He died of the same illness as his friend Christopher Hitchens, esophageal cancer, Martin Amis. The writer died Friday at his home in Lake Worth, Fla., at the age of 73, his wife, writer Isabel Fonseca, announced. Born in Oxford on August 25, 1949, Martin Amis was a formidable and discontinuous novelist, polemicist outside the box and intellectual enemy of clichés. With his expansive and controlled prose, he helped redefine British fiction in the 1980s and 1990s, influencing a generation of British authors such as Zadie Smith and Will Self.
A deep and enduring friendship bound him to Christopher Hitchens, as he was an essayist, critic, brilliant mind, polemical spirit and non-conformist panache, “the only blonde I’m in love with,” as he once defined him with his characteristic scathing irony . It was his death in 2011 that inspired his latest book, The Story Inside (subtitled How to Write), which Einaudi is sending to the bookstore on Tuesday: a sort of fluid novel-like autobiography, set in reality, memory and real people With first names, last names and fictional characters, he reconnects the threads of his life already told in one of readers’ favorite books, Experience, in which he focuses on the complex relationship with his father Kingsley, also a writer had.
The Story Within, configured at this point as his literary and human testament, is a hodgepodge in which to find all the people who left a deep mark not only in its genesis but also in contemporary English-language literature in general . In it is everything: the women he loves, the father, his wife, Elizabeth Jane Howard (author of the Cazalet saga), family friend and great poet Philip Larkin, tutelary deities Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov (whom he wrote Twin Peaks named). ). And then Iris Murdoch, and that group of contemporary writers formed largely while studying at Oxford University, which includes Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie. There was also a deep friendship and complicity between them, reinforced by Khomeini’s fatwa against the author of the Satanic Verses: several times they told of fleeing to see each other, despite the armored life to which the escort forced Rushdie.
Ranked by Time among the fifty most influential intellectuals since 1945, Amis was a keen observer of the 20th century and its wounds: “I’ve written two books on Hitler and two books on Stalin, so I’ve already spent about eight years on it .” Your business. But from my point of view there is no way around these two,” he announces in the foreword of the new book. In 1973 he won the Somerset Maugham Prize for his first book, The Rachel File, the most traditional of his novels adapted into a poorly-performing film, telling the story of a brilliant and selfish teenager (admittedly autobiographical) and his family tells relationship with a friend in the year before college. With this recognition, he immediately met his father, who received it for Lucky Jim in 1954.
In the years that followed, Amis explored the excesses and absurdities of “late capitalist” Western society, pedaling the satire and the grotesque. He has achieved this with novels like Money, in which he focuses on an advertising director shooting his first film between London and New York and confronting self-absorbed stars, self-indulgent producers and unfaithful lovers; with “London Fields,” a comic crime thriller set in a tough and wounded post-Thatcher London; mit Information, the story of two forty-year-olds who, after studying together at Oxford, have both become writers, one successful, the other a failure. With “The Zone of Interest”, from which director Jonathan Glazer made a film that was shown in Cannes during these hours, he told the story of a Nazi officer who falls in love with the wife of the commandant of the death camp. The Nazis described the 40 square kilometer area around the Auschwitz concentration camp as the “Zone of Interest”. This three-part story caused such controversy that some European publishers refused to publish it. He spoke about love in The Pregnant Widow, which is set in a long Italian summer in the 1970s and is experienced by a group of boys grappling with the unexpected events of the sexual revolution.
A provocative polemicist (“he was one of the most celebrated and discussed writers of the past 50 years,” according to a Booker Prize note), he has angered feminists and railed against Islam (after the attack on the Twin Towers). declared that to stop the new strategy of “horrorism” and Islamic massacres “the Muslim community should have suffered and restored order within it”); He criticized the sexual revolution and even railed against old age by proposing mass euthanasia for those over 70.
His death leaves a huge void in the cultural landscape not just in Britain but around the world. A voice, sometimes rough and disturbing, will be missing, but always free, capable of breaking through prejudices and telling stories that never remain indifferent. “I’m often accused of focusing on the repulsive side of life. Actually, I think I’m sentimental,” he told the New York Times in 1985, in one of those snide remarks that he was probably telling the truth.