Martin Amis

[coppice]

Bloody hell, the news of his death has profoundly rocked me . There was a cohort of brilliant British writers in the late 20th C - Julian Barnes , Kazuo Ishiguoro , Sarah Waters , William Boyd , Seabstian Faulks and Ian McEwan (inter alios*) but Amis was the man . I write myself, and every time I get a little pleased with myself about a well turned sentence , I think of Amis 's prose and wonder why I ever bothered .

His fiction was either staggeringly good and/or borderline bonkers but for me it is his his two semi autobiographical books- Experience and Inside Story -which stand out. The latter is the best book I've read in the last decade - at least .

Damn .

• Thought I'd better get this right - it's what he would have wanted ..

[coppice]

An excellent two page obituary in The Times today . The paucity of posts on this thread - supposedly about books and literature- suggests that Amis was not a popular read among PH folk. Their loss - I wonder how many posts the death of a King , Child or Grisham would get ?

[coppice]

Sebring440 said:

William Boyd?

An excellent and very productive writer , if not in the same league as Amis . But he's in good company in that status -no-one was. Unlike Amis though , his quality has always been consistent and his work very easily readable BBC Sounds has an edition of Open Book in which Amis talked about Inside Story in 2020.

And yeah , it ain't the TLS , is it ? Sometimes I despair at the cultural aridity of PH (as Amis never said)

[coppice]

I've just re-read Experience (his (sort of) autobiography )and it's even better the second time round. My dad was alive when I read it first , but reading of Kingsley's decline and death re-awakened so many of my own memories back. None more so than Amis's insight that upon the death of a parent you there is a feeling of levitation - and thee really was for me .

Like Kingsley , Martin had such an uncanny ear for speech patterns and pronunciation , and there's some treats to enjoy on that theme . Martin uses his dad's technique of phonetic description - so tim peaches (tin of ) , porp pie and so on.

[coppice]

I've just re-read Experience , his (sort of ) autobiography from about 2002. It is an even more sublime read second time around and his accounts of (dad) Kingsley's decline and death are so acutely observed . And often bloody funny too. Recommended