Martin Amis, one of Britain’s most imaginative and influential writers of recent times, died in the early hours of Saturday while he slept at his home in Lake Worth, Florida, at the age of 73 of esophageal cancer he had suffered for several years, according to EL PAÍS confirmed from sources close to the family. Ironically and incredibly, the same illness ended the life of his best friend Christopher Hitchens.
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A prominent public intellectual, in his novels and essays he carried out a hard-hitting x-ray, tinged with humor and irony, of both his native England and the United States, a country to which he moved in 2011 and established his residency in the New York borough of Brooklyn. . Controversial, sometimes uncomfortable, inevitably clear, his work was the meeting place of contradictory forces that neutralized or fertilized each other. His writing, full of memorable achievements and occasional failings, was above all a triumph of intelligence. Sarcastic, satirical, with a touch of humanity that sometimes allowed a small dose of tenderness, Amis never shied away from any topic, however controversial.
Martin Amis poses in the living room of his home on August 17, 2012 in Brooklyn, New York. Bebeto Matthews (AP)
One of his best weapons was humor, always dark. He liked to say that fiction has no choice but to be a comic genre because the life it is meant to reflect is also comic. He endorsed the motto of Australian writer Clive James, for whom common sense and a sense of humor were the same. The rays of power that constantly crossed and contradicted each other in his work are particularly visible in what later became his last book, Desde dentro (2020). Described by its author as an autobiographical novel, it was in fact a heterogeneous mix of genres, from personal memory to literary essay, ordered according to the dictates of the imagination, i.e. according to the laws of fiction. It took him more than 20 years to craft it, and he began to despise different versions because he ended up missing the point: finding the most effective way to represent the truth. He accomplished this by performing several exorcisms, the most important of which was the deaths of the three father figures, Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, and Saul Bellow, and one sister, perhaps the most important, Christopher Hitchens.
ghosts and parents
Martin Amis lived until the last moment besieged by ghosts who watched closely what he was doing. The first father figure he had to exorcise was his real father, Sir Kingsley Amis, a writer of impressive stature. It’s not easy to break through in the shadow of someone with the credentials of his father, author of one of the most famous novels of his day in England, Lucky Jim (1954), and other outstanding works, as a novelist, but Martin managed with playful agility he turned gaze while developing a style in which his ancestor’s DNA traces were undetectable. Part of it was survival. As he confessed, his father was not interested in what he wrote. The complex relationships between father and son have long enthralled the tabloids.
Martin Amis, photographed in Barcelona on November 17, 1999. Carles Ribas
In From Within, Amis replaces real paternity with a fictitious one created by Philip Larkin, who was not only one of the greatest poets of his time but also Sir Kingsley’s best friend. house brand. He still had scores to settle, but in this case the transfer of the genetic code went seamlessly: from a literary point of view, Amis decided to use the great American writer Saul Bellow as his parent, whom he also became disobedient to over time. With the genealogical questions settled, there was one more thing to emphasize, perhaps the most important. One can’t talk about Amis without mentioning the deep emotional and intellectual mark his friendship with Christopher Hitchens left on him, the brilliant and uncomfortable polemicist with whom he had a constant conversation and whose death in 2011 he never died came overcome. . Another more complex but no less intriguing debt was that he owed to another great fictional magician with whom he never stopped playing hide and seek, Vladimir Nabokov, to whom he paid tribute on numerous occasions, most notably in “Visiting Mrs .” . Nabokov and Other Excursions (1993).
Amis leaves a legacy that includes a handful of exceptionally valuable novels and some exceptional non-fiction, including memoirs and essays on literary criticism. A good way to get closer to him is to immerse yourself in Experiencia (2000), the superb intellectual autobiography he wrote at the height of his artistic and literary maturity. As for his fictional work, over the decades Amis has witnessed the changing society he has had to live in, emulating the traumas of a troubled England with his caricatural, costumed and satirical style that is almost always brilliant and effective. His essays reflected the same reality from a perspective no less poignant. The generation to which he belonged included Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie and Julian Barnes. He was married for the second time to Uruguayan-born writer Isabel Fonseca. His first wife, Anne Philips, whom he left when he met Fonseca, is a philosophy professor.
devilish
Martin Louis Amis was born in Oxford in 1949. Adept at the road world from the outset, he studied at Exeter College, Oxford and began his career as editor of the literary supplements to The Times, The Observer and The New Statement. He became friends with Hitchens during his time as editor of this media. His first novel, The Rachel Papers, published at the age of 24, won the Somerset Maugham Prize and already bore the hallmarks he would develop in his future work. The critics noted positively that an exceptional writer had appeared. The novel tells the story of a rebellious young man who cares about sex and health and whose greatest goal is to get accepted into Oxford University. After Dead Babies (1974), Success (1978) and Other People, Mystery Story (1981), he became famous with the so-called London trilogy. The first, Dinero (1984), is a wild, comic-toned satire on 1980s consumerism; Fields of London (1989) is an ambitious novel in which he examines a society teetering on the brink of collapse. The third title in the trilogy, La información (1995), gained notoriety for non-literary reasons coupled with advancements and agency changes. Amis received an advance of nearly $800,000 at the time. Amis left his agent Pat Kavannagh, wife of his friend Julian Barnes, to date Andrew Wylie, the infamous Jackal.
British writer Martin Amis 20.05.2023EUROPA PRESS/CONTACT/NICK CUNARD (EUROPA PRESS/CONTACT/NICK CUNAR)
A stylist of great technical virtuosity, enemy of all clichés, in The Arrow of Time (1991) he toyed with the possibility of undoing the horrors of history and preventing them from happening using the resource (previously used by Kurt Vonnegut and Philip K. Dick was used). and Alejo Carpentier) by rewinding time and telling the life of a Nazi war criminal from his death to his birth. “Night Train” (1997) received negative reviews from some critics who felt its style was Americanized, but while there was always someone to find fault with, there was something about what Amis did that drew him in as a storyteller made, sometimes even guilty . One of his most controversial novels, but ultimately unbeatable as a bearer of the Amis brand, was Perro callejero (2003). The reality of evil embodied in figures such as Hitler and Stalin appear at different times in his fictional and essayistic works. In The Pregnant Widow (2010), he approaches the sexual revolution of the 1970s with characteristic humor and wit. Interested in the commercial’s impact on popular culture, he offers us the portrait of a petty criminal who wins the lottery and becomes a tabloid hero in Lionel Asbo: The State of England (2012). As always, the character best portrayed is English society and its scourges.
Amis was a lovable and vital character, a public intellectual who knew how to X-ray the end of the 20th century and the first two decades of the 21st in his novels and essays. He appeared frequently in the public media and on television, and his views were frequently controversial. Her world was clearly masculine and she stepped into it, mercilessly showing her flaws and shortcomings. His non-fiction works cover a wide range of topics. In Silly Hell and Other Visits to the United States (1986), he anticipates the country where he would eventually settle and die. Like Hitchens, controversy surrounded him almost to the end, but ultimately it was his personality that won readers over. For some he was a better essayist than a narrator, but in reality the background was always the same. In The War Against the Cliché: Writings on Literature (2001) and in his most recent essay collection The Touch of Time (2017), he writes about Bellow and Hitchens as well as Vladimir Nabokov, John Travolta and Donald Trump.
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