Discover Experience: A Memoir Brought To You By Martin Amis Distributed As Hardbound

Amis is one of the most gifted and innovative writers of our time, With Experience, he discloses a
private life every bit as unique and fascinating as his bestselling novels.
He explores his relationship with his beloved father, novelist Kingsley Amis, and examines the life and legacy of his cousin, Lucy Partington, who was abducted and murdered by one of Britain's most notorious serial killers.
Experience also dissects the literary scene, and includes Amis'portraits of Saul Bellow, Salman Rushdie, Allan Bloom, Philip Larkin, Robert Graves, and Ian McEwan, among others.
Not since Nabokov's Speak, Memory has such an implausible life been recorded by such an inimitable talent.
We forever play the same records over and over again but so rarely reread books, It is nowyears since I read this clever memoir which has been staring at me from the book shelf.
Ti's time to dig into la vita Martin again, Remember admiring and loving the first outing, can not remember much of the story, See you later, only on pagenow, "Liking it Rob" "Yes, so far yes!" I'm reluctant to give this book even one star, as it doesn't deserve THAT, in my humble opinion.
I seldom excoriate books I've read, but this one is so selfimportant and trumped up that I feel obliged to warn other readers away from its pretentious pages.
OK I am officially moving this from "currently reading" to "read" because I have abandoned it amp don't think I'll ever finish.
I found this totally boring but probably just don't know who enough of the semifamous people involved are for it to be juicy.
“But writers write far more penetratingly than they live, Their novels show them at their very best, making a huge effort: stretched until they twang, ”

I bought a newB pencil to annotate this beast of a memoir,
Amis bemoans the messiness of life “forget about coherence of imagery and the Uniting Theme” but does a fantastic job of imposing some kind of pleasing biographical structure here.
He seamlessly weaves and digresses between areas of his life, Focusing on his relationship with his father, Kingsley Amis, the disappearance of his cousin in, and having his top teeth completely removed at age.
Dishes the dirt on his falling out with Julian Barnes and with KAs biographer Eric Jacobs,
Footnotes were usually very interesting and worth stopping for,
Prose pristine as always “hobnob with Nabokov”, In parts, one of the most amusing books Ive ever read, So much so that Im contemplating a reread, Of a biography,
Just read it.

may be biased currently in the first flush of feverish obsession with Martin Amis.
In case you couldn't tell,

“This remains the great deficiency of literature: its imitation of nature cannot prepare you for the main events.
For the main events, only experience will answer, ”

“Well its all experience, though its a pity there had to be so much of it.
”
.
.
.
LITERATURE

“after very few pages I felt a recognition threading itself through meHere is a writer I will have to read all of I see Bellow perhaps twice a year, and we call, and we write.
But that accounts for only a fraction of the time I spend in his company, He is on the shelves, on the desk, he is all over the house, and always in the mood to talk.
Thats what writing is, not communication but a means of communion, And there are other writers who swirl around you, like friends, patient, intimate, sleeplessly accessible, over centuries.
This is the definition of literature, ”

“Even the best kind of popular novel just comes straight at you you have no conversation with a popular novel.
Whereas you do have a conversation you have an intense argument with Herzog, with Henderson, with Humboldt, frowning, nodding, withholding, qualifying, objecting, conceding and smiling, smiling first with reluctant admiration, then smiling with unreluctant admiration.
”

“What was I reading I want to convey a mood, and what you are reading is a constituent of how you feel.
In biographies they should always tell us that, routinely, in the margin: what they were reading, ”

“It has been said that there are only two types of Irish male: the hard man, and the desperate chancer.
In life, Joyce was a desperate chancer, But in his work he was a hard man, Tell a dream, and lose a reader, said Henry James, And we all know that the pun is the lowest form of wit, Joyce spent seventeen years punning on dreams, The result, Finnegans Wake, reads like apage crossword clue, But it took a hard man to write it, ”

“I agree with my fathers entry on Shakespeare in The Kings English: to say or imply that the man of this name is not our greatest writer marks a secondrate person at best.
”

“Nabokov clearly derived sensual pleasure from being dismissive: it is the patrician in him, ”“overcultivated contempt”


KINGSLEY

“Edward Upward said that he felt the aging process at work in him when he experienced little failures of tolerance.
Well, Kingsley was never much of a tolerancecultivator and his failures were big failures, ”

“Jeremy Bentham, like Kingsley Amis, was a man who addicted himself to the endorsement of unattractive opinions.
”

About MAs maternal grandfather: “In a letter to Phillip Larkin, Kingsley described him as resembling a musicloving lavatory attendant and Im sorry, Mum, but the writer in me knows a bullseye when he sees one.
”

BAD TEETH

“My mouth is full of decayed teeth and my soul of decayed ambitions.
” James Joyce

“My tongue feels like someone coming home and finding his furniture gone, ” VN

“Still, I claim peership with these masters in only one area, Not in the art and not in the life, Just in the teeth. In the teeth. ”

“Vladmir, James and I, however, have blackballed Updike, His teeth are too good Its not everyone, you know, who can jostle shoulders with Joyce, who can hobnob with Nabokov.
”

“I thought I would slip out of the country and head off to a land Albania Uzbekistan South Wales where nobody else had any teeth either.
”

“his was the harder course, but mine had to be lived by me, ”Paraphrase PL

WRITING PEDANTRY

“singlehanded is already an adverb” As is regardless, over.
Must stop using the word overly

“Cant believe the US proofs of The Info.
A termitary of imported commas, each one like a papercut to my soul, ”Google tells me that termitary termite colony

Dont begin a paragraph with the same word that you started the last paragraph with.
Unless you do three or more in a row as a conscious stylistic choice,

OTHER STUFF

“Jerusalem, the city without smalltalk, ”

“Virtually: the signature tune of the idler and the charlatan, ”

“Poets cant, dont, shouldnt drive, British poets cant or dont drive, American poets drive, but shouldnt, ”

“beauty is accepted slang for yes” Larkin,

“E, M. Forster said that women and children was the phrase that exempts the English male from sanity, Now its taxpayers money. ”The memoir is a guided tour, no free ranging research with the price of admission, It is likely closer to a slide show, One mustn't shuffle the sequence, It alleges itself as a report, an account, It isn't submission. That is unseemly. I often felt ill at ease when reading Experience, My friends and I read Zachary Leader's biography of Kingsley Amis a few years back, The sordid details of the home life and its philandering projections really bothered me, Such an upbringing also gave a context to Marty's less than stellar moments, The pauses, omissions and gaffes fuel the narrative, The footnotes underscore the narrative, We must agree with Kingsley's observation that life is grief and labor, I suppose Forster is also on target and I should feel that Amis connected with me, the reader, though I'm not sure I welcome such.
I love the themes from minutiae to magnificent, as coexisting subjects of experience writing, adolescence, children being a child and having them and guilt, sex, problematic teeth, travel, marriage, troubles with friendships, pleasure in friendships, struggles with close family members.
He

writes at one point that his dentist 'after a particularly gruelling session, wrung his hands and told his mother "it's a mess in there"'.
He also writes of the coincidence of things that happen to families, where the intimate and the worldly overlap, and where life exists in an absence of information.
His cousin went missing was one of those 'missing people' and it was discovered years later that she was abducted by Frederick West.
Amis does not 'deal with' or build a motif around this issue, but simply discloses it it comes to light, but remains a shadow over their family's sense of stability and predictability all things are incomprehensible, as experience itself when it happens and life is only a continual contemplation of incomprehensible and incongruous experience.
The title, it turns out, is a caveat emptor,

I went in expecting a look at MA's life as a writer in his twenties, thirties, and fortiesthe Granta/Booker heydays, nights out, friends, foes and lovers.
You know, summer reading fun,

I got perhaps fifty pages on tooth pain, tooth anxieties, trips to dentists, and ruminations on the dental problems of famous novelists.


And discussions about a murdered cousin and with it, the obvious hope that the weight of that terrible event would counterbalance the triviality of the rest, plus schoolboy letters home and critiques of schoolboy letters home, glancing references to big events in Amis' life you know, because it's assumed I would already know All Things Martin before I picked up Experience, and a handful of pages about Hitchens and Bellow, focusing mostly on where they met, what was worn and what was eaten.


The only saving grace is that it's secretly about Kingsley Amis, But if you're looking for Marty, there's no way around it: Experience is an underwhelming read, I can't even say it's for fans only, find out about Martin's relationship with his dad, and about his teeth, Or not if you don't want to, I wouldn't blame you, .
notebook: stuffs chocolate like Martin Amis's dad in the memoir, Picture Kingsley his cheeks full of fat and sugar taking ten minutes of concentrated mastication before he can clear his mouth enough to reply.
Read to pageand just couldn't take it anymore,
I think this is my alltime favourite autobiography, Beautifully written, packed with wonderful anecdotes, sometimes laughoutloud funny and sometimes deeply moving, What more can you ask for An autobiography as Amis can write it, At first it seems like a mess but it all makes sense, It's also a bare all autobiography, detailing the relationship with his father, his cousin being murdered by Fred and Rose west and the child he sired and metyears later.
Plus some tidbits of other authors such as Rushdie and Saul bellow,

Excellent and heartwarming,

"E' tutta esperienza, dispiace solo che debba essercene così tanta"


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.

Martin ha avuto una vita ricca di avvenimenti e di stimoli, alcuni piacevoli, come le frequentazioni di scrittori famosi e gli incontri con altri grandi del panorama letterario, altri terrificanti, come il coinvolgimento di sua cugina di primo grado tra le vittime di Frederick West, il mostro di Gloucester.

Le lettere che, con molta onestà, Martin introduce tra i paragrafi ci mostrano un giovane spocchiosetto sullo stile del protagonista di The Rachel papers, che arranca all'ombra di un padre ingombrante e pertanto deve farsi un'idea alla svelta dei grandi della letteratura prima di tentare l'esame per Oxford.
. . curiosamente le sue lettere sono meno saccenti di quanto ci si aspetterebbe, come invece risultano quelle di Auster nella sua autobiografia.

Martin è stato un giovane talento e non ha mai dubitato che avrebbe scritto per vivere, l'esempio del padre, famoso donnaiolo, lo spinge a far presto esperienza anche in quel settore e, seppure con garbo e senza grossi intenti pettegoli, Martin ci elenca le sue innumerevoli compagne, fidanzate, più un paio di mogli e tutto il dolore che i passaggi di mano tra l'una e l'altra gli hanno causato.
. .

la seconda parte è equamente divisa tra i tormenti dentari, di cui fu vittima per lungo tempo e per i quali è stato bersagliato assai dalla stampa scandalistica, e il racconto della fine di suo padre, che a seguito di una caduta si scopre essere vittima di Alzheimer, una forma di demenza degenerativa molto veloce a esito assai infausto.
. . completano il quadro accenni ai suoi figli, la scoperta di una figlia illegittima e qualche caso di "sassolino nella scarpa" nei confronti del biografo di suo padre.
. .


edit: leggere Joseph Anton insieme a questa autobiografia è un'esperienza corale, alcuni episodi sono gli stessi e, riportati da due punti di vista, rendono la visione d'insieme qualcosa di più della somma di due libri.