Martin Amis, página 3 de 9

Ce qui suit est une lettre pour expliquer mon suicide. Quand vous la poserez, John Self aura cessé d’exister. M. A. En ce début des années 1980, Margaret Thatcher est Premier ministre du Royaume-Uni

Una novela deslumbrante; satírica y sumamente divertida, pero con un trasfondo de absoluta negrura, sobre el paso del tiempo, la relación entre literatura y vida, el fracaso y la muerte. Richard Tull y Gwyn Barry son escritores, ambos al filo del abismo de los cuarenta años -han nacido con un dia de diferencia-, y amigos desde siempre. Richard fue el primero en probar las mieles del triunfo, publico su primera novela cuando era una joven y brillante promesa de las letras, mientras el opaco Gwyn redactaba laboriosos articulos para enciclopedias y ni siquiera conseguia reseñar libros para revistas literarias.Pero el tiempo ha pasado, y ahora es Richard quien vive en los oscuros margenes del mundillo literario, con sus dificiles novelas experimentales olvidadas por todos, trabajando para una dudosa editorial que publica novelas que pagan los propios autores, y reseñando biografias de escritores casi tan desconocidos como el mismo para una escualida revista literaria. Gwyn ha alcanzado la fama en el mundo entero con una ingenua, facil y seductora utopia new-age, se ha casado con una deslumbrante aristocrata, se lo disputan editores y agentes literarios, y es el niño mimado de los medios de comunicacion.Y un buen dia, consumido por la envidia, el horror de la cotidianeidad y el horror al fracaso, acosado por la informacion que le llega en las noches de insomnio -ese rumor que comienza a oirse a los cuarenta años y nos habla de la certeza de la muerte-, Richard decide pasar al ataque, e instrumenta un plan -o mejor dicho una serie de planes-, para fastidiar bien fastidiado al famoso Gwyn, su amigo de siempre. Pero no sabe que la humillacion del imperturbable escritor de best-sellers es una empresa poco menos que imposible; los triunfadores, como los idiotas, son seres olimpicos e invencibles...En La informacion, Martin Amis retorna a territorios que le son familiares: la amistad y la rivalidad especular entre dos hombres, que ya aparecia en Exito, el submundo canalla y turbio de Campos de Londres, que acecha en los limites de la clase media, con la que mantiene una interaccion de fascinacion dialectica; la America de Dinero, un territorio, una cultura y una lengua que subyuga a los escritores britanicos... Y el resultado es una novela deslumbrante; satirica y sumamente divertida, pero con un trasfondo de absoluta negrura, donde los grandes temas -en un sentido casi musical-, son el paso del tiempo, la relacion entre literatura y vida, el fracaso y la muerte.

«Estados Unidos no es un país, es un mundo.» La sentencia es de Martin Amis, sin duda, el más radicalmente divertido y brillante de la nueva generación de escritores británicos. Para comprobarlo sólo

Además de un poema largo, Tormenta todavía es también un ensayo y una narración. A partir de su experiencia como traductor de El rey Lear, Andreu Jaume lleva a cabo una dramatización de la metamorfosis que sufre una voz intima en su transito a la madurez, mezclando la indagacion en torno a la experiencia amorosa, la paternidad frustrada o el aprendizaje del desapego con la reflexion critica en torno a los autores que le han acompañado, desde Parmenides y Shakespeare hasta T. S. Eliot o Gil de Biedma. Dividido en tres partes que representan tres momentos estilisticos y vivenciales, el poema propone dinamitar los limites del yo de la mascara moderna para adentrarse en una especulacion sapiencial que pone en duda algunos de los dogmas de nuestro tiempo y pide recuperar para la poesia el derecho de ficcion atribuido a la novela.

El ex hombre-fuerte de un circo, veterano de Varsovia en 1939, y artista de Notting Hill, encuentra su propio y personal holocausto en "Bujak y la fuerza poderosa o Los dados de Dios". Aburrimiento maximo y amor minimo son aconsejados en "La enfermedad del tiempo". Una esquizofrenica virulenta abruma al joven hijo del "padre de la era nuclear" en "Lucidez en Flama Lake". La evolucion ha tomado un camino repugnante en la kafkiana historia de amor "El cachorrito que pudo", y la historia de la tierra es discutida con franqueza por alguien que lo ha visto todo en "Los inmortales." Encuadernacion: Tapa dura con sobrecubierta.

El año, un fantasmagórico 1999. Podría ser el último otoño del planeta. Un calor anormal reseca la tierra, azotada por tormentas de polvo. Y cuando por fin llega la lluvia, no cesa hasta parecer un diluvio eterno. El clima politico no es menos caotico y una crisis internacional se acerca a su punto de fision. Este panorama apocaliptico constituye el mas que adecuado telon de fondo para la terrible y divertida novela de uno de los mas talentosos escritores britanicos de nuestros dias. "Campos de Londres" se inicia con una perfecta inversion del topico: entre los detritos de Portobello, la victima comienza a acechar a su victimario, la asesinada dara caza al asesino. Vestida de negro, como corresponde a toda mujer fatal, la bella Nicola Six encuentra a su asesino en el pub local, el Black Cross, refugio de vividores, pequeños delincuentes y aficionados a los dardos. Nicola decide que la matara Keith, un estafador de poca monta, estafado el mismo por la vida, alimentado de pornografia y television, hijo de la Inglaterra thatcheriana, cruel y vulgar: perfecto para el papel asignado. Pero la escena del crimen no puede constituirse con solo dos vertices, y Nicola atraera a un tercero, Guy, el inocente aristocrata fascinado por los bajos fondos, el angel caido que pondra en movimiento al terrible Keith. Los tres se deslizaran en un minuet esperpentico, en una danza de cortejos y decepciones que enmascaran apenas un sordido fondo de perversion y violencia. Y quien lo contara todo es un narrador seducido y atrapado por la escena, Samson Young, un joven escritor americano mortalmente enfermo y, quiza, mortalmente esteril?

"For all its savagery...Other Peopleis a funny book... an achievement light years ahead of his earlier novels." --The Times "Powerful and electrifying...Other Peopleis a metaphysical thriller, Kafka reshot in the style of Psycho." -- J. G. Ballard "One of the most gifted novelists of his generation." --Time "Amis is a force unto himself... There is, quite simply, no one else like him." -- Jonathan Yardley,Washington Post Book World

There were conjugal visits in the slave camps of the USSR. Valiant women would travel continental distances, over weeks and months, in the hope of spending a night, with their particular enemy of the people, in the House of Meetings. The consequences of these liaisons were almost invariably tragic. House of Meetings is about one such liaison. It is a triangular romance: two brothers fall in love with the same girl, a nineteen-year-old Jewess, in Moscow, which is poised for pogrom in the gap between the war and the death of Stalin. Both brothers are arrested, and their rivalry slowly complicates itself over a decade in the slave camp above the Arctic Circle. As one brother, finally, writes to the other, 'You know what happened to us? It wasn't just a compendium of very bad experiences. That was general and standard-issue. That was off the rack. What I'm referring to is the destiny that is made to measure. Something was designed inside us, blending with what was already there. For each of us, in different ways and settings, the worst of all possible outcomes.' A short novel of great depth and richness, House of Meetings finds Martin Amis at the height of his powers, in new and remarkably fertile fictional territory.

When ''dream husband'' Xan Meo is vengefully assaulted in the garden of a London pub, he suffers head- injury, and personality- change. Like a spiritual convert, the familial paragon becomes an anti- husband, an anti-father. He submits to an alien moral system- one among many to be found in these pages. We are introduced to the inverted worlds of the ''yellow'' journalist, Clint Smoker; the high priest of hardmen, Joseph Andrews; the porno tycoon, Cora Susan; and Kent Price, the corpse in the hold of the stricken airliner, apparently determined, even in death, to bring down the plane that carries his spouse. Meanwhile, we explore the entanglements of Henry England: his incapacitated wife, Pamela; his Chinese mistress, He Zhezun; his fifteen- year- old daughter, Victoria, the victim of a filmed ''intrusion'' which rivets the world- because she is the future Queen of England, and her father, Henry IX, is its King. The connections between these characters provide the pattern and drive of YELLOW DOG. Novelists have noticed that contemporary reality keeps outdoing their imaginations. Yet there is still the obligation to attempt a reading of the present and the very near future. If, in the twenty-first century, the moral reality is changing, then the novel is changing too, whether it likes it or not. YELLOW DOG is an early example of how the novel, or more particularly the comic novel, can respond to this transformation. But Martin Amis is also concerned here with what is changeless and perhaps unchangeable. Patriarchy, and the entire edifice of masculinity; the enormous category- error of violence, arising between man and man; the tortuous alliances between men and women; and the vanished dream (probably always an illusion, but now a clear delusion) that we can protect our future and our progeny.

House of meetings is a love story, gothic in timbre and triangular in shape. In 1946, two brothers and a Jewish girl fall into alignment in pogrom-poised Moscow.

Koba the Dread is the successor to Amis''s celebrated memoir, Experience. It addresses itself to the central lacuna of twentieth-century thought: the indulgence of communism by Western intellectuals. In between the personal beginning and the personal ending, Amis gives us perhaps the best one hundred pages ever written about Stalin: Koba the Dread, Iosif the Terrible. The author''s father, Kingsley Amis, was ''a Comintern dogsbody'' (as he would come to put it) from 1941 to 1956. His second-closest, and later in life his closest friend, was Robert Conquest, whose book The Great Terror was second only to Solzhenitsyn''s The Gulag Archipelago in undermining the USSR. Amis''s remarkable memoir explores these connections. Stalin said that the death of one person was tragic, the death of a million a mere ''statistic''. Koba the Dread, during whose course the author absorbs a particular, a familial death, is a rebuttal of Stalin''s aphorism.

Martin Amis is perhaps the most gifted and innovative novelist of his generation. His prose refashions the English language into a lean and brilliant instrument, dazzling readers with its energy and wit. His novels and short stories chart a world that is uniquely his: as John Updike puts it, Amis is trying to construct a large, reaching, ambitious set of books trying to cover the world in fiction. His celebrity as a novelist is also unique few writers have attracted such obsessive media attention. In this much anticipated memoir, Amis writes with striking candour about his life and looks intimately at the process of writing itself. As the son of a famous writer, the great comic novelist Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis explores his relationship with his father and writes about the various crises of Kingsleys life, including the final crisis of his death. Amis also examines the case of his cousin, Lucy Partington, who disappeared without trace in 1973 (a month after the publication of his first novel), and was exhumed in 1994 from the back garden of Frederick West, Britains most prolific serial killer. Inevitably, too, the memoir records the changing literary scene in Britain and the United States, with many anecdotes and pen-portraits. The result is a remarkable work of autobiography profound, witty, and ruthlessly honest. As a writers self-portrait, it is destined to become a classic of its kind.

Pornoland est ce pays où sont quotidiennement produits et tournés les films pornographiques. C'est dans cet univers à la fois dérangeant et intriguant que plonge le photographe Stefano De Luigi. Entre plateaux improvisé "s, scénarios presque inexistants et violence des performances sexuelles exécutées, ces photos de scènes de films et des coulisses de tournages reflètent dans tout sa complexité l'atmosphère de l'industrie peu connue du film X. Le regard de Stefano De Luigi, comme le texte de Martin Amis racontent avec force, respect et parfois ironie ce monde marginal fait des lumières tamisées, d'une tendresse inattendue et de situations à la limite de l'absurde.

When Richard Tull, frustrated, failed novelist invited to tour America with this oldest friend, internationally bestselling novelist Gwyn Barry, to record the event, his envy and humiliation are complete. He sets out to gather the information that will destroy his best friend and pull his career down around his ears. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the, both men are being watched by a psychopathic ex-con and a young thug who have staked out their homes—watching their wives, watching Richard's small boys, the twins—waiting until the time is right...