২১ মে, ২০২৩

"Mr. Amis’s talent was undeniable: He was the most dazzling stylist in postwar British fiction."

"So were his swagger and Byronic good looks. He had well-chronicled involvements with some of the most watched young women of his era. He wore, according to media reports, velvet jackets, Cuban-heel boots, bespoke shirts. He stared balefully into paparazzi lenses. His raucous lunches with friends and fellow writers like Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie, Clive James, James Fenton and [Christopher] Hitchens were written up in the press and made other writers feel that they were on the outside looking in. He seemed to be having more fun than other people. His detractors considered him less a bad boy than a spoiled brat.... 'He was more blond than [Mick] Jagger and indeed rather shorter,' Mr. Hitchens wrote, 'but his sensuous lower lip was a crucial feature,' and 'you would always know when he had come into the room.' Mr. Amis wrote his first novel, 'The Rachel Papers,' published in England in 1973, on nights and weekends. He gave himself a year to complete it. If it hadn’t panned out, he said, he might have considered academia."


"I feel I’m only going to write short stories and novellas from now on. Chekhov said, toward the end of his life, 'Everything I read strikes me as not short enough.' And I agree."

"In the old days it came quicker, the prose. Now it’s a battle. It’s not about coming up with striking adverbs, it’s more about removing as many uglinesses as I can find."

"What makes you a writer? You develop an extra sense that partly excludes you from experience. When writers experience things, they’re not really experiencing them anything like a hundred percent. They’re always holding back and wondering what the significance of it is, or wondering how they’d do it on the page."

AND: From the London Times:

Some thought him misanthropic, but it would probably be truer to say that he was disappointed and depressed by traits in society that, in his opinion, more and more held sway. He could see beauty and virtue lurking jointly in the shadows. He could also appreciate the rich comedy of life and the poignancy of its pretences. Yet, in the end, his was a pessimistic outlook, holding that personal progress was necessarily finite and insignificant while the universe itself, unmoved by any guiding hand, moved ineluctably towards chaos and destruction.

১১টি মন্তব্য:

Michael বলেছেন...



While the legend of The Algonquin Round Table was mostly hype, the literary circle of early 70s London was the real thing.

gspencer বলেছেন...

"and Byronic good looks"

Only in the mind of Peter Fallow.

Tom T. বলেছেন...

Time's Arrow was an interesting technical achievement, but the direction it ultimately went felt cliched.

Temujin বলেছেন...

Whoa. This one is setting me back a bit.
Last night, late- around 11, I was browsing online and came to a review of the new Martin Scorsese film, "Killers of the Flower Moon", which was just shown at Cannes to huge raves. That led me to another upcoming movie trailer, for a movie called "Zone of Interest", based on the book of the same name by Martin Amis.

I hadn't read any Martin Amis for years. I loved the two books I had read by him years ago, "House of Meetings" and "Koba the Dread". I thought to myself, I need to pick up another Amis novel to read and planned to scour Amazon today to select a book or two by Amis. I even put it on my calendar to do.

And then I open up Althouse this morning to find that he has passed. RIP to a terrific writer. Sad news.

n.n বলেছেন...

ChatMSM.

Ampersand বলেছেন...

Now that Mr. Amis is no longer with us, I can reveal that I never was clear about which one was Martin Amis and which one was Julian Barnes.

Narr বলেছেন...

Loved his father's books, but never got into his.

Joe Smith বলেছেন...

"...'but his sensuous lower lip was a crucial feature,' and 'you would always know when he had come into the room.'"

Other boys use the splendor of their trembling lip

They're so teddy bear tender

and tragically hip


--Elvis Costello

Ampersand বলেছেন...

Both Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens died from esophageal cancer (Hitchens from pneumonia that was a complication of the disease). One of the The biggest behavioral vectors for the disease is heavy drinking over a long period of time, plus tobacco use. So if you think cirrhosis and lung cancer are the only risks, think again. Life is already too short for most of us.

Craig Mc বলেছেন...

I am but a simple genre reader, but I have read "London Fields" and quite enjoyed it.

rcocean বলেছেন...

That Hitchens liked him is a red flag, but I'll read one of his novels. I hope the critics are right and its funny. Usually they are *extremely* generous in labeling something "funny".