Martin Amis, one of Britain's most influential writers, who created a high style to describe low things, died on Friday at his home in Lake Worth, Florida, at the age of 73.
His wife, Isabel Fonseca, announced his death on Saturday, which was due to esophageal cancer. This disease is the same one that took his good friend and fellow writer Christopher Hitchens to his grave in 2011.
Amis's career was marked by his caustic, erudite and darkly 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 overconsumption. Interestingly, his own private life made him fodder for sensationalism. Critics complimented his ability to express himself.
Throughout his career he wrote fifteen novels, several works of non-fiction, short stories, a collection of essays and successful memoirs.
"He had a real literary vitality that was an animated farce", writes James Wood in the obituary of The New Yorker.
All this body of literature led Amis to be 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 work he devoted himself to investigating the atrocities of the Stalinist regime, the war on terrorism and the legacy of the Holocaust.
The trilogy of novels about London launched him to fame with Diners in 1985, and he continued with Camps de Londres in 1990 and finally with The Information, which he continues to form with his memoirs, Experience, published in 2000 , his most representative work and admired by readers.
In an interview with the Paris Review, he stated that “plots only matter in suspenseful works. So he emphasized that Diners, which launched him to fame, was a work for choral voices. "If the voice doesn't work, then you're screwed", he emphasized.
The style of his novels, according to experts, was brilliant, bristling and profane. "The whole world is fast food, sex shows and nude magazines", he declared in 1985 in an interview with the New York Times Book Review. “I am often accused of concentrating on the spicy and reprehensible side of life in my books, but there is something sentimental about the matter. Anyone who reads the tabloids will be faced with far greater horrors than I describe.”
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 graduate in English with honors.
He credited his stepmother, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, with introducing him to literature as a drifting youth. Based on his two literary heroes, Vladimir Nabokov and Saul Bellow, his first novel was The Book of Rachel. In that debut he wanted to avoid "the risk of turning adolescence into something as boring as adolescence usually is". His essence was already there.
