Plan B Forum

I was just reading this Guardian story about a film opening based on a Martin Amis Holocaust novel and then a couple of hours later this news of his passing was posted:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/ ... es-aged-73


Here’s the piece about the adaption opening soon:
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/m ... aust-drama

I never got into Martin Amis - I found him gloomy and he could not command my attention beyond a few pages. Probably my fault not his.

I preferred his dad, Kingsley Amis* especially Lucky Jim, the story of a university lecturer (this was before we called them all professors) in English Literature at a minor UK university. Amis wrote this while he was lecturing at University College Swansea (South Wales, Gob's old stomping ground; now Swansea University) and where I did postgrad research 15 years later. One of the English Dept senior lecturers whom I knew slightly was supposedly the person on whom Kingsley modeled Lucky Jim.

*I'm talking about his writing. By all accounts Kingsley was a turd particularly towards women, and by his own account he was an antiSemite.

I had a graduate school professor who was a fan of both Kingsley and Martin so I’ve read novels by both in seminar.

I prefer Martin but then I have that bent toward the melancholic and bleak. I also believe that I feel a kindred spirithood with Martin Amis, having also grown up with an abusive alcoholic and serial philanderer who made home life a misery and was a raging antisemite to boot. Martin Amis spent a lot of time in his writing exploring the roots of antisemitism and trying to grapple with it. He called it out in our current politics. He married a Jew and has two Jewish children with her. I wonder if he felt all his life the same urgency to make amends for being the offspring of someone with such ugliness in them, or maybe just to try to make sense of how someone we love can be so awful and hold such awfulness in them.

I’m going to put him on my reading list for the coming weeks, something I haven’t read before. And I look forward to seeing the film adaptation of The Zone of Interest when it is available streaming.