Martin Amis, whose caustic, scholarly and darkly comic novels redefined British fiction in the 1980s and 1990s with their acerbic assessment of tabloid culture and consumerism, died on Friday May 19 at his home of Lake Worth, Florida at the age of 73. According to the statements of his wife, the American writer and journalist Isabel Fonseca, to the New York Times, he succumbed to esophageal cancer.
His death occurred the day of the presentation at Cannes of a film inspired by his book The Zone of Interest (2014), which bears the same title and was directed by Jonathan Glazer. Born in 1949 in Wales, Martin Amis redefined British literature of the 1980s and 1990s with dark and biting novels.
Considered “the terrible child of English literature”, he is the author of fifteen novels, highly acclaimed memoirs (Experience, in 2000), essays and collections of short stories. It was with his so-called London trilogy – Money, Money (1984), London Fields (1990) and L’Information (1995) that he achieved recognition.
Some said he was “born with a silver pen in his mouth”, because he is the son of Sir Kingsley Amis (1922-1995), a famous British writer, knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990 for “services to literature”. , who was married to Jane Howard, a renowned novelist, and the family frequented authors such as Philip Larkin and Robert Graves.
Outstanding stylist
This illustrious ancestry prompted him to start writing very young and uninhibited. It was at the age of 21 that he tackled his first novel, Le Dossier Rachel, which was published in 1973. His father encouraged him, but quickly told him that he could not read it. “What I was writing didn’t interest him. Basically, he did not like modern literature and preferred poetry to the novel. In his beautiful memoir, Expérience (published in France by Gallimard, 2003), Amis talks a lot about his father, his death, “for which we believe we are prepared and it is not true”, and the insolent young man he was, thinking that if his father didn’t like Joyce or Nabokov, he couldn’t be a good writer.
“For my first books, I was encouraged. It was spoiled when we saw that I persisted, that I had not done this to measure myself against my father, but that it was my life. So it started, like I was favored by my birth. That may be true for Prince Charles, but not for a writer. Either you know how to do it or you don’t. It has little to do with the father, “he told Le Monde in 2015, at the release of The Zone of Interest, a satire set in Auschwitz. The novel tells the story of a Nazi officer in love with the wife of the commandant of the extermination camp. The “area of ??interest” was the term used by the Nazis to describe the 40 square kilometer area surrounding the concentration camp.
Very quickly, Martin Amis, whom the Times ranked in 2008 as one of the best British writers since 1945, established himself as an outstanding stylist, with a work of very radical social criticism. Mocking sexual liberation in Dead Dolls, in 1975. Showing the frenzied desire for money in Money, Money, in 1984. X-raying the literary world through the confrontation of two writers in L’Information, in 1995. Questioning Nazism in The Arrow of Time, in 1991, then on Stalinism in Koba the Terror, in 2009, and on Islamo-fascism in The Second Plane, in 2010.
He was selected twice for the Booker Prize, the first in 1991 for The Arrow of Time and the second in 2003 for Chien Jaune.
