Martin Amis

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Martin Amis (2014)

Martin Louis Amis (born August 25, 1949 in Swansea , Great Britain ) is an English writer . Amis' works deal with the excesses of late capitalist western societies. He often exaggerates the absurdity he experiences in grotesque caricature. The New York Times has described Amis as a master of the new nastiness . The writers who influenced Americans include Saul Bellow , Vladimir Nabokov and James Joyce . Amis himself influenced a number of successful British authors, including Will Self and Zadie Smith .

His best-known works include the novel Gierig (original title: Money - A Suicide Note, 1984) and London Fields (1989). For his first novel The Rachel Papers (1974) he received the Somerset Maugham Award . The novel was titled Er? Want! You not? (1989) filmed by director Damian Harris with Dexter Fletcher in the lead role. He was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his memoirs Die Hauptsachen (2000), in which he deals, among other things, with his relationship with his famous father, the novelist Kingsley Amis . Two of his works were nominated for the Booker Prize - 1991 the novel Arrow of Time (original title Time's Arrow ) and 2003 the novel Yellow Dog . In 2013, Amis was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . From 2007 to 2011 he was Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Manchester . In 2005, the American magazine Time selected his novel Greedy as one of the best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005, and the British newspaper The Times named him one of the 50 most outstanding British writers since 1945.

In Great Britain, Martin Amis is also known to a public who is not interested in literature: gossip columns in the British press dealt, among other things, with the difficult relationship with his father Kingsley Amis , who, according to an anecdote spread by Martin Amis himself, refused to read the novel Greedy - at least one of his most successful works - read to the end. According to committee member David Lodge , the controversial removal of London Fields from the list of finalists for the Booker Prize was due to the fact that two members of the selection committee strongly opposed the portrayal of the female characters in this novel. In 2008 it was announced that Amis was earning £ 80,000 a year for teaching at the University of Manchester - several newspapers commented that this was equivalent to an hourly wage of £ 3,000 an hour, given the obligation to teach 28 hours a year Fact picked up in a number of British newspapers. The University of Manchester defended itself against the allegations by pointing out that Amis, like any other member of the university faculty, had far more responsibilities than teaching.

Life

Martin Amis was born on August 25, 1949, five years before the novel Glück für Jim earned his father literary fame in North America and Europe, which resulted in the family visiting North America regularly. In 1960, Martin Amis spent a formative year in the United States, where his father taught creative writing at Princeton University . Two years later, Kingsley Amis, who had previously had numerous extramarital relationships, left his wife Hilly and children to live with the writer Jane Howard.

His stepmother, Jane Howard, is responsible for ensuring that the teenager Martin Amis began to deal with literature instead of comics. She introduced him to the novels of Jane Austen and was also the driving force that prepared him for the entrance exams for one of the prestigious British universities. From 1968 to 1971 Amis studied at Exeter College, Oxford University. His tutors included Jonathan Wordsworth and the lyricist Craig Raine . Like his father before, Martin Amis graduated with honors. Just three months later he was hired as a literary critic by the British newspaper The Observer . The editor in charge, Terence Kilmartin, emphasized that Martin Amis did not owe this position to his father. As a test work, he had to write a book review, which was judged by several people to be outstanding and mature.

In 1973 he was hired by the British newspaper The Times , where he worked as editor-in-chief for fiction and poetry from 1974. At the same time he wrote book reviews for The New Statesman , where Claire Tomalin was his supervisor, and for the short-term cultural magazine New Review . In 1979 Amis gave up his job as a journalist and began to concentrate fully on his work as a writer. However, he remained closely connected to two colleagues from his time with the New Statesman : James Fenton and Christopher Hitchens .

His tutor at Oxford, Jonathan Wordsworth, had asked him after completing his studies either to publish a novel within a year or to return to university and embark on an academic career. Ami's first novel, The Rachel Diary , was published in 1973 and won the Somerset Maugham Prize for best first work - his father had received the same award for good luck for Jim . Amis himself later emphasized that his name had almost guaranteed him that he would find a publisher for his first novel.

In 1984 Amis married the American philosophy professor Antonia Phillips. The two sons were born in 1984 and 1986 respectively. James Diedrick takes the view that Amis had already achieved cult status in the mid-1980s and compares him with Graham Greene , John Updike , Saul Bellow , Kurt Vonnegut and Gore Vidal . Letters from Kingsley Amis from these years show that he saw the success of his son increasingly distant, but also envious. To Philip Larkin Kingsley 1984 wrote when Greedy appeared that his son was famous. That didn't change the fact that Kingsley Amis was awarded the Booker Prize for The Old Devils .

The ongoing literary success and his omnipresence as a public figure ensured that Martin Amis was viewed increasingly critically in the press in the mid-1990s, unconsciously taking up criticisms that his father had already expressed in his private letters a decade earlier. Greed, avarice, infidelity, and vanity were the most common allegations. His arrogance, his attempt to get an advance of 800,000 USD for his novel Information , the break with his longtime literary agent, which cost him the friendship with Julian Barnes , and the separation from his wife were commented on . The British writer AS Byatt publicly described his behavior as " male turkey-cocking ". In a tone uncharacteristic of the newspaper's style, The Times commented on the second marriage with the comment that Amis was a millionaire, marrying a millionaire heiress, had spent £ 20,000 on the repair of his teeth, but hardly a friend was invited to his second wedding and the whole ceremony cost him £ 106. Salman Rushdie , a longtime friend of Martin Amis' commented on this in 1995 with the following words:

“Something happened to Martin that happens regularly in England, when the press suddenly surrounds a public figure and begins to drift and tear apart. It has nothing to do with the money. It's just a "The guy had it too good for too long - let's kill him now."

Kingsley and Martin Amis

Both Kingsley and Martin Amis are major British writers. Martin is assumed that his edgy personality, his stylistic virtuosity, his patriarchal views and his regularly emphasized admiration for the work of Vladimir Nabokov and Saul Bellow have their origin in the unusually difficult relationship with his father. Kingsley Amis himself reported that his son tried to hide any literary attempt from him while he was still living at home. Conversely, Martin Amis accused his father:

"My father, not least - I think - also because of a certain indolence, took no notice of my early attempts at writing until I finally threw the proof of my first novel on his desk."

After his father's death in October 1995, Martin Amis described the relationship as increasingly positive. In the afterword to his non-fiction book Koba the Terrible - The Twenty Millions and Laughter , entitled Letter to the Spirit of My Father , Amis even pointed out that - if their year of birth had been reversed - each of them would have written in the style of the other. In 1997, Amis admitted that he was offended that his father was so unwilling to read his novels:

"How could he be so little curious about me?"

Reception of individual works

In his autobiography Die Hauptsachen Amis eschews the satire that normally characterizes his work. He mainly deals with the losses and extreme experiences he was exposed to in the 1990s: the death of his father in 1995, the end of his 10-year marriage to Antonia Phillips, the discovery that his esteemed cousin Lucy Partington, who has been missing since Christmas 1973, was a victim of the serial killer Frederick West , his first meeting with his illegitimate daughter Delilah, who was born in 1976, but whom he only met when he was 19 and the break with his longtime literary agent Pat Kavanagh, who too broke with Kavanagh's husband, longtime friend Julian Barnes . In the biography he also goes into his relationship with the wealthy Isabel Fonseca, whom he married in 1998. The autobiography received some of the best reviews Amis received for his work published to date. According to James Diedrick, this work deserves to become a classic of literary autobiography.

The novel The Pregnant Widow (2012) is set in a castle in Campania, Italy. In the Jeunesse dorée milieu, the sexual revolution is a game of temptation, hesitation, attraction and rejection. Stylistically furious, the author juggles with perspectives and time levels.

Amis has been concerned with the Holocaust since his youth and wrote a novel in Time's Arrow about a concentration camp doctor. In 2014 he took up the topic again in literary terms in The Zone of Interest , which is a love story among SS men at the IG Farben Buna plant in Auschwitz .

Works

Novels

  • 1973 The Rachel Papers
  • 1975 Dead Babies
  • 1978 Success
  • 1981 Other People
    • The others - a mysterious story , translator Jürgen Bauer, Edith Nerke. Fischer, Frankfurt 1997 ISBN 3-10-000821-9
  • 1984 Money: A Suicide Note
  • 1989 London Fields
  • 1991 Time's Arrow: Or the Nature of the Offense
    • Arrow of time . Translated by Alfons Winkelmann. Zsolnay, Vienna 1993 ISBN 3-552-04502-3
  • 1995 The Information
  • 1997 Night Train
  • Experience. Hyperion, NY 2000
    • The main things. Translated from Werner Schmitz. Hanser, Munich 2005
  • 2003 Yellow Dog .
  • 2006 House of Meetings .
  • 2010 The Pregnant Widow .
  • 2011 The State of England: Lionel Asbo, Lotto Lout .
  • The zone of interest . Jonathan Cape, 2014

Stories and anthologies

  • 1987 Einstein's Monsters
  • 1993 Visiting Mrs Nabokov: And Other Excursions
  • 1994 Two Stories
  • 1995 God's Dice
  • 1998 Heavy Water, and Other Stories
    • Heavy water and other stories , translated by Joachim Kalka; Frankfurt am Main: Fischer 2000. ISBN 3-10-000824-3
  • 1998 State of England: And Other Stories
  • 1999 Ami's omnibus
  • 2000 The Fiction of Martin Amis
  • 2004 Vintage Americans
  • In the volcano. Essays . Translation Joachim Kalka . Editor Daniel Kehlmann . Zurich: No & But, 2018

Non-fiction

  • 1982 Invasion of the Space Invaders
  • 1986 The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America
  • 2000 Experience (autobiography)
    • The main things , translated by Werner Schmitz; Munich, Vienna: Hanser 2005. ISBN 3-446-20653-1
  • 2001 The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews, 1971-2000
  • 2002 Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (via Josef Stalin )
    • Koba the Terrible - The Twenty Millions and Laughter , translated by Werner Schmitz; Munich: Hanser 2007. ISBN 3-446-20821-6
  • 2008 The Second Plane (essays and two short stories)

Essays

Martin Amis has written essays on a number of writers. Some of those he has honored include JG Ballard , Saul Bellow , Norman Mailer , Vladimir Nabokov , VS Pritchett , Philip Roth , John Updike and Angus Wilson . James Diedrick points out that the extensive oeuvre of Amis, which deals with the work of other writers, is characterized by the fact that it deals almost exclusively with male authors. The few women writers he comments on are limited to Jane Austen , Iris Murdoch , Fay Weldon and Joan Didion . Diedrick takes the view that this is also an expression of the father / son conflict that has so deeply shaped Martin Amis. The writers he reviewed ultimately represented father figures whose influence he could appreciate without having to mention the conflict.

literature

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ The title used to be an SS expression for the entire region of the Auschwitz concentration camp complex.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Martin Amis. In: " The Guardian . July 22, 2008, accessed November 12, 2018 .
  2. ↑ a b Stout, Mira. "Martin Amis: Down London's mean streets" , New York Times , February 4th 1990th
  3. ↑ Benedicte Page: Colm Tóibín takes over teaching job from Martin Amis . In: The Guardian , January 26, 2011. 
  4. ^ The 50 greatest British writers since 1945 . The Times , Jan. 5, 2008, (subscription only).
  5. ↑ Wynn-Jones, Ros. Time to publish and be damned , The Independent , September 14, 1997.
  6. ^ Yakub Qureshi, £ 3,000 an hour for Amis , Manchester Evening News , January 25, 2008; Amis the £ 3k-an-hour professor , Guardian , Jan. 26, 2008.
  7. ↑ Yakub Qureshi, op. Cit. , Manchester Evening News , 25 January 2008.
  8. ↑ James Diedrick: Understanding Martin Amis . University of South Carolina Press, Columbia 2004, ISBN 1-57003-516-4 , p. 6.
  9. ↑ James Diedrick: Understanding Martin Amis . University of South Carolina Press, Columbia 2004, ISBN 1-57003-516-4 , pp. 6 and 7.
  10. ↑ James Diedrick: Understanding Martin Amis . University of South Carolina Press, Columbia 2004, ISBN 1-57003-516-4 , p. 7.
  11. ↑ James Diedrick: Understanding Martin Amis . University of South Carolina Press, Columbia 2004, ISBN 1-57003-516-4 , p. 8.
  12. ↑ a b James Diedrick: Understanding Martin Amis . University of South Carolina Press, Columbia 2004, ISBN 1-57003-516-4 , p. 9.
  13. ↑ a b James Diedrick: Understanding Martin Amis . University of South Carolina Press, Columbia 2004, ISBN 1-57003-516-4 , p. 10.
  14. ^ Salman Rushdie after James Diedrick: Understanding Martin Amis . University of South Carolina Press, Columbia 2004, ISBN 1-57003-516-4 , p. 10. The original quote is: There is thing that happened to Martin which periodically happens in England when the public print rounds upon the public figure and tries to tear him apart. It really has nothing to do with the money. It's just This guy has had it too good for too long - let's murder him.
  15. ↑ James Diedrick: Understanding Martin Amis . University of South Carolina Press, Columbia 2004, ISBN 1-57003-516-4 , p. 11.
  16. ↑ quoted from James Diedrick: Understanding Martin Amis . University of South Carolina Press, Columbia 2004, ISBN 1-57003-516-4 , p. 12. The original quote is: My father, I think, aided by a natural indolence, didn't really take much notice of my early efforts to write until I plonked the proof of my first novel on his desk.
  17. ↑ quoted from James Diedrick: Understanding Martin Amis . University of South Carolina Press, Columbia 2004, ISBN 1-57003-516-4 , p. 12. The original quote is: How could he be so incurious about me?
  18. ↑ James Diedrick: Understanding Martin Amis . University of South Carolina Press, Columbia 2004, ISBN 1-57003-516-4 , p. 3.
  19. ^ Review by Tilman Urbach in the NZZ on June 7, 2012: Martin Amis' new novel -Die pliers of lust , accessed on June 10, 2012.
  20. ^ Rebecca Abrams : Time's sorrow , Financial Times , Aug. 30, 2014, p. 11; Reviews by Hubert Spiegel , FAZ , September 15, 2015 and by Jürgen Kaube in FAS , September 1, 2015.
  21. ^ Bauer in the translator database of the VdÜ , 2019.
  22. ^ Nerke in the translator database of the VdÜ, 2019.
  23. ^ The translation in the translation. Carmela Welge on the translation of the novel, ReLÜ , review magazine , 3, 2006.
  24. ↑ James Diedrick: Understanding Martin Amis . University of South Carolina Press, Columbia 2004, ISBN 1-57003-516-4 , p. 14.
personal data
SURNAME Amis, Martin
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Amis, Martin Louis (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English writer
DATE OF BIRTH August 25, 1949
PLACE OF BIRTH Oxford , England