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Crash
- Narrated by: Alastair Sill
- Length: 5 hrs and 59 mins
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Crash
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Summary
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.
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Critic 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
What listeners say about Crash
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Mr Creosote
- 12-12-20
chapter points are all messed up
loooool Ballard's bizarre pornographic novel is what it is, the dispassionate medical descriptions of perverse sexual acts within an almost autistic pagescape of civil engineering, functional service occupations and transport nomenclature forming a psychotic nexus between the dystopia of autogeddon and the conceptual anus of middle classes. Or something.
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.
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4 people found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- John
- 24-03-16
Disturbing yet fascinating
This is a fascinating book, looking at the link between technology and desire. The reading of it is good also- it was nice to hear a reasonably normal English accent, rather than the plummy one you often get on audiobooks. It is quite a deadpan delivery, but this seem appropriate for the lewd, twisted content of the book. The earlier ratings are too low in my opinion. But I guess this book is not for everyone. It could seem to some as pornographic novel- which it is- but then we live in a pornographic culture with sex mediated by technology, with a fascination for sex, as well as the dismemberment of bodies and death. It is more diagnosis of this culture than anything, but still- don't listen to it out loud on the bus!
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2 people found this helpful
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance2 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- J Salisbury
- 05-07-21
Well written and masterfully descriptive
It was totally and utterly unlike anything I have ever read before.
The narrator was a bit meh and I found it hard to listen to him for longer periods.
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance2 out of 5 stars
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Story2 out of 5 stars
- am
- 08-01-16
it was better when i read it
A hard book to narrate.. good attempt though a little flat with just a few words spoken as if not known.. suture.. perineum and macadam..
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3 people found this helpful
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- Laura
- 11-01-23
Absolutely bizarre
I have no idea how I managed to finish this but I’m glad I did. It’s clearly a window into the mind of the perverse and fascinating in a sickening way.
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Overall2 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story2 out of 5 stars
- Yellowblah
- 19-07-17
Was an effort to listen
I got really bored of hearing about erections, clits, death, blood and broken cars all the time
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2 people found this helpful
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Overall1 out of 5 stars
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Performance1 out of 5 stars
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Story1 out of 5 stars
- BARBARA
- 20-02-17
REVOLTING: UNBELIEVABLE IMAGINATION
Nasty, nasty nasty.
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.
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2 people found this helpful
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Overall2 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story2 out of 5 stars
- Andrew Flint
- 09-06-18
Repetitive despite the shock value
This is perhaps the worst J.G. Ballard book I have ever read. The concept sounds quite exotic and strange, but the execution of the novel is repetitive. The same phrases repeated, elements that could have been made poetic, exotic, just falling flat and the shock value isn't enough to cover those things up in today's age. I imagine that if another writer took this novel up and re-wrote it the concept would still be an interesting one and could make made into something special.
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Overall2 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story1 out of 5 stars
- Emily N.
- 10-05-23
Brace yourself!
Be aware, this book is incredibly sexually explicit and gruesome. Not for the faint hearted. Despite being a lover of horror myself, I could not bring myself to go beyond the third chapter. Felt as if a talented author was trying to write something as disturbing as possible, purely for shock value. But I suppose it worked, because you’re considering buying it!! Legitimate concern for the sanity of the author… Proceed with caution.
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