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Experience

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He has written an utterly fascinating self-portrait that's also a horrified examination of the fragility of life. Although Kingsley does take the time to administer a kick to two of his son’s literary idols – Saul Bellow and John Updike.

I was a reluctant fan of the man before (wholehearted of his writing, though, I should make clear) but this memoir brings me into the fold. particularly ones involving coverage of himself (Amis was so regularly savaged by the British press in the 1990s that as a teenager I gathered, without yet having read a word of his own writing, that he was Someone To Be Despised). nel primo caso per la severità intrinseca a natalia ginzburg, nel secondo per il basso continuo della dolenza nevrotica in michele mari.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.

Then, of course, there is the adored Saul Bellow (whose own struggles with a near-fatal illness also shook Amis in the late 1990s).Jeremy Bentham, like Kingsley Amis, was a man who addicted himself to the endorsement of unattractive opinions.

All the kids' voices in Experience -- those of the narrator as a child and those of his own children -- are done with a clairvoyant accuracy that wrings the heart even though it's funny. Early in the book, Amis discloses that he no longer identifies with the younger self who wrote most of the letters, whom he names “Osric,” after the naive courtier from Hamlet. Although I haven’t dipped as extensively into Martin’s work as some of my contemporaries, nothing I’ve read so far has matched – say – ‘Lucky Jim’. The above occurred to me as an apt title, for Martin embodies, among other things, the Englishman’s pre-occupation with bad teeth. Letters from School" (and then College) to Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard (Martin's stepmother from 1965 to 1983) are interspersed between the chapters of the first part of the memoir, giving a glimpse of the young Martin and his academic (and other) tribulations as he crams for (and then at) Oxford.Before Experience I might compare him with a kind of ‘ mean friend’ that the child within you desperately hopes to please. Endless footnotes, long footnotes, distracting footnotes, on nearly every page - what is the point, to purposely annoy? He is no longer "the kid", as Bellow puts it to him after the death of father Kingsley in 1995, and this generational shift is sharply in evidence within the quietly smouldering pages of Experience. Perhaps Martin presupposes that his readers are familiar with the details; still, it is an odd way of "setting the record straight".

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