Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN num: 9780007116867
ISBN number: 0007116861
Label: Flamingo
Manufacturer: Flamingo
Page Count: 192
Printing Date: May 21, 2001
Publishing house: Flamingo
Sale Popularity Level: 296421
Studio: Flamingo
Other books you might be interested in perusing:
Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
The Atrocity Exhibition is J.G. Ballard's most complex, disturbing work, with fabulous photos by Ana Barrado and artwork by Phoebe Gloeckner.
Amazon.com Review:
Easily one of the 20th century's most visionary writers, J. G. Ballard still lives far ahead of his time. Called his 'prophetic masterpiece' by many, The Atrocity Exhibition practically lies outside of any literary tradition. Part science fiction, part eerie historical fiction, part pornography, its characters adhere to no rules of linearity or stability. This reissued edition features an introduction by William S. Burroughs, extensive text commentary by Ballard, and four additional stories. Of specific interest are the illustrations by underground cartoonist and professional medical illustrator Phoebe Gloeckner. Her ultrarealistic images of eroticism and destruction add an important dimension to Ballard's text.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
-
There was a lot of experimentation in speculative fiction back in the late 60s and early 70s, and many such works do not hold up for present readers. This bizarre experiment by Ballard is a partial exception and will make an impact with those readers patient enough to figure it out. The original text is a non-linear anti-plotline, dripping with obtuse postmodern construction techniques, so experience with slogging your way those types of writing methods will be a plus. Readers who do not expect the experimental writing style herein might find the book either boring or completely incomprehensible. Even Ballard himself has recommended that the book be read out-of-order. With that being said, adventurous readers willing to fight through Ballard's experimentation will find occasionally terrifying and always thought-provoking snippets on modern society's obsessions with sex and violence, plus a running condemnation of the hyperactive and bowdlerized media landscape. (Some academic knowledge of media patterns would be another advantage before reading the book.) Here Ballard also introduces the basic themes that would form the basis of his later and even more bizarre novel "Crash."
The illustrated 1990 edition of this book adds some features that will probably aid in the reader's comprehension. The annotations from Ballard himself are informative, as is the original preface by William S. Burroughs (though you can disregard the worshipful 1990 intro from the editors). While Ballard's non-linear and postmodern construction are showing their age, readers willing to sink their teeth (and minds) into the text will find an atrociously brain-bending experience. It's certainly not for everyone, though. [~doomsdayer520~]
Rated by buyers -
*The Atrocity Exhibition* is a book so radically original in concept and execution it renders itself resistant to practically any endeavor to rate it by ordinary standards. Lacking both conventional plot and characterization, bearing a structure closely resembling collage, and a syntax that sometimes seems to slip into a style reminiscent of automatic writing and word association, one might make the case that *Atrocity* is neither novel nor novella, neither entirely fiction nor entirely nonfiction--indeed, *The Atrocity Exhibition* represents a text outside any established genre whatsoever and therefore against what standard can you judge it, except, perhaps, the only relevant one: is it worth reading?
It is.
What you have here, basically, is a sort of literary assemblage loosely radiating around a dense gravitational core of obsessions--cultural, sexual, and psychological representative of the postmodern countdown to the anti-climactic nothing that took the place of the apocalypse we'd all been expecting.
The JFK assassination, the media representation of iconic Hollywood stars, the Vietnam war, the geometric sterility of highways and car parks, and the mythology of the American automobile as a symbol of speed, consumerism, sexuality, and the allure of violent death are some of the structuring themes around which *The Atrocity Exhibition* is built. Fans--or detractors--of Ballard's controversial *Crash* will find much of that later work prefigured here, but *The Atrocity Exhibition* is far more atrocious, far more deliciously tasteless than *Crash*, which, by comparison, now seems almost a "mainstream" novel.
Composed in an often flat, documentary style purposely reminiscent of a scientific paper, which, at times, it ostensibly is, *The Atrocity Exhibition* is one of the more extreme transgressive texts by a well-known author you're likely to read. In great part because Ballard employs real-life celebrities and historical personages as the victims of his x-rated brand of stylized violence and because of the matter-of-fact delivery of even the most outrageous sexual and political theories, the effect of *The Atrocity Exhibition* is in many ways even more shocking than, say, Burroughs's *Naked Lunch.* Ballard's fictional characters move through a surrealistic landscape of constantly shifting, never resolved, but always ominous aura, the borders between sanity and insanity, simulation and reality, fiction and fact open to interpretation. Is Ballard serious? Does he really mean the things he's saying? What's so disturbing is that one has to ask the question at all. There's a certain psychopathic truth to even the most radically insane theories proposed in *The Atrocity Exhibition,* the kind of simulacra of "truth" that is often inextricably wound into the schizophrenic rant of the insane. Is it possible that reality itself can't be rationally explained without recourse to insanity?
In this edition, Ballard has contributed sidebar annotations which are often every bit as thought-provoking as the text itself. Written from a perspective nearly three decades after the initial publication of *Atrocity,* Ballard's notes illuminate much of the circumstances and influences that inspired the text. It's striking how prescient Ballard was about events and trends that would eventually come to pass and how spot-on were his satiric takes on politics, media, war, and sex. *The Atrocity Exhibition* often reads like a prophetic text from an earlier time that eerily describes, even at its blackest, our obscene present--a sort of postmodern "Book of Revelation."
Hardly what one would call an "easy read," *The Atrocity Exhibition* requires attention and patience as well as a taste for experimentation and a connoisseur's palate for perversity. This book offers a feast for such readers, comparable to those super-exclusive restaurants of urban legend that serve Heart of Lion Medallions or Broasted Leg of B-movie Starlet--hard to find establishments, all-but-impossible to get into, certainly not for the hoi-polloi, but well worth the price of admission if nothing else can satisfy your jaded appetite. You've been warned. Here's your invitation to the Exhibition. Enjoy.
Rated by buyers -
The Atrocity Exhibition is written with the kind of breath of a William S. Burroughs novel; particularly Naked Lunch. In both novels the characters seem to be lost in the labyrinth of their own mind. Whether or not the four male characters of Atrocity Exhibition are in fact living in a drug induced hell remains a mystery.
However what is clear, and believe me there is a lot left unclear in this work, is that the characters are living fractured lives. They are traumatized by events beyond their control. In a desperate endeavor to gain some power over themselves, they grasp at one another, tearing apart emotions and using their bodies as a temple for self-actualization. It is difficult to grasp a cohesive narrative structure out of the novel and in a sense it is an anti-novel.
With characters and events that remain unclear, like Elizabeth Taylour and her ambiguous "gill slits." Despite these elements of nonsense this novel remains a kind of testament to how desperate people are to truly have a sense of self.
Once that self is grasped the characters enter some kind of new world where their dreams or fantasies become their reality. It is a kind of egotism where the sexual is not erotic but painful, the kind of pain found in isolation. Here you have to have a sense of methaphors and be able to pick apart the novels short-comings because it does get rather torrid trying to understand a work without empathy.
As the novel goes on I realized that Ballard wrote it in a way that he understands the inner-self so much that all he can do is show how these people experience reality. Without empathy the work becomes a lost testament to how disaffected people have become.
Rated by buyers -
the atrocity exhibition is a watershed and seminal work in the canon of jg ballard. ballard is regarded and indeed classified as a writer in the 'science fiction' genre. if you consider science fiction to be the domain of 'star wars' et al. then reappraise, reevaluate and restart your imaginative capacity NOW.
ballard bestrides the real essence of what science fiction is all about. along with genre peers like william s burroughs and philip k dick ballard lets our everyday reality somersault into malleable form in order to glimpse through its creases as it bends and flips. and that is what science fiction is truly about.
the atrocity exhibition retells the imaganitive interpretation of a world gone vacant and disused despite its technological grandeur and will to power. the narrative dispells the need to lurk in the shadow of pessimmism for a dystopian world view of 'the future'. like pk dick, ballard is recounting a parallel universe that we are, in fact, already in yet refuse, deny and thus - vainly - extricate ourselves from. ballard simply removes the blinkers from our eyes and reveals the panaramic vision of 'our times'. less a parallel universe than a 'concurrent' one.
one aspect of ballards narrative(s) in general and (just one) significant difference when compared to the likes of philip k dick and burroughs, is the total lack of paranoia permeating the text.
ballard in my view is more prophet than paranoid.
the atrocity exhibition is one man's coming to sense with the 'real' world by tortuous and torturous understanding... he has to go 'mad' first.
i got my copy through RE/SEARCH PUBLICATIONS and anybody interested in the left of centre (and therefore) more substantial literary experience should check them out post-haste.
Rated by buyers -
"The Atrocity Exhibition is the industrial brain-terrorism of a drug fetus and JG Ballard rapes the digital-chimpanzee's naked body in the corpse feti=streaming circuit of the abolition world." - Kenji Siratori, author of Blood Electric
Find other books like this one:
