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Narrated by:
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Alastair Sill
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By:
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J. G. Ballard
About this listen
The definitive cult, post-modern novel – a shocking blend of violence, transgression and eroticism.
When our narrator smashes his car into another and watches a man die in front of him, his sense of sexual possibilities in the world around him becomes detached. As he begins an affair with the dead man's wife, he finds himself drawn with increasing intensity to the mangled impacts of car crashes. Then he encounters Robert Vaughan, a former TV scientist turned nightmare angel of the expressway, who has gathered around him a collection of alienated crash victims and experiments with a series of erotic atrocities, each more sinister than the last. But Vaughan craves the ultimate crash – a head-on collision of blood, semen, engine coolant and iconic celebrity.When our narrator smashes his car into another and watches a man die in front of him, his sense of sexual possibilities in the world around him becomes detached. As he begins an affair with the dead man's wife, he finds himself drawn with increasing intensity to the mangled impacts of car crashes. Then he encounters Robert Vaughan, a former TV scientist turned nightmare angel of the expressway, who has gathered around him a collection of alienated crash victims and experiments with a series of erotic atrocities, each more sinister than the last. But Vaughan craves the ultimate crash – a head-on collision of blood, semen, engine coolant and iconic celebrity.
©2011 J. G. Ballard (P)2011 HarperCollins Publishers LimitedCritic reviews
'A work of very powerful originality. Ballard is amongst our finest writers of fiction.' Anthony Burgess
'One of the few genuine surrealists this country has produced, the possessor of a terrifying and exhilarating imagination.' Guardian
'Ballard has issued a series of bulletins on the modern world of almost unerring prescience. Other writers describe; Ballard anticipates.' Will Self
'Britain's number one living novelist.' John Sutherland, Sunday Times
Narrated in slightly gauche plummy tones by an earnest young man, this audiobook version is somewhat inexplicably marred by arbitrary chapter divisions that bear no relation to those of the paper book, and curious mispronunciations of words like 'macadam', casting it not as the scottish surname of the inventor of tarmac but as some new kind of mediterranean nut, a minor postcolonial error between pistachio and penis.
chapter points are all messed up
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Disturbing yet fascinating
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The narrator was a bit meh and I found it hard to listen to him for longer periods.
Well written and masterfully descriptive
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it was better when i read it
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Absolutely bizarre
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Was an effort to listen
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Don't, if you have any sensitivity at all, read this near-pornographic book. Recognising the author's name from the movie Empire of the Sun, I imagined it might turn out to be a post-modern history of some kind, but what a mistake; and all I can conclude is that Ballard wrote this as an experiment in how many times he could variously describe the sex act in as many positions as possible in the most vivid and picturesque language English provides.
If you have any imagination at all, you will dislike it as much as I did.
REVOLTING: UNBELIEVABLE IMAGINATION
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Repetitive despite the shock value
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Brace yourself!
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