Experience

Product Information

Kingsley’s book is fragmentary and episodic in design, but the prose is crisp and the text is genuinely funny; while Martin’s is incredibly touching in parts and more emotionally honest, does contain the same literary ticks that disturb me in his fiction. Jeremy Bentham, like Kingsley Amis, was a man who addicted himself to the endorsement of unattractive opinions. This memoir is his attempt to succeed in the new world of experiential writing which he recognizes as ascendant – “We live in the age of mass loquacity.

Kingsley loved his booze and his women and drove his wives away with his bad behaviour, even though they both remained loyal to him until the end. You do get the sense that he's sheltering his first wife, at least, from the public gaze (although not literally, as he includes a photo). And when the man is a novelist -- why he's hardly to be trusted more than any of the members of the Fourth Estate Amis inveighs against. particularly ones involving coverage of himself (Amis was so regularly savaged by the British press in the 1990s that as a teenager I gathered, without yet having read a word of his own writing, that he was Someone To Be Despised).Martin's sons are also a loved presence throughout the book (while Martin's wives and women rate few mentions (except as dedicatees)). On his two good friends Saul Bellow, also a mentor, and Christopher Hitchens: "I am not [Bellow's:] son, of course.

I haven't been able to bring myself to tell Gully that I don't think our living together will work and it's getting to be pretty worrying since we're supposed to be looking for suitable places to live. He readily acknowledges the nepotism that got him published and widely reviewed at the age of twenty-one.

Before Experience I might compare him with a kind of ‘ mean friend’ that the child within you desperately hopes to please. It is hard to remember whether these risible sentences occur in Craig Brown's inspired parody in Private Eye or in Experience itself. I suppose Forster is also on target and I should feel that Amis connected with me, the reader, though I'm not sure I welcome such.

Ma anche un’informazione sommaria nulla può togliere al fascino di una scrittura impeccabile e di una storia trascinante; sono molte storie, in realtà, che si avvicendano: dai solidi legami famigliari alla persecuzione del mal di denti; dalla tragica sorte toccata alla giovane cugina Lucy Partington alla furiosa rottura dell’amicizia con Julian Barnes; dall’affettuoso rapporto con la “matrigna”Jane Elizabeh Howard fino alla straziante morte del padre. Nevertheless, it must be pointed out that he once again does nothing resembling setting any record straight. It has been said that there are only two types of Irish male: the hard man, and the desperate chancer. It is no discredit to him that his careful, heartfelt tribute - the text closes with a letter to her mother, complete with kisses at the end - somewhat unbalances the book.

Though he is angry--mostly with the English media--the tone of the book is one of patient memorial and reconciliation, with most obviously Kingsley, and his own manifestations, but also with his "missing"--the cousin, Lucy Partington, a victim of Fred West's "prepotence", and the daughter, Delilah, by an earlier relationship. This year was momentous for Amis and he gives an intricate and detailed account of all the losses but manages to make the reader feel joyous at the end when he takes you to the birth of his daughter, Fernanda. He also examines the life and legacy of his cousin, Lucy Partington, who was abducted and murdered by one of Britain’s most notorious serial killers. His novels and short stories chart a world that is uniquely his: as John Updike puts it, 'Amis is trying to construct a large, reaching, ambitious set of books - trying to cover the world in fiction'.

His teeth are too good… It’s not everyone, you know, who can jostle shoulders with Joyce, who can hobnob with Nabokov. Yet these literary stars were querulous and critical of each other: Nabokov criticized Joyce, Kingsley criticized Nabokov, and Hitchens destroyed a visit with the ailing Bellow by talking outrageously.Bravely struggling against disease can make for a moving and uplifting memoir, but bravely struggling against toothache is never going to lift you into the pantheon of stoic heroes. Die schmerzhaften Verwandlungen des Lebens wurden von Martin Amis nie eindrucksvoller beschrieben als in diesem Buch. If the trick is to work, the unreliable narrator must in fact be very reliable indeed: reliably partial, reliably unaware of his own egotism.