2023-05-20 22:53:51
Martin Amis, one of the most influential English-language writers of recent decades, died yesterday at his home in Lake Worth, Florida, at the age of 73, according to The New York Times. His wife, also a writer Isabel Fonseca, specified that the cause of his death was esophageal cancer.
Born in Oxford in 1949, Amis was a member of a brilliant generation of British authors including names such as Salman Rushdie, Christopher Hitchens, Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes, who have brought a touch of modernity to the islands’ literature ever since. the 80’s.
Raised between the United Kingdom, Spain and the United States, he was the son of the popular teacher and writer Kingsley Amis, who introduced him to the world of letters and with whom he had a love-hate relationship. On one occasion, on BBC radio, he stated that he wished he had put “more distance” between himself and his father, as the “Amis franchise” became “sort of a burden” on him. Kingsley Amis was even a literary character in his son’s work and in his memoir ‘Experience’, published in 2000, he exorcised the demons that marked their relationship.
Also in that book, Martin Amis addressed his own separation from his first wife and mother of his two children, the American academic Antonia Phillips, and the discovery that he had a 17-year-old daughter whom he had never met.
His first novel, published while working in the literary supplement of The Times newspaper, was ‘Rachel’s Book’ (1973), with which he won the Somerset Maugham Prize and works such as ‘Dead Children’ and ‘Dead Children’ also date from that early period. Success’.
But Amis published his best-known work, ‘Dinero’, published in Spain by Anagrama in 1984 and chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 most important English-language novels of the last century. In it, Amis draws on his experience as a screenwriter on the film ‘Saturn 3’, directed by Stanley Donen and starring Kirk Douglas as the main star. In The Guardian newspaper, another writer, Robert McCrum, assured that it is “a ‘zeitgeist’ book that remains one of the dominant novels of the 1980s.” “Money’s emotion, which is turbocharged with wild humor from page one to page, is Amis’s lavish delight in contemporary Anglo-American vernacular,” McCrum noted.
As his literary career consolidated, Amis, considered an ‘enfant terrible’ in the United Kingdom for his opinions, consolidated his role as an intellectual and participated in not a few controversies. In 2006 he was accused of being an Islamophobic for stating that “the Muslim community will have to suffer until they put their house in order”, although, as he himself said, “that very afternoon” he repented of his words. On another occasion, he pointed to “euthanasia” as the best measure to end the aging of the population.
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