Martin Amis, one of the most influential British writers, who created a high style to describe low things, died this Friday at his home in Lake Worth, Florida, at the age of 73.
His wife, Isabel Fonseca, reported the death this Saturday, which was caused by esophageal cancer. This illness is the same one that took his good friend and fellow narrative troublemaker Christopher Hitchens to the grave in 2011.
His death was due to esophageal cancer, the same one that took his friend Christopher Hitchens
Amis’s career was marked by his caustic, erudite and sadly comic novels that redefined British fiction in the 1980s and 1990s.
“Drop me anywhere in America and I’ll tell you where I am: in America”, one of the phrases that define him.
His style was characterized by his keen appreciation of tabloid culture and excessive consumption. Interestingly, his own private life made him the fodder for sensationalism. Critics praised his ability to express himself.
He wrote fifteen novels, several non-fiction works, short stories, a collection of essays, and a successful memoir.
Throughout his career he wrote fifteen novels, several non-fiction works, short stories, a collection of essays, and some successful memoirs. “He had a real literary vitality that was a lively farce,” writes James Wood in his obituary for The New Yorker . All this literary corpus made Amis considered one of the best writers of his generation. Amis is among the celebrated group of storytellers that includes Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes. In his last works he dedicated himself to investigating the atrocities of the Stalinist regime, the war against terrorism and the legacy of the Holocaust.
Anagrama 30th anniversary party in London, 1999. From left to right, top, Jimmy Burns, Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Graham Swift, Lawrence Norfolk, David Lodge, Russell Lucas, Pankaj Mishra and Hanif Kureishi. Below, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jorge Herralde and Vikram Seth
His trilogy of London novels launched him to fame with Money in 1985, and continued with london fields in 1990 and finally, with Information which continue to form, along with their memories, Experience published in the year 2000, his most representative works and admired by readers.
In an interview in Paris Review , Amis stated that “plots only matter in thrillers.” So he stressed that Money , which launched him to fame, was a choral voice work. “If the voice doesn’t work, then you’re screwed,” he stressed.
The style of his novels, according to experts, was brilliant, bristly and profane. “The whole world is fast food sex shows and nude magazines”, he declared in 1985 in an interview in the New York Times Book Review . “I am often accused of concentrating on the racy and reprehensible side of life in my books, but I feel somewhat sentimental about it. Anyone who reads the tabloids will be faced with far greater horrors than what I describe,” she added.
Martin Amis was born in Oxford in 1949, he was educated in schools in the United Kingdom, Spain and the United States, before entering Exeter College, one of the four that make up the University of Oxford, where he graduated in English with honors.
He credited his stepmother, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, with introducing him to literature as a drifting youth. From the two literary heroes of his, Vladimir Nabokov and Saul Bellow, his first novel was the Rachel’s secret book . In that debut, she wanted to avoid “the risk of turning adolescence into something as boring as adolescence usually is.” There was already the essence of him.
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![photograph by XAVIER CERVERA 01/10/2015 Martin Louis Amis (born 25 August 1949) is an English novelist. His best-known novels are Money (1984) and London Fields (1989). He has received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his memoir Experience and has been listed for the Booker Prize twice to date (shortlisted in 1991 for Time's Arrow and longlisted in 2003 for Yellow Dog). Amis served as the Professor of Creative Writing at the Center for New Writing at the University of Manchester until 2011.[2] In 2008, The Times named him one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.[3] Amis's work centers on the apparent excesses of late-capitalist Western society, whose perceived absurdity he often satirises through grotesque caricature; he has been portrayed as a master of what the New York Times called](https://www.lavanguardia.com/files/image_250_123/files/fp/uploads/2021/12/22/61c385e5a05b4.r_d.613-315.jpeg "Martin Amis, the light of the profane | Entertainment | The USA Print 29")
