This is the first book I have read of Martin Amis and I found it to be wonderfully written. At times the style reminded me of Pynchon. It takes a while to get used to it, but it is well worth the effort. Set during the middle of the Second World War, the story is told primarily from the viewpoin...
What a fun fucking book. I blew off everything today (and, well, most of the week) just to read this book, because it was that fucking fun. God, I loved this book. I just read it nonstop, and when the recurring irritation that is my life did tear me away, I kept thinking about what I'd read, and ...
Yes, you are right. Money is about ‘Money’. But not the everyday money one needs to go on with the daily business of living. It is ‘The Money’. The sort people go bonkers to attain to overcome their fears. To suppress the ‘thinking monster’ who is ready to rear its head at a moment’s notice, when...
With its Dostoevskian anti-hero and its willingness to explore the essence of humanity in the depths of degradation, Martin Amis’ House of Meetings may be the best Russian novel ever written by an Englishman. In 2002, Amis published a slim non-fiction volume, Koba the Dread, in which he took libe...
I still felt tolerably spermy and Joycean after my night with Gloria.Tell me if this is not youth in a nutshell – splendidly and carelessly lumping together the two mythological Eros – of creation and sex, the most important things the young artist cares to think about, although,Since Henry Mille...
How does it come to be that a book which starts off being as gripping as they come can wind up fizzling out in an self-satisfied ramble that leaves you demanding the last two days of your life back?I'd studiously avoided M.Amis through uni and beyond, on the strength of a not unjustifiable prejud...
“Who does a bullshitter bullshit when he is alone?” Had the Sphinx asked this of Oedipus it wouldn’t probably wouldn’t have ended up eating itself. Now, millennia later, Martin Amis provides an answer for this ages-old quandary: a bullshitter alone will bullshit the reader, at least when he’s n...
The GROTESQUE! Satire can be so uncomfortable, especially when it details deformities, drugs, and sex. If you like Chuck Palahniuk, Irvine Welsh, or Marquis de Sade, all of which I do, read this book. Can’t quite figure out the significance of the motto of “dead babies,” except that it’s crass ...
The character of time is an open question in physics and philosophy. Entropy and the laws of thermodynamics seem to indicate that there is an "arrow of time," that time goes only in one "direction." Despite our best efforts, however, we still just don't know. It is, however, a well-known fact ...
Several years ago, perhaps many years ago, I decided Martin Amis's fiction was not worth reading because he was a snarky Brit who wasn't all that funny despite his barbed wit and talent for replicating the various accents of Britain's various social classes. Then I came back to Amis a few years ...
There is no way to write a book review of Night Train without spoiling the ending. If you plan on reading this novel, do not read this review."I am a police. That may sound like an unusual statement - or an unusual construction. But it's a parlance we have. Among ourselves, we would never say I a...
“…fanatically difficult modern prose wasn’t her thing” (p. 87)Nor mine – I don’t mind saying for the record, right up front, here and now (and before you waste another second on this review if “fanatically difficult modern prose” is, in fact, your thing.I’m clearly behind the times on what consti...
Journalism, I think, is where Martin Amis is at his best, where his writing is the most entertaining and witty*. On this compilation of non-fiction essays he writes not only about accomplished writers such as John Updike, Anthony Burgess, Isaac Asimov, John Braine, Salman Rushdie, Graham Greene, ...
Martin Amis hates nuclear weapons. With a passion. He doesn't know what to do with them and would rather they did not exist in the first place. And who can blame him? Einstein's Monsters, a collection of five stories dealing with people living under constant threat of a nuclear war and survivors ...
My rating for the book goes down the longer I think about it. I picked this one up at the same time as Daphne Du Maurier's "The Scapegoat" and was really surprised to find the two books, so very different in many ways, extraordinarily similiar in structure and what they offer the reader. Both rel...
The Drowned World: Diving into the neuronic past of our collective unconsciousOriginally posted at Fantasy LiteratureThe Drowned World (1962) is J.G. Ballard’s best apocalyptic work, the other two being The Burning World (1964) and The Crystal World (1966), but if you are thinking of an action-pa...
El novelista británico Martin Amis decidió hacer una especie de retrato de la sociedad norteamericana entre mediados y finales de la década de los ‘70 y ‘80 con una cantidad de crónicas periodísticas para diferentes revistas entre las que se encontraban “Vanity Fair”, “The Observer” y “London Rev...
The 1960s, as is well known, saw the launch of the sexual revolution, which radically affected the lives of every Westerner fortunate enough to be born after the Second World War. But a revolution is a revolution - contingent and sanguinary. In the words of the Russian thinker Alexander Herzen: T...
We banked, and hit a deep welt or grapple-ridge in the road: to the sound of a rifle-shot the cab roof ducked down and smacked me on the core of my head. I really didn't need that, I tell you, with my head and face and back and heart hurting a lot all the time anyway, and still drunk and crazed a...
Then progress was swift.The hideous envelope (windowed, dun-coloured, and spitefully undersized) came by second-class post, in late June. It contained by far the longest literary effort that Des had ever seen from his uncle’s pen (MILK and TOILITPAPER and TUBASKO – this was the kind of thing he w...
GREY SNOW 1. THOMSEN: FINDING EVERYTHING OUT Herr Thomsen:I want to ask you to do me a service, if you would. You remember Bohdan, the gardener? I’m told he has been arbitrarilly transfered to Stutthof.He is also said to have been involved in a very shocking incedent, resulting in the death of po...