2023-05-21 20:34:48
Breathtaking juggler of words, outstanding sculptor of the English language, the British writer Martin Amis, author of Money, Money (Mazarine, 1984) and London Fields (Christian Bourgois, 1992) died of esophageal cancer on Friday May 19 at his home in Lake Worth (Florida). Irony of the calendar: the adaptation, by the British director Jonathan Glaser, of one of his major books, The Area of Interest (Calmann Levy, 2014), was presented at Cannes the day of his death. He was 74 years old.
A personality, Martin Amis! Brilliant and tortuous. Always with a part of opacity, like his books. Gifted with a colorful verb, this seductive dandy wielded irony like no other.
But he was also renowned for his bite and ferocity. By his own admission, he deserved the thousand and one epithets that had been given to him throughout his career: arrogant, egotistical, sly, provocative, cantankerous, misogynistic, elitist…
Claimed elitist
“Elitist? Of course I’m an elitist… Why would it be frowned upon to be one in the field of culture? Elitist, I am when I fly or when I go to the doctor. I demand the best, don’t you? », he retorted during a visit to Paris in 2013.
He let out his words more than he chewed them. In War on the cliché (Gallimard, 2007), a collection of literary criticism written for the British press over three decades (1971-2000), Amis was jubilant in pinning down, one after the other, his American colleagues. Phillip Roth: “Despite the increasing stupidity of his novels since Portnoy and its complex, the quality of his writing has steadily improved. » Norman Mailer : “His new book bears all the hallmarks of a writer being ordered to pay $500,000 a year in child support. » Tom Wolfe : “Looks like his typewriter isn’t working well. A malfunction of the “repeat” button is suspected. »
The day we met, it was Beckett he had in his sights. “No, I don’t like his plays. In the transparency of things, Nabokov describes a hermit sitting naked on a dilapidated toilet seat. He suggests that this image alone sums up all of Beckett’s theater. These lines have always made me smile. »
Who did Martin Amis think he was? For someone who had grown up with a little silver spoon (or rather a pen) in his mouth, his (many) detractors answered in substance. Born in Swansea, South Wales, on August 25, 1949, Amis was the son of Sir Kingsley Amis (1922-1995), a writer and member of the ‘Angry Young Men’ literary movement in the 1950s, author of numerous books including the best-selling Lucky Jim (“Jim la chance”, Plon, 1956) and even, under a pseudonym, of a James Bond adventure in 1968.
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