Experience

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But Experience is not quite a memoir, nor is it quite a portrait of his father, nor is it really an autobiography.

I disliked its spleen, smugness, resentment and lack of self-knowledge, the marks of the pampered and the overpraised down the ages. The memoirs are warmer - Amis is both a devoted father and son, and Nabokov's passage about his infant child is one of my favorites from Speak. Parts of it do not quite succeed, particularly the sections dealing with the author's first cousin, Lucy Partington, who disappeared in 1973, and was later discovered to have been one of Frederick West's victim's - but then, how could such horror be written about successfully?I love the themes from minutiae to magnificent, as coexisting subjects of experience - writing, adolescence, children (being a child and having them) and guilt, sex, problematic teeth, travel, marriage, troubles with friendships, pleasure in friendships, struggles with close family members.

This eclectic combination of people, each bringing a singular personality and transcending the normal boundaries of intimacy, is definitive of Amis’s experience with his family. con la differenza, rispetto ai romanzi, che qui abbassando ovviamente l’asticella del sarcasmo martin amis mostra come sa praticare la chirurgia dell’intelligenza anche quando non ci sono freddezza e distacco.

There are themes that reoccur, there are dramatis personae who reappear, but in the main it’s a series of vignettes – some more comic than others. Another favourite passage from Experience is a recollection of a very tense dinner clash with Salman Rushdie. Debería haber más escritores o mas historias bien escritas que hablen de relaciones entre padres e hijos. Queda claro que según el titulo de este libro “la experiencia” es lo mejor que nos puede pasar, pero cuando Martin Amis habla de experiencia se refiere a vivencias duras, profundas, muy reales, de esas que cambian la vida y ya no lo dejan a uno igual jamás.