Martin Amis, one of the most influential British writers, who created a high style to describe low things, died this Friday at his home in Lake Worth, Florida, at the age of 73.
His wife, Isabel Fonseca, reported the death this Saturday, which was caused by esophageal cancer. This illness is the same one that took his good friend and fellow narrative troublemaker Christopher Hitchens to the grave in 2011.
Amis's career was marked by his caustic, erudite and sadly comic novels that redefined British fiction in the 1980s and 1990s.
"Drop me anywhere in America and I'll tell you where I am: in America", one of the phrases that define him.
His style was characterized by his keen appreciation of tabloid culture and excessive consumption. Interestingly, his own private life made him the fodder for sensationalism. Critics praised his ability to express himself.
Throughout his career he wrote fifteen novels, several non-fiction works, short stories, a collection of essays, and some successful memoirs. “It had a real literary vitality that was a lively farce,” writes James Wood in his obituary for The New Yorker. All this literary corpus made Amis considered one of the best writers of his generation. Amis is among the celebrated group of storytellers that includes Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes. In his last works he dedicated himself to investigating the atrocities of the Stalinist regime, the war against terrorism and the legacy of the Holocaust.
His trilogy of novels about London launched him to fame with Dinero in 1985, and continued with Campos de Londres in 1990 and finally, with La información , which continue to make up, together with his memoirs, Experiencia , published in 2000, his works most representative and admired by readers.
In an interview in the Paris Review, Amis stated that "plots only matter in suspense." So he stressed that Dinero, which launched him to fame, was a choral voice work. "If the voice doesn't work, then you're screwed," he stressed.
The style of his novels, according to experts, was brilliant, bristly and profane. "The whole world is fast food, sex shows and strip magazines," she declared in 1985 in an interview in the New York Times Book Review. “I am often accused of concentrating on the racy and reprehensible side of life in my books, but I feel somewhat sentimental about it. Anyone who reads the tabloids will be faced with far greater horrors than what I describe,” she added.
Martin Amis was born in Oxford in 1949, he was educated in schools in the United Kingdom, Spain and the United States, before entering Exeter College, one of the four that make up the University of Oxford, where he graduated in English with honors.
He credited his stepmother, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, with introducing him to literature as a drifting youth. Starting with his two literary heroes, Vladimir Nabokov and Saul Bellow, his first novel was The Secret Book of Rachel. In that debut he wanted to avoid "the risk of turning adolescence into something as boring as adolescence usually is." There was already the essence of him.
