J.G. Ballard's THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION

The Atrocity Exhibition is best read as if one were the poor schmuck who has to pick up after a colossal accident in which a fairly banal narrative of obsession, injury and celebrity was dropped from a very great height and shattered into dozens of pieces, each composed entirely of very jagged and sharp edges. It's impossible to handle them without being injured by them, and it's useless to even think of trying to reassemble them into what they "originally were" because The Atrocity Exhibition wasn't finished until it was dropped from a very great height and shattered into dozens of pieces, each composed entirely of very jagged and sharp edges.

The annotated edition, which is the one that I read, at least comes with a few band-aids in the form of remarks made by the author years later, about what was going on historically or culturally that might be opaque to readers who weren't there for the original happenings, but band-aids is all they are, and your mind's body is still brutally slashed and hemorrhaging terribly and getting worse with each turn of the page, but still you read because you can't look away, and you wonder where Ballard is going with all of this, if he's going anywhere but into a more conventionally told version of the car crash angles when he gets around to writing Crash (which I've seen the film of but have yet to read).

It's one of the worst books that I've ever read twice, and one of the best books that I've ever screamed at and wanted to throw against a wall. It's gross and demented and beautifully written. One GoodReads reviewer brilliantly arranged its lines of prose into free verse a la The Wasteland and it works amazingly well that way.

It also gave me a new appreciation for the works of Max Ernst. I will be eternally grateful to The Atrocity Exhibition for this, even though this means that I'll never be able to look at an Ernst painting without thinking of car crashes and an imaginary breast reduction surgery performed on Mae West and the "protagonist's" "lovers" rendered in extreme closeups, reduced to geometry, and projected onto billboards that crowd the landscape from every angle. And lots of sex scenes that are most certainly not sexy. And...

Ouch.