Dead Martin Amis, novelist of troubled times who looked history in the face – Corriere.it

Died of the same disease as friend Christopher Hitchens, esophageal cancer, Martin Amis. The writer passed away on Friday at the age of 73, in his home in Lake Worth, Florida: his wife, the writer Isabel Fonseca announced it. Born in Oxford on August 25, 1949, a formidable and discontinuous novelistout-of-the-box polemicist, intellectual enemy of clichés, with his rambling and controlled prose Martin Amis helped to redefine British fiction in the 1980s and 1990s, influencing an entire generation of British writers such as Zadie Smith and Will Self.

A deep and lasting friendship bound him to Christopher Hitchens, like him essayist, critic, brilliant mind, polemical spirit and from the nonconformist verve, “the only blonde I’ve fallen in love with”, as he once defined him with the caustic irony that distinguished him. It was precisely his death, in 2011, that inspired his last book, The story from within (subtitle How to write) which Einaudi sends to the bookstore on Tuesday: a sort of fluvial novelistic autobiography in which, mixing reality, memory, real people with first and last names, fictional characters, he reconnects the threads of his life, already told in one of the books most loved by readers, Experiencein which he had focused on the complex relationship with his father Kingsley, also a writer.

The story from withinwhich is configured at this point as his literary and human testament, is a hodgepodge in which all the people who have left a profound mark can be found, not only in its formation, but also in contemporary English-speaking literature in general. Inside there is everything: the women he loves, his father, his wife, Elizabeth Jane Howard (author of the Cazalet saga), the family friend and great poet Philip Larkin, the tutelary deities Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov ( which he called Twin Peaks). And then Iris Murdoch, as well as that group of contemporary authors who was formed largely during university studies at Oxford and which includes Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie. There was also a profound friendship and complicity with them, strengthened by Khomeini’s fatwa launched against the author of the Satanic Verses: several times they have told of the escapes to see each other, despite the armored life to which the escort forced Rushdie.

Inserted by «Time» among the fifty most influential intellectuals since 1945, Amis was a careful observer of the twentieth century and its wounds: «I have written two books on Hitler and two books on Stalin, so I have already spent about eight years in their company . But there’s no escaping those two, the way I see it,” he announces in the Prelude of the new book. In 1973 he won the Somerset Maugham Prize for the first book, The Rachel file, the most traditional of his novels, turned into a film of little success, which tells the story of a brilliant and selfish teenager (with admittedly autobiographical traits ) and his relationship with his girlfriend in the year before going to university . With that recognition he immediately caught up with his father, who had received it for Lucky Jim in 1954.

In the following years Amis grilled the excesses and absurdities of “late-capitalist” Western society, pushing on the pedal of satire and the grotesque. He did it with novels like Money, where he put at the center an advertising director who is shooting his first film between London and New York and is faced with self-centered stars, rampant producers and unfaithful lovers; with London Fields, comic mystery in a tough and wounded post-Thatcherite London; with The information
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story of two forty-year-olds who, after studying together at Oxford, both became writers, one successful, the other a failure
. With The area of ​​interest
from which director Jonathan Glazer made a film presented in Cannes in these hours, told the story of a Nazi officer who falls in love with the wife of the commandant of the extermination camp. The “zone of interest” was the name used by the Nazis to describe the 40 square kilometer area surrounding the Auschwitz concentration camp and that three-voice story had aroused fierce controversy to the point that some European publishers had refused to publish it. You spoke of love with The pregnant widowset in a long Italian summer of the seventies, experienced by a group of boys grappling with the unexpected events of the sexual revolution.

A provocative polemicist (“He was one of the most acclaimed and discussed writers of the last 50 years”, the Booker Prize declared in a note), over time he has angered feminists, he has railed against Islam (after the attack on the Towers twins stated that for stop the new strategy of “horrorism” and the Islamic massacres «the Muslim community should have suffered and put its internal order back»); he criticized the sexual revolution and even railed against old age, proposing mass euthanasia for the over seventy.

His death leaves a huge void in the cultural landscape not only in Britain but worldwide. A sometimes harsh and disturbing voice will be missing, but always free, capable of breaking preconceptions and telling stories that never left indifferent. “I’m often accused of focusing on the repellent side of life, actually I think I’m sentimental,” he told the “New York Times” in 1985, with one of those sneers in which, probably, he was telling the truth.