Book description
The author traces his life and career, examining his relationship with his father, comic novelist Kingsley Amis, and the changing literary scene in Great Britain and the United States.
Why read it?
1 author picked Experience as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
A writer’s book about a writer-father. In this remarkable memoir, Amis pays tribute to Kingsley Martin. The book is truthful about the anxiety of influence and about the collision of ambition, the competitiveness between writers, even when they happen to be father and son.
What made the book touching was Martin Amis’s love and sorrow not only for Kingsley Martin, his biological father but also for his literary father, the novelist Saul Bellow. Bonus: Amis’s probing, ruthless, but always burnished sentences: “The trouble with life (the novelist will feel) is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted,…
From Amitava's list on fathers.
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