original could be done with the novel form beyond the staid and traditional forms foisted upon us as A level English students. (My less fortunate peers in the soft South had to make do with Hermann Hesse.) Both Crash and the Atrocity Exhibition belong very much to their time, of course, but they do encapsulate a sort of postmodern masculine sociopat...

As a reader of Ballard, I’ve always preferred his early novels (The Drowned World, The Crystal World) and short stories (those collected in The Disaster Area, The Four-Dimensional Nightmare, and The Overload Man). Read Ballard for any length of time and you know he returns to the same obsessive images and landscapes again and again, often to powerful effect. Well, The Atrocity Exhibition is obsessive Ballard taken to the max. It’s the full Ballardian commedia dell’arte, replaying all the variati...