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Experience: A Memoir Paperback – Illustrated, June 12, 2001
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“Superb memoir...a moving account of [Amis’s] coming of age as an artist and a man.” —San Francisco Chronicle
The son of the great comic novelist Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis explores his relationship with this father and writes about the various crises of Kingsley's life. 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. Experience also deconstructs the changing literary scene, including Amis' portraits of Saul Bellow, Salman Rushdie, Allan Bloom, Philip Larkin, and Robert Graves, among others.
Not since Nabokov's Speak, Memory has such an implausible life been recorded by such an inimitable talent. Profound, witty, and ruthlessly honest, Experience is a literary event.
- Print length432 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherVintage
- Publication dateJune 12, 2001
- Dimensions5.2 x 1.1 x 8 inches
- ISBN-100375726837
- ISBN-13978-0375726835
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“A splendid writer.... Hums with the same antic prose and looping comic riffs that characterize Amis’ fiction.” —Time
“Superb memoir...a moving account of [Amis’s] coming of age as an artist and a man.” —San Francisco Chronicle
From the Inside Flap
The son of the great comic novelist Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis explores his relationship with this father and writes about the various crises of Kingsley's life. 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. Experience also deconstructs the changing literary scene, including Amis' portraits of Saul Bellow, Salman Rushdie, Allan Bloom, Philip Larkin, and Robert Graves, among others. Not since Nabokov'sSpeak, Memory has such an implausible life been recorded by such an inimitable talent. Profound, witty, and ruthlessly honest, Experience is a literary event.
From the Back Cover
The son of the great comic novelist Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis explores his relationship with this father and writes about the various crises of Kingsley's life. 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. Experience also deconstructs the changing literary scene, including Amis' portraits of Saul Bellow, Salman Rushdie, Allan Bloom, Philip Larkin, and Robert Graves, among others. Not since Nabokov's" Speak, Memory has such an implausible life been recorded by such an inimitable talent. Profound, witty, and ruthlessly honest, Experience is a literary event.
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
— Dad.
This was my older son, Louis, then aged eleven.
— Yes?
My dad would have said, '... Yeeesss?' — with a dip in it, to signal mild but invariable irritation. I once asked him why he did this and he said, 'Well I'm already here, aren't I?' For him, the Dad-Yes? interlude was a clear redundancy, because we were in the same room together and established as having some kind of conversation, however desultory (and unenlivening, from his point of view). I saw what he meant; but five minutes later I would find myself saying, 'Dad.' And then I would brace myself for an especially vehement affirmative. I was a teenager before I broke the habit. Children need a beat of time, to secure attention while the thought is framed.
This is from I Like It Here (1958), Kingsley's third and most close-to-life novel:
'Dad.'
'Yes?'
'How big's the boat that's taking us to Portugal?'
'I don't know really. Pretty big, I should think.'
'As big as a killer whale?'
'What? Oh yes, easily.'
'As big as a blue whale?'
'Yes, of course, as big as any kind of whale.'
'Bigger?'
'Yes, much bigger.'
'How much bigger?'
'Never you mind how much bigger. Just bigger is all I can tell you.'
There is a break, and the discussion resumes:
... 'Dad.'
'Yes?'
'If two tigers jumped on a blue whale, could they kill it?'
'Ah, but that couldn't happen, you see. If the whale was in the sea the tigers would drown straight away, and if the whale was ...'
'But supposing they did jump on the whale?'
... 'Oh, God. Well, I suppose the tigers'd kill the whale eventually, but it'd take a long time.'
'How long would it take one tiger?'
'Even longer. Now I'm not answering any more questions about whales or tigers.'
'Dad.'
'Oh, what is it now, David?'
'If two sea-serpents ...'
How well I remember those vastly stimulating chats. My tigers weren't just ordinary tigers, either: they were sabre-toothed tigers. And the gladiatorial bouts I dreamed up were far more elaborate than I Like It Here allows. If two boa constrictors, four barracuda, three anacondas and a giant squid ... I must have been five or six at the time.
In retrospect I can see that these questions would have played on my father's deepest fears. Kingsley, who refused to drive and refused to fly, who couldn't easily be alone in a bus, a train or a lift (or in a house, after dark), wasn't exactly keen on boats — or sea-serpents. Besides, he didn't want to go to Portugal, or anywhere else. The trip was forced on him by the terms and conditions of the Somerset Maugham Award — a `deportation order' he called it in a letter to Philip Larkin (`forced to go abroad, bloody forced mun'). He won the prize for his first novel, Lucky Jim, published in 1954. Twenty years later I would win it too.
The Rachel Papers appeared in mid-November, 1973. On the night of 27 December my cousin, Lucy Partington, who was staying with her mother in Gloucestershire, was driven into Cheltenham to visit an old friend, Helen Render. Lucy and Helen spent the evening talking about their future; they put together a letter of application to the Courtauld Institute in London, where Lucy hoped to continue studying medieval art. They parted at 10.15. It was a three-minute walk to the bus stop. She never posted the letter and she never boarded the bus. She was twenty-one. And it was another twenty-one years before the world found out what happened to her.
— Dad.
— Yes?
Louis and I were in the car — the locus of so many parental dealings, after a while, when the Chauffeuring Years begin to stretch out ahead of you like an autobahn.
— If nothing else was changed by you not being famous, would you still want to be famous?
A well-executed question, I thought. He knew that fame was a necessary by-product of acquiring a readership. But apart from that? What? Fame is a worthless commodity. It will occasionally earn you some special treatment, if that is what you're interested in getting. It will also earn you a far more noticeable amount of hostile curiosity. I don't mind that — but then I'm a special case. What tends to single me out for it also tends to inure me to it. In a word — Kingsley.
— I don't think so, I answered.
— Why?
— Because it messes with the head.
And he took this in, nodding.
* * *
It used to be said that everyone had a novel in them. And I used to believe it, and still do in a way. If you're a novelist you must believe it, because that's part of your job: much of the time you are writing the fiction that other people have in them. Just now, though, in 1999, you would probably be obliged to doubt the basic proposition: what everyone has in them, these days, is not a novel but a memoir.
We live in the age of mass loquacity. We are all writing it or at any rate talking it: the memoir, the apologia, the c.v., the cri de coeur. Nothing, for now, can compete with experience — so unanswerably authentic, and so liberally and democratically dispensed. Experience is the only thing we share equally, and everyone senses this. We are surrounded by special cases, by special pleadings, in an atmosphere of universal celebrity. I am a novelist, trained to use experience for other ends. Why should I tell the story of my life?
I do it because my father is dead now, and I always knew I would have to commemorate him. He was a writer and I am a writer; it feels like a duty to describe our case — a literary curiosity which is also just another instance of a father and a son. This will involve me in the indulgence of certain bad habits. Namedropping is unavoidably one of them. But I've been indulging that habit, in a way, ever since I first said, 'Dad.'
I do it because I feel the same stirrings that everyone else feels. I want to set the record straight (so much of this is already public), and to speak, for once, without artifice. Though not without formality. The trouble with life (the novelist will feel) is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental and ineluctably trite. The dialogue is poor, or at least violently uneven. The twists are either predictable or sensationalist. And it's always the same beginning; and the same ending ... My organisational principles, therefore, derive from an inner urgency, and from the novelist's addiction to seeing parallels and making connections. The method, plus the use of footnotes (to preserve the collateral thought), should give a clear view of the geography of a writer's mind. If the effect sometimes seems staccato, tangential, stop-go, etc., then I can only say that that's what it's like, on my side of the desk.
And I do it because it has been forced on me. I have seen what perhaps no writer should ever see: the place in the unconscious where my novels come from. I couldn't have stumbled on it unassisted. Nor did I. I read about it in the newspaper ...
Someone is no longer here. The intercessionary figure, the father, the man who stands between the son and death, is no longer here; and it won't ever be the same. He is missing. But I know it is common; all that lives must die, passing through nature to eternity. My father lost his father, and my children will lose theirs, and their children (this is immensely onerous to contemplate) will lose theirs.
On the shelf by my desk I have a small double-sided picture-stand which contains two photographs. One is black-and-white and of passport size: it shows a teenage schoolgirl in a V-necked sweater, shirtsleeves and tie. Long brown hair parted at the centre, spectacles, the beginnings of a smile. Above her head she has written, in block capitals: undesirable alien. This is Lucy Partington ... The second photograph is in colour: it shows a toddler in a dark flower dress, smocked at the chest, with short puffed sleeves and pink trim. She has fine blonde hair. Her smile is demure: pleased, but quietly pleased.
This is Delilah Seale.
The photographs are kept together, and for almost twenty years their subjects lived together in the back of my mind. Because these are, or were, my missing.
Letter from School
Sussex Tutors,
55 Marine Parade,
Brighton, Sussex.
23rd Oct. [1967]
Dearest Dad and Jane,
Thanks awfully for your letter. So we all appear to be working like fucking fools. I seem to be flitting manically from brash self-confidence to whimpering depression; the English is all very fine, but the Latin I find difficult, tedious, and elaborately unrewarding. It would be so boring if it buggered up my Oxford Entrance paper. I spend about 2-3 hours per day on it, but I feel a painful lack of basic knowledge — not being one of those little sods who has been chanting `amo, amas, amat', from the age of eighteen months. Anyway, the set book (Aeneid Bk. II) is pretty splendid, and if I slog through that with sufficient rigour I should be O.K. on that part of the 'O' level paper.
Mr Ardagh decided that the best plan for Ox. Ent. is to choose about 6 chaps and know them pretty thoroughly, rather than farting about with a bit of everyone. I have chosen: Shakespeare; Donne and Marvell, Coleridge and Keats; Jane Austen; [Wilfred] Owen; Greene; and possibly old Yeats as well. I do enjoy the English but I must say that I get periods of desperately wanting something else to occupy myself with. The prospect of teaching has lost its glow because it means that I will be dealing with the same sort of thing for the next 4 years without much of a break. I hope you don't think I'm off the idea of Eng. Lit., because I find myself suffused with an ardour for sheer quantity of consumption. In my last few days in London I read `Middlemarch' (in 3 days), `The Trial' (Kafka is a fucking fool — in 1 day) and `The Heart of the Matter' (in 1 day), and even here I manage a couple of novels a week (plus lots of poetry). Its [sic] just that I'm a bit cheesed off with applying myself to the same ideas all the time — but I shouldn't think its [sic] anything that a paternal — or step-maternal — harangue won't correct. I'm sorry to be a bore, and it's probably merely a phase — might even be character-building, who knows.
I thought it very representative of your integrity, Jane, to warn me of the defficiencies [sic] of Nashville. Much as I'd love to see you both, it does seem that I'll be doing too much fire-ironing and pie-fingering (I'm sure Jane could adapt that to one of her swirling mixed metaphors), to be able to get away for a full 2-3 weeks. I might have an interview at Oxford as late as the 20th of Dec. and various replies could start coming in as early as Jan 1st. This, coupled with the dire deterrent of U.S. T.V. being lousy, will, I fear, prevent me from coming over. It is a pity because I would dearly love to see you both.
I see young Bruce pretty regularly, but not regularly enough, it seems, for him to contrive to secure adequate stocks of fish-cakes for my visits. However he seems in fine form ... Predictably enough the very word is like a bell to toll me back to Latin Unseens, prose constructions, and like trivia.
Please write soon, I miss you both terribly,
All my love,
Mart x x x
P.S. Convey my cordial regards to Karen — there are no doleful regrets there because, as far as I can remember, she should be about 9' 6" tall by now.
P.P.S. On [sic] retrospect I consider `Middlemarch' to be FUCKING good - Jane Austen + passion + dimension. Very fine. Love Mart.
Product details
- Publisher : Vintage; Illustrated edition (June 12, 2001)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 432 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0375726837
- ISBN-13 : 978-0375726835
- Item Weight : 14.4 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.2 x 1.1 x 8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #427,277 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #435 in British & Irish Literary Criticism (Books)
- #1,907 in Author Biographies
- #12,292 in Memoirs (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Martin Louis Amis (born 25 August 1949) is a British novelist. His best-known novels are Money (1984) and London Fields (1989). He has received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his memoir Experience and has been listed for the Booker Prize twice to date (shortlisted in 1991 for Time's Arrow and longlisted in 2003 for Yellow Dog). Amis served as the Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester until 2011. In 2008, The Times named him one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.
Amis's work centres on the excesses of late-capitalist Western society, whose perceived absurdity he often satirises through grotesque caricature; he has been portrayed as a master of what the New York Times called "the new unpleasantness". Inspired by Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, and James Joyce, as well as by his father Kingsley Amis, Amis himself went on to influence many successful British novelists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, including Will Self and Zadie Smith.
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
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Customers find the book's prose complex and insightful, with many literary moments. They describe it as interesting, intelligent, and entertaining. Readers praise the book as a wonderful read with a moving pacing.
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Customers find the author's writing style insightful and beautiful. They describe the book as cleverly structured and moving, with many literary moments of brilliance. Readers praise the author's charming yet unapologetic personality. The book is a touching tribute to a complex and difficult man.
"...For me, that's a plus. (Actually, the book is cleverly structured, and it should be of interest to those studying the genre of memoirs or, more..." Read more
"...Amis can delight with his precise wording and dry wit, taking us from his childhood to his no-longer-young adulthood." Read more
"...The book's scope is impressive because aside from Amis's life, it chronicles the lives of his immediate family members, his father in particular...." Read more
"...And it proved to be a wonderful read, just as clever and insightful as his novels...." Read more
Customers find the book insightful, clever, and entertaining. They appreciate the author's creative work and footnotes that provide useful information. The book is described as charming yet unapologetic.
"...will exasperate some readers, but I found that the footnotes contain a lot of good stuff...." Read more
"...such as the relationship between an author's experience and his creative work, the place of the narrator in a work of fiction, and the lost..." Read more
"...There are a number of fascinating elements to draw in his readers--profane and hilarious letters written mostly in his late teens that serve as..." Read more
"...Overall, the book rambles and time frames are mixed, but then Martin says that is the way all lives are lived." Read more
Customers enjoy the book's readability. They say it's a clever and insightful read, and the author is superb.
"...However despite these potential shortcomings it was a terrific read...." Read more
"...Although far from a perfect book, with EXPERIENCE Martin Amis enters that communion of literature." Read more
"...And it proved to be a wonderful read, just as clever and insightful as his novels...." Read more
"...Perfect book. Mr Amis should be very proud. Have been giving copies to all my friends." Read more
Customers enjoy the book's pacing. They find it compassionate, funny, and moving.
"...It also is moving, it has many moments of literary brilliance, and it often is quite interesting...." Read more
"...challenges and charms us; here Amis is at his most wry and funny and moving." Read more
"Compassionate, funny, wry and very moving. Martin Amis?..." Read more
Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on December 12, 2012I read this memoir shortly after rereading Christopher Hitchens' "Hitch-22". The difference between the way in which an essayist and a novelist write a memoir is striking, and neither style can be said to be superior to the other. Having only read one of Amis' novels previous to this I was unsure what to expect and my knowledge of his father and the literary scene in the UK is minimal. However despite these potential shortcomings it was a terrific read. Amis' lets the reader deep inside his grief over losing his cousin to a serial-killer and his father to old age without becoming weepy or needlessly sentimental. He explores his successes without arrogance. And he opens a window, just a crack, into the life of a writer without creating a narrative that could only be appreciated by a member of the profession.
I'm not the most skilled of readers (despite loving the process), but I took in this book in just a couple days and have since purchased more of his work. This is highly recommended and was much enjoyed!
I should add the book was very affordable and arrived much faster than I'd expected (actually much faster than any other product I've purchased from the Amazon website), and, though used, was in perfect, brand-new condition. I will certainly use this seller again.
- Reviewed in the United States on January 3, 2015Like many of his novels, Martin Amis's memoir is unconventional. It also is moving, it has many moments of literary brilliance, and it often is quite interesting. But, for me, Amis is too full of himself, he shares too much information (rather like peeing in public), and there is too much flash. In short, EXPERIENCE is over the top. Still, I enjoyed it.
EXPERIENCE is not written in traditional chronological or linear fashion. For me, that's a plus. (Actually, the book is cleverly structured, and it should be of interest to those studying the genre of memoirs or, more broadly, non-fiction writing in general.) Instead, EXPERIENCE -- written by Amis at age fifty -- is organized more around what he has learned in life (hence the title?), three of the more unusual events of his life, and some of the exceptional people he has known.
The unusual events are the vile murder of his cousin Lucy Partington by the serial murderer Frederick West, Amis's serious dental problems (this motif becomes tiresome), and the sudden appearance around the age of forty of a daughter, then nearly twenty, whom he had fathered out-of-wedlock. The exceptional people include Philip Larkin, Christopher Hitchens, Saul Bellow (who, along with Nabokov, Amis deems the "novelist of the century"), and of course his father Kingsley. Indeed, the book is almost as much about Kingsley Amis as it is about Martin. It ends up being a touching tribute to a complex and difficult man. (EXPERIENCE also is a tribute to Martin's mother Hilly.)
One of the unconventional characteristics of the book is that it is heavily footnoted. That no doubt will exasperate some readers, but I found that the footnotes contain a lot of good stuff. The first half of the book Amis loosely organizes around letters he sent as a young man to his father and stepmother. (In an excess of pedantry, these letters are presented with a pestilence of "sic"s.) There is an insert of about two dozen photographs -- quite welcome.
EXPERIENCE was perhaps more interesting to me than it would be to most American readers, first because I came to it with a high regard for both Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, and second for the more personal reason that I happen to have been born one day before Martin Amis. Thus, I found myself, as presumptuous as this may seem, comparing lives. A small example: for Amis, the Cuban Missile Crisis (October 1962) was a much more traumatic, psychically scarring event than it was for me, even though I was living close to one of the putative principal targets for the Soviet ballistic missiles. Amis writes: "The children of the nuclear age, I think, were weakened in their capacity to love. Hard to love, when you're bracing yourself for impact." To me, that's silly.
There is much, however, that is far from silly. Here are a few of the many worthwhile observations I encountered:
* "It's not the case that in the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes. In the future everyone will be famous all the time -- but only in their own minds. It is lookalike fame, karaoke fame."
* "This is where we really go when we die: into the hearts of those who remember us."
* "Kingsley and I agreed * * * that the last forty-odd lines of 'Paradise Lost' were incomparably the greatest thing in non-dramatic poetry in English."
* "I see Bellow perhaps twice a year, and we call, and we write. But that accounts for only a fraction of the time I spend in his company. He is on the shelves, on the desk, he is all over the house * * *. That's what writing is, not communication but a means of communion. And here are the other writers who swirl around you, like friends, patient, intimate, sleeplessly accessible, over centuries. This is the definition of literature."
Although far from a perfect book, with EXPERIENCE Martin Amis enters that communion of literature.
- Reviewed in the United States on August 19, 2000Readers expecting anecdotes and gossip about Amis's literary friends and family will be disappointed. This is not actually a memoir, but a creative work that revisits the themes developed in Amis's previous books such as the relationship between an author's experience and his creative work, the place of the narrator in a work of fiction, and the lost illusion of a caring, omnipotent god.
Reviewers who approached this book as a literary memoir were understandably puzzled by Amis's apparent obsession with the disappearance of his cousin, Lucy Partington, in 1973. Twenty years later the family learned that she had been murdered by a serial murderer. This is a family tragedy, certainly, but a private sort of tragedy. Yet, Amis returns to the subject again and again and in the oddest places. At one point, he is going to have all of his upper teeth pulled and he starts worrying about Lucy Partington. I think the place of Lucy Partington in Amis's imagination does take shape in this book in an interesting way. Still, I understand the resistance to his having made this tragedy such a personal affair.
The book has that blurry distinction between the accidental and the created world that is part of the fun of an Amis novel. One wonders if a dentist in Argentina actually sent Amis an essay about dental imagery in Joyce's "Ulysses" with the comment that there is much in the novel "transcending the purely dental." (p. 180)
I had written a longer review, but I see I am preceeded by some excellent comments by other readers. Oddly enough, the negative comments seem as true as the positive. That is sort of the way Martin Amis's books are. I doubt if someone completely unfamiliar with Martin Amis would pick up this book, but I would recommend reading some of his other fiction first, particularly, "London Fields" and "Time's Arrow." Anyone who has not read Kingsley Amis's "Lucky Jim" ought to do so anyway just for the pure delight of it, but it, too, is sort of a prerequisite to Martin Amis's "Memoirs." For readers who wait impatiently for a new work by Martin Amis, this book will be a treat.
Top reviews from other countries
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MerryxmasReviewed in France on August 31, 2014
2.0 out of 5 stars Experience
J'ai adoré l'étude du livre Lucky Jim de Kingsley Amis (le père de l'auteur), j'ai donc appris appris des évènements de sa vie mais quelle longueur et quel ennui parfois. Je vais maintenant lire un roman de Martin en espérant qu'il soit plus passionnant.
- Philip MayoReviewed in the United Kingdom on August 23, 2013
5.0 out of 5 stars Thank you, Martin Amis!
Well, first things first: this is the best autobiography I have ever read. Ever. It is also very possibly the best book of any type that I have ever read, although that claim, as we readers know, is really an impossible call to make; like in Sophie's Choice, sometimes it's impossible to choose; but believe me, this is a stunningly good book. I finished this book at about 6 am this morning, having started it a few days ago, and was unable to put it down without feeling instant longings to get back to it. It is quite incredible. It was like being in love! I couldn't think of anything else! So please read it.
I bought Kingsley Amis's "Memoirs" at the same time as I bought "Experience" - autobiographies of father and son together - that won't happen often! I read Kingsley's "Memoirs" first, and it is very good indeed, but less about himself than an autobiography would normally be. He actually tells us in the preface, that he is deliberately writing about his life as reflected through people he met or knew, rather than about his personal story, which he claims would make for dull (!!) reading, and also that it would risk hurting people that he loves, or had loved. And he sticks to that fairly well. Martin Amis's "Experience" is where one reads about the real Kingsley Amis (KA), or a least a much more revealing account, although I am fairly sure that a lot has still been held back, because apart from being a magnificent writer, Martin Amis (MA) clearly loved his father very much, even though they disagreed on almost every issue possible, and KA hurt a great many people indeed (as I'm sure many of us have in our time), and he certainly did not lead a dull life.
MA's book is not chronological,moving about a lot in time and location, and there are a lot of footnotes, with possibly half as much content as is in the main text. None of this is in any way disconcerting or boring or difficult to read. I would say that three main threads knit the story together: 1 > His father KA, 2 > The death of his cousin Lucy Partington at the hands of Frederick West, and 3> (somewhat bizarrely, yet very effectively), the saga of his own massive dentistry work in the US. These themes run through a kaleidoscope of memories, anecdotes, literary references, friends, influences, opinions and reflections. It is a story which is often very sad, always appearing to be brutally honest, and often uproariously funny, told in wonderful language by an obviously highly intelligent man who almost anyone must surely wish that they could call their friend. Well done Martin Amis, and thank you for adding something important to my life. This book can change the way one thinks about oneself.
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Barbara MüllerReviewed in Germany on September 8, 2011
5.0 out of 5 stars experience
Das Buch und die Verpackung sind in gutem Zustand. Qualität wie in der Beschreibung angegeben. Lieferung hat etwas länger gedauert. Im Ganzen bin ich sehr zufrieden.
- Shane K. JosephReviewed in Canada on December 29, 2020
4.0 out of 5 stars Transcending the Purely Dental
The above occurred to me as an apt title, for Martin embodies, among other things, the Englishman’s pre-occupation with bad teeth.
Raised in the bosom of private schools and under the shadow of a larger-than life literary lion, father Kingsley, Martin flunks, plays truant, and smokes dope before stepmother Jane (also an author) takes him under her wing and inspires him to qualify for Oxford. From this late blooming (or awakening) Martin goes on to match his father in literary heft.
This book is mainly an elegy to Kingsley, for we see him and his ghost throughout the book, but it is mostly of the elder Amis coming down the mountain from the literary heights he attained after the success of his breakout novel, Lucky Jim. 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. Kingsley is an enigma: he refused to drive and refused to fly, and couldn’t easily be alone in a bus, a train or a lift, or in a house after dark. Martin sums his father’s decline well: “With him, getting fat was more like a project, grimly inaugurated on the day Jane left him in the winter of 1980. He ate for comfort; the tranquillising effects of starch and glucose helped to allay fear. But I now see that his nocturnal gorging was a complex symptom, regressive, self-isolating. It cancelled him out sexually. It seemed to say that it was over: the quest for love, and the belief in its primacy.”
Martin’s literary heroes are Christopher Hitchens, Vladimir Nabokov, Saul Bellow, James Joyce, and of course, Daddy. 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. Similarly they ooze literary wisdom:
1. Don’t start two consecutive paragraphs with the same word, but you can start three consecutive ones.
2. The writer is the opposite of the suicide, constantly applauding life and, furthermore, creating it, assigning breath and pulse to ‘a nonexistent progeny.’
3. If the trick is to work, the unreliable narrator must in fact be very reliable indeed: reliably partial, reliably unaware of his own egotism.
4. Writers write far more penetratingly than they live. Their novels show them at their very best, making a huge effort: stretched until they twang.
The narrative jumps back and forth in time, as if Martin prefers to dive deep into each recollection rather then try to stich them into a chronological order. Letters he sent his father and stepmother—candid ones that are quite literary and usually end with a request for money—open many of the chapters, and we see the budding and bold writer trying to match up to the established father. I got the impression that either Martin has a very impressive vocabulary or he was using ancient thesauri to pull out lesser used synonyms to pepper his narrative.
Martin’s misfortunes with his bad teeth, that embarrass him no end, and Kingsley’s lingering death get more than required air time in this book. Also floating around to provide an air of mystery and tragedy is the murder of Martin’s first cousin, Lucy Partington, by one of Britain’s most prolific serial killers. Noteworthy is that the “villain of the piece” element turns out to be Kingsley’s biographer who wrote and sold an unflattering account of the elder Amis to the tabloids upon his subject’s death. Descriptions like, “He is Thersites: a one-speech phenomenon in the Iliad, but a fully developed argument in Troilus and Cressida. ‘Thou crusty batch of nature’, as the (here) despicable Achilles calls him. ‘[T]hou core of envy.’ Thersites — ‘A slave whose gall coins slanders like a mint.’ He is the ‘deformed and scurrilous Greek’, compelled by his own baseness to see deformity everywhere” – didn’t enamour the biographer to the Amis family. I concur.
This is a good book to glimpse the life of a literary giant who did not have to struggle to get published (his father’s agent and publisher published Martin’s first book and got him off to the races without the required mandatory years committed to wandering in the literary wilderness). His career flourished in the company of well-known personalities of the literary and entertainment world. In Martin’s own words, he was an Osric, the unworthy courtier who found himself among royalty. 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. We are all writing it or at any rate talking it: the memoir, the apologia, the c.v., the cri de coeur. Nothing, for now, can compete with experience.”
- Robert ‘Bob’ MacesperaReviewed in the United Kingdom on July 30, 2020
4.0 out of 5 stars Very good
Martin Amis is one of the best writers alive and the compilations of his best articles and essays (specifically The Moronic Inferno, Visiting Mrs Nabokov and The Rub of Time) are amongst the best studies of contemporary life, especially on the United Estates. And they are also some of the funniest books published in the last 20 years - no exageration; just try the articles on Brian de Palma or Matt Romney and the Republican convention of 2012 in those books.
Experience is another one to add to his saga, if under more autobiographical tones. The book is excellent, carried by a magisterial prose. It is very good on his early journalistic career and as a picture of the UK in the seventies.
It works also very well as a travel piece. Amis dissects admirably the countries he knows best: USA, Spain and France.
Why not five stars then? The book looks to these eyes sometimes a bit disperse, almost confusing the reader as to what's coming next. It also looks a bit too much to his father, the very good writer Kingsley Amis; but this writer takes so much space that at some points it looks it is a book about him all-together.
Nevertheless, a very good book with many funny bits (and some horrific too) but very well written, a must to all Amis fans and whoever has any interest in good literature, journalism or the recent History of the UK.