con la differenza, rispetto ai romanzi, che qui abbassando ovviamente l’asticella del sarcasmo martin amis mostra come sa praticare la chirurgia dell’intelligenza anche quando non ci sono freddezza e distacco. Amis does his best to save her from the posthumous epitaph of helpless victim – in particular refuting Fred’s heinous tale that she wanted to introduce him to her parents - and to tell us about who she was and why he hopes, and believes, when darker thoughts enter his mind, that it was all over quickly for her.

He also suggests that Christopher Hitchens is, "funnily enough", Kingsley's ideal reader -- a judgement that, on the basis of the evidence presented in this book, sounds more convincing. His teeth are too good… It’s not everyone, you know, who can jostle shoulders with Joyce, who can hobnob with Nabokov. Experience was published in 2000, partly in reflection of his father (passed in 1995), and also in response to the discovery – decades later – of his cousin Lucy’s remains among the many victims of Frederick and Rosemary West (1994). Martin Amis, scrittore postmoderno, figlio di Kingsley Amis, a sua volta noto poeta; scrittore e critico letterario britannico, traccia un profilo dei suoi anni di gioventù fino alla maturità, un racconto discontinuo sul piano cronologico però molto avvincente su quello umano. As such we learn about his time in Oxford, Swansea and America; he talks about his friendships with Philip Larkin and Anthony Powell; and gets to settle scores with the likes of John Wain and Roald Dahl.The critic James Wood wrote in the Guardian: " Experience is a beautiful, and beautifully strange book, and it is unlike anything one expected. In silence Kingsley went down on one knee, there on the doormat, and the boys, also silent, and unblinking, dubbed him in turn with a touch of the blade on either shoulder. The memoir is also heavily footnoted ("to preserve the collateral thought") with additional asides (some of which are astoundingly off-point -- indeed, off almost any point). This volume, about how many people leave a room compared to entering it--to quote a recurrent theme--exorcises that particular fear, and a more general dread that has perpetually haunted his prose. This book is mainly an elegy to Kingsley, for we see him and his ghost throughout the book, but it is mostly of the elder Amis coming down the mountain from the literary heights he attained after the success of his breakout novel, Lucky Jim.

The memoirs are warmer - Amis is both a devoted father and son, and Nabokov's passage about his infant child is one of my favorites from Speak. This year was momentous for Amis and he gives an intricate and detailed account of all the losses but manages to make the reader feel joyous at the end when he takes you to the birth of his daughter, Fernanda.I found this totally boring but probably just don't know who enough of the semi-famous people involved are for it to be juicy. His novels and short stories chart a world that is uniquely his: as John Updike puts it, `Amis is trying to construct a large, reaching, ambitious set of books - trying to cover the world in fiction'.

In Experience, Amis seems to have set out to show that what Hornby did for football, he can do for dentistry," wrote Sutcliffe. He revels in fatherhood (including the (re)discovery of a girl he fathered in his younger days and first met some 20 years after the fact), but the women involved are treated much more circumspectly and discreetly. This remains the great deficiency of literature: its imitation of nature cannot prepare you for the main events. The fact of the matter, of the fact of the matter (of the matter), is that Amis is a towering presence in the field of lit-crit: the sharpest and smartest Nero of criticism working in Britain right now, with almost four decades of experience under his belt.After the first fifty pages – past the infinitesimal detail about his entrance into the litosphere – I got the impression Amis had been imprisoned in this role of literary executioner since birth. This is only one of several episodes where Amis is apparently extremely recognizable and everyone is clearly familiar with his life as well as his future plans.

On his two good friends Saul Bellow, also a mentor, and Christopher Hitchens: "I am not [Bellow's:] son, of course.Julie Burchill's attack in the Spectator was so spectacular that it became a mini-news story in its own right, emphasising the fact (acknowledged in the memoir) that writing and celebrity are now inseparable in Amis's life. Although Kingsley does take the time to administer a kick to two of his son’s literary idols – Saul Bellow and John Updike. This is a good book to glimpse into the life of a literary giant who did not have to struggle to get published (his father’s agent and publisher published Martin’s first book and got him off to the races without the required mandatory years committed to wandering in the literary wilderness). Ma anche un’informazione sommaria nulla può togliere al fascino di una scrittura impeccabile e di una storia trascinante; sono molte storie, in realtà, che si avvicendano: dai solidi legami famigliari alla persecuzione del mal di denti; dalla tragica sorte toccata alla giovane cugina Lucy Partington alla furiosa rottura dell’amicizia con Julian Barnes; dall’affettuoso rapporto con la “matrigna”Jane Elizabeh Howard fino alla straziante morte del padre.