Anyone who reads the tabloid papers will rub up against much greater horrors than I describe.” Amis’s literary heroes - he called them his “Twin Peaks” - were Vladimir Nabokov and Saul Bellow, and critics located in his work both Nabokov’s gift for wordplay and gamesmanship and Bellow’s exuberance and brio. “I’m often accused of concentrating on the pungent, rebarbative side of life in my books, but I feel I’m rather sentimental about it.
“What I’ve tried to do is to create a high style to describe low things: the whole world of fast food, sex shows, nude mags,” Amis said in a 1985 interview. The tone of these novels was bright, bristling and profane. He is best known for his so-called London trilogy of novels - “Money: A Suicide Note” (1985), “London Fields” (1990) and “The Information” (1995) - which remain, along with his memoir, his most representative and admired work. In his later work he investigated Stalin’s atrocities, the war on terror and the legacy of the Holocaust. Amis published 15 novels, a well-regarded memoir (“Experience,” in 2000), works of non-fiction, and collections of essays and short stories. His wife, the writer Isabel Fonseca, said the cause was oesophageal cancer - the same disease that killed his close friend and fellow writer Christopher Hitchens in 2011. NEW YORK: Martin Amis, whose caustic, erudite and bleakly comic novels redefined British fiction in the 1980s and ’90s with their sharp appraisal of tabloid culture and consumer excess, and whose private life made him tabloid fodder himself, died on Friday at his home in Lake Worth, Fla.
0 kommentar(er)
